so i'm looking at upgrading my ancient (1998) 2.1 speakers (Boston Digital BA735 that came with my Gateway p3 550mhz !) and investing in some quality 5.1 speakers so i can play doom3 the way everyone says it's meant to be played. But i like to know what i'm buying before I invest, so could you guys please help me understand what the following things measure (basically, which numbers should be high and which ones should be low?) -Frequency Response -RMS Power (this is what measures how much oomf i get outta each speaker, right? what's a good range?) -Signal to Noise Ratio Also, I was looking at some speaker boxes in Fry's yesterday and I noticed that the sum of the RMS power output of each speaker, plus the RMS power output of the subwoofer did NOT total the "wattage" advertised on the box. what gives?

http://www.satcure-focus.com/icetech/index.htm

Interesting link Hiho. I didn't spend long enough there to find whether or not it answered the question. It came across rather condescending. Frequency Response is the range of sounds the speakers can reproduce. The human ear can hear 20Hz to 10-20KHz. Obviously the closer the ratings come to what you are capable of hearing the better. As your aim is to live Doom3, the lower end of the range is more important. RMS or Relative Mean Strength is the true output power of the speakers/amp. Signal to noise ratio is just like it sounds like. The higher the number the more of the sounds you want to hear and less of the hum. Total output power is basically a crock. It adds the maximum power of all of the speakers worked out as what they can handle as a spike, certainly not RMS. My cheapo speakers were advertised as 120W. The box declares them to be 16W. My ears tell me they are lucky to put out 2W.

RMS actually stands for Root Mean Square and is a method of equating an AC voltage (or current) to an equivalent DC voltage to give the same heating effect when applied to a load. It's a meaningless concept when used for power. There are no such things as RMS watts. Other than that, as you have discovered, look for the power of each individual speaker. 20W each should be sufficient. Get good quality speakers. Cheap speakers are just that - cheap. Bryan

oh boy does doom 3 sound nice on z-680s...well so do all other 5.1 games actually. Asus A7N8X-X AMD XP 3200+ Corsair PC3200 1024 Geforce 6800 OC Thermaltake 480W