Quote Originally Posted by mlsstl
I took a look at the specs at the Cyber Acoustics web site and believe I know what is going on. These speakers probably use digital "T" amps. The amps have low distortion but it rises rapidly on clipping (which is typical of most solid state amps.)

Here's a web site that has a power/distortion graph for a typical T amp.
http://www.retrothing.com/2005/10/sonic_impact_ta.html
Note how it has very low distortion until it runs out of power, then things go to hell.

They probably wanted to make the amp look as powerful as possible so used the gross clipping power. The speakers I noted were 6 watts per channel for the satellites at the 10% distortion figure. If they would have used a 3 or 4 watt figure or so you'd probably have seen a figure under 1% but then they couldn't show the higher power rating.

At normal listening levels the distortion is likely fairly low. However, as you crank it up, there will come a point where things start sounding pretty nasty
Ya I have known that Cyber Acoustics tries to make there speakers high end like use those power pro series driver for the subwoofer instead of normal cones. Also the CA-3550 I have are gold plated plugs too which is good thing.

But it is really true that higher the volume it does sound pretty bad since to me when they are up all the way up the subwoofer sounds like noise and not real bass at all.

When I use to have the Altec Lansing VS4121 or the VS4221 they did the same thing meaning at higher volumes it gets really distorted. But when you listen to it before it gets distorted they sounded good.


The biggest reason I got the CA-3554 which is the same as CA-3550 is since they use the higher end subwoofer. They call them the Power Pro Driver.