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Regular readers will know that, these days, we have an extra dimension alongside our traditional pure music and gaming tests. This is the ‘real world living room' scenario.
Once you start using powered speakers with a TV, you will forget what the original built-in units sound like. The answer, for those who can't remember, is terrible – super thin LCD screens are not an ideal shape for good speaker design.
First up, music and we started with some heavy rock favourites with tracks from Heaven & Hell by Black Sabbath.
With tracks such as Die Young, cheaper speakers start off fine, but quickly turn into literal boom boxes when the bass and drums kick in. The bass drive from the Wavemaster Moody speakers is quite incredible.
Whether by accident or design (we would like to think the latter), pushing the speaker volume to the limit does not make the woofer creak like it is about to break. While there might be another 5dBA or so in this system that will remain untapped, the lack of ‘high volume shakes' gives the impression of quality. Smoothly driven bass, at high volume, without nasty distortion.
Determined to push the speakers to distraction in a completely different way, we also went with the full version of Jamiroquai's Deeper and the Datsik and Excision remix of Teflon by Kelly Dean & Steady. Same result. The Wavemaster Moody 2.1 speakers took the punishment and stood there smiling.
For completion, we also went through some quiet segments by Arvo Part (Agnes Dei) and U2 (With or Without You) – all of which were delivered with rich tones. The same is true for Blade Runner Blues.
We switched back and forth between the Wavemaster Moody (£69) and Stax speakers (£49) and the difference was easily noticeable across all tracks.
In our living room set up, we went with the Blu-Ray of Star Trek Into Darkness, which exhibits massive dynamic range – shifting between annoyingly quiet and incredibly loud, from scene to scene. All of this was handled with relative ease – which is commendable.
Across all of our tests, we couldn't find a situation where there was no distinct difference between the Wavemaster Stax and Moody speakers – except gaming. The in-game tests we ran were as close to identical on both sets of speakers.
