Z-560’s baby brother

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute here, ok?  Hardware review sites, us included, tend to review the latest and greatest on the market.  Our review of the Logitech Z-560 was one fine example; we paired the outstanding THX-certified Z-560’s with the expensive Hercules Game Theater XP sound card, creating an excellent PC sound system with a $350 price tag.  The fact is, not all of us can afford to spend that much money on speakers and sound cards.  Many of us have kids, wives that don’t understand our obsession, a mortgage, car payments, you get the idea, right?  Thankfully Logitech understands, too, and they offer a kickass set of speakers for the gamer that wants to have enough cash to send his kids to college, without suffering through tin-can speakers.   

The Z-540’s are the mid-range speakers in the Z series, coming in with a meager $79 price tag.  Like the more expensive Z-560, the Z-540 is a 5-piece speaker system, featuring four satellites and a subwoofer.  Being the mid-range unit, the 540’s power rating is lower than the 560’s, but don’t let the seemingly diminutive wattage fool you, this unit can wake the neighbors with the best of them.  

As the images reveal, the 540’s share the distinctive styling of the 560’s, black with silver stands and subwoofer trim.  The satellite speaker stands are reversible for use as wall brackets, and are easily removed with a single large screw on the rear of the speaker housing.  The image below shows the bracket reversed for wall mounting:

A total of 40 Watts RMS is divided between the speakers, 20W for the subwoofer and 5W per satellite, with a system frequency response of 35Hz - 20kHz.  The subwoofer utilizes a unique “dual chamber” design that allows the speaker to generate up to twice the bass of conventional designs.  Our media kit included a very informative article about the subwoofer design, and I thought the information was actually pretty interesting, so I am going to pass some of the knowledge on to you, our valued readers whom we love so much.  If you look at the Z-540’s sub, you would assume it is an 8-inch driver, right?  So how could 20 Watts power an 8-inch driver and make it sound good?  This is where the engineers at Logitech got busy.  The secret is that the subwoofer actually uses a 4-inch driver.  Yes, you read that right, a 4-inch driver.  But wait, I said the speakers were LOUD, how can this be you ask?  How about we copy an image from the press kit:

Inside the sealed subwoofer box, we actually have two chambers.  The 4-inch driver creates the bass, and the sound is shot into the second chamber via the driver itself, and the small port at the bottom.  The bass is then reproduced by the Pressure Driver, which is reacting to the pressure created by 4-inch driver, effectively creating the same amount of bass as a true 8-inch driver.  The Pressure Driver is constructed much like an actual driver, only without the magnets and springs to move the cone.  The Pressure Driver also serves to filter out any distortion or high-frequency noises that may be present, allowing only clean bass to be heard by the listener.  Of course this is just the abbreviated description, but it gets the point across.  The whole box is tuned and built to maximize the bass output of the driver, and overall I think the engineers have done an excellent job.  I had to contact Logitech to make sure I was reading this right, because the bass from the 540’s seemed too good to be from a small 4-inch driver.

The satellites are ported, each with a single driver.  The speaker wires are permanently attached to each speaker, with RCA-type plugs running to the rear of the subwoofer.  The front right satellite houses the power switch, volume control, fader, M3D controls, as well as the front and rear input wires.  The 540 does not have a headphone jack, which is something of a bummer for guys that play games late at night while the family is asleep.  A single mini-DIN connector from the front right satellite attaches to the subwoofer, completing the installation.  The sub’s power cable does not have the ugly wall-wart type plug, either, much to the relief of my overworked power strip.  The bass is controlled with a knob on the rear of the subwoofer cabinet; we would have preferred the control be on the satellite, but in this price range we cannot expect all of the comforts of the high-end systems.