The first computer I bought 12 years ago had a one-voice sound generator that played through the speaker of a TV set. With the right programming, it could give a pretty good rendition of a bad calliope playing the melody of the Star Spangled Banner.
A few years later, somebody very smart figured out how to program it to produce four voices simultaneously. The first time I heard it play the William Tell Overture in four-part harmony, I was nearly in tears. I'm sure Rossini would have been, too.
For quite a while, that was pretty much the state of the art. As long as computers could produce music and sound effects that had all the charm and presence of a radio alarm clock, nobody paid much attention to the speakers that were attached.
Today, most home PCs come equipped with sound cards that can produce an astonishing variety of music and sound effects. They can record your voice, play back digital recordings stored on your hard disk, generate their own musical instrument sounds and -- if you have a CD-ROM drive -- even play your music CDs in the background while you work.
Unfortunately, the cheap speakers that come with many multimedia kits are better suited to the William-Tell-Overture-on-a-calliope era. They can't match the performance of the sound boards behind them. In fact, by almost any standards, they're awful.
At first, users were so captivated by the fact that their computers could speak and sing and play rock 'n' roll at all that this didn't matter. But this is America, folks, and where there's a vacuum, the market will rush to fill it.
Now the shelves of computer stores are full of self-powered speakers designed to deliver something resembling real music and voice. Priced between $75 and $150 per set, they certainly provide pleasant listening -- possibly on the order of a decent car radio. I've enjoyed the Yamaha YST-10s on my computer, and my kids like their Sony MCS-50s, both of which sell for less than $100.
But because these speakers have to be small enough to fit on your desktop, competing for space with your computer, monitor, printer, modem, telephone and whatever open real estate you need to do your work, they have their limits. They don't produce much bass. So when you blow up the evil Romulan battle cruiser, it goes kathwop when it should really go KABOOM.
