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The Microlab Solo 6C speakers ship in a large, predominately white box with an image of the speakers on the front. They follow a more ‘hi fi' oriented bookshelf design ethic, rather than a traditional PC speaker design. This should appeal to a different audience of user.
The speakers are protected between some thick, heavy duty Styrofoam, which is just as well as our review sample box looked like it received some heavy handling during shipping.
MicroLab include a user manual, remote control, a cable to connect to a computer and a cable for connection between the speakers.
The tiny remote offers control over input, treble, bass and volume. There is also a handy mute button at the top.
The speakers are constructed from wood and are shipped with removable front covers, as shown above.
Bottom left, the signature seal of Peter Larsen himself, the designer behind the Solo 6C speakers.
The speakers ship with a thick plastic protective sheet, which covers the delicate tweeter. This is easily removed.
The speakers consist of a 1 inch tweeter and 6.5 inch woofer. The impedance is rated at 4 ohm with a signal to noise ratio of 85db. Input sensitivity is rated at 440mV. The tweeter delivers 10 Watt of output, and the bass driver 30 watts. They are considerably larger than many other speakers we have reviewed in the last year. As a means of highlighting this you can see one of the speakers next to a Nikon SLR lens cap.
The overall appearance is surprisingly good, especially considering the modest price point. Sadly we noticed some damage on one of the woofers as shown in the image above right. Luckily whatever caused the damage, didn't perforate the cone, but the surface ‘slice' was quite long.
Our concern with this would be that this set of Solo 6C speakers left the factory with cosmetic damage. The speakers ship with covers over the cones, so if damage occurred during shipping then the covers would have been ripped before the cones received damage.
One of the speakers contains the amplifier system and this is cooled by a large, metal heatsink. There are two sets of input connectors, a left/right speaker connector (to connect to the other speaker) and a power button and volume control. This rear mounted volume control is unusual in that it doesnt ‘stop' at a maximum or minimum point but will rotate indefinitely. Just be sure to keep this low before turning them on.
Bass and treble can be adjusted from 0-8 via the controller, and this is represented by a red LED readout bottom right of the primary speaker.
The support speaker is connected to the amplified speaker by a simple set of Hifi style binding posts. Audiolab supply a decent quality speaker cable for this.
