Benwin BW2000 Flat Panel Speakers

Sound Quality

This is the most important area to consider when choosing a speaker set, whether for the computer or a home theater. Once again, the most important thing to keep in my mind when buying an audio equipment is that your ears are always the best judge because everyone has different musical tastes. It is also necessary to keep in my mind what you plan to use the speakers for. Just about anything will get you by if you just want Windows beeps and dings, but if you plan to listen to music 6 hours a day, you are going to need much more. With that in mind, not many people buy three piece speaker sets for beeps and dings, so the focus here will be on music and (to a lesser extent) gaming.

You never know what to expect with such a new technology as we have in Benwin's BW2000 speaker set. However, sound quality is surprisingly good - there's a reason so many high profile manufacturer's are looking into the technology. Let's ignore the sub for a moment and admire the incredible job the satellites do with sound reproduction. Their response is incredibly smooth with little coloration. It seemed as if the frequency response of the satellites was completely flat in their intended range of operation, producing extremely accurate sound. The claimed response of 150 - 20kHz is also surprisingly quite accurate. Who would have thought that something so small could go so low?

Benwin claims that there is no sweet spot thanks to the NXT technology. While not quite true, the sweet spot is definitely greatly enlarged over conventional systems, especially small ones. This is again due to the nature of traditional speakers, which act much more like a point source. Those satellites also do a great job of filling the room with sound.

Really, the limiting factor is the sub, which seems both too small and underpowered. Bass response is weak and distorts quickly when turned up. Although the sub supposedly goes down to 50Hz, that may be somewhat of a stretch. It may respond that low, but only every so slightly. Don't expect to shake the room with these speakers. What the sub does is provide sufficient fill in of the lower frequencies that the flat panels simply cannot generate.

The volume output of the system as a whole was also a little weak, but then again, you can only expect so much from such a small system. This is partially do to the low efficiency of the flat panel technology at this early stage - something that Benwin and NXT continue to work on through experimentation with new materials.

The 3D surround sound feature is an interesting one. In general, the goal of such algorithms is to make the sound from two speakers feel like they fill the room better and remove the listening "sweet spot." As mentioned above, the flat panel technology has already helped to take care of those issues to a certain extent. It works through a combination of amplifying certain frequencies and adding a certain amount of reverb.

I have never found the sound from such algorithms to sound better, but rather it seems to produce a sort of "funny" feeling sound that is hard to describe. In the case of the Benwin's where the sweet spot is already greater enlarged and the room filled with sound thanks to the flat panels, the 3D sound feature probably won't get a lot of use.