The speakers are pretty high quality and deliver pretty impressive sound quality, especially when in use watching a 5.1 DVD movie, the bass is powerful and the satellites deliver nice midrange and high pitched sounds without any flaws. In terms of audio quality there's only one complaint, the bass, which can be tweaked via a knob on the woofer has a tendency to go a little overboard from time to time, regardless of how you set the base level (ok, so there's cutting the base out altogether solves the problem but that really isn't an option).

In terms of look the speakers definitely get the thumbs up as in their simplicity they do look very stylish.

Now there's one more negative thing which I just have to mention as we close in on to the finale of this review, the controls for volume and base tweaking are seated on the subwoofer and the subwoofer goes on the floor (ideally at least), and what does that mean, well, each and every time you want to fiddle with the volume you have to get down on the floor to do it, and even worse, the controls are on the back of the woofer (understandably as it helps the look of the set). Now you can of course change the volume via the Windows control tray but when playing a game that's a no-no.

With the MagicTheater Pro comes a bunch of software for audio playback and recording in the form of EzAudio, JetAudio, WillowTalk and an Mp3 player. And, there's also something far more interesting than said applications included, WinDVD, with a special 5.1 audio playback routine written specifically for the ForteMedia sound chip found on the Magic Sound Live! board. Now this one really got me excited since everyone has always told me that WinDVD is the best (read: fastest) software DVD application available.

After installing, I started up the program, threw a DVD movie in my drive only to be utterly disappointed as I was presented with a garbled image cluttered with green squares, first I though it was a video issue but later it appeared to be due to an incompability with my Toshiba SD-M1202 DVD-Drive.

After solving the problem by downloading a revised BIOS for the drive the power of WinDVD in combination with 5.1 accelerated audio via the ForteSound chipset became quite apparent. The playback performance was better than with any solution I'd tinkered with prior to this date and the 5.1 surround sound was quite accelerating considering it came from a relatively low-priced set if speakers.