The Unparalleled Gaming Experience: A Review of 50 Cal Speaker Kits
When it comes to immersing oneself in a gaming experience, few factors can create the same level of excitement and engagement as high-quality speakers. The 50 Cal speaker kit, with its powerful and realistic sound, is an ideal choice for gamers looking to elevate their audio experience. These speakers are like a big machine gun on a tank, with every round firing off in your chest, creating a truly immersive environment.
The physical and crazy realistic sound of the 50 Cal speakers is only matched by the way that the speakers encircle you with air in the game. It's as if you're actually inside the game environment, with sounds and visuals coming at you from all angles. This sense of immersion is unparalleled, making the gaming experience feel like a truly interactive and engaging one.
However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. The 50 Cal speakers have some practical disadvantages that gamers should be aware of before investing in them. Firstly, they are passive speakers, which means they need external amplification and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). This adds to the overall cost of the setup, as well as taking up space.
I recently had the opportunity to test out the 50 Cal speaker kit with an amplifier called a Primo Unico. It's a 21-year-old amplifier that I bought used, which is actually handmade in Italy from back in 2001. Despite being old, it works incredibly well with these speakers, providing 80 watts of class A/B power. However, the amplifier does not have a built-in DAC, so I had to use an additional device called a Topping D7S for that purpose.
The setup was a bit more complicated than I initially anticipated, but the end result was well worth it. I also experimented with using a smaller amp-dac combo called an SMSL 8018, which is available on Amazon for around $150. While it didn't sound bad with this little amp, it lacked the same level of space and bass authority as the Primo Unico setup.
One of the biggest disadvantages of the 50 Cal speaker kit is the price. You can pay thousands of dollars for a pair of high-quality headphones that offer similar audio quality, but these speakers are certainly not cheap. While you can get good-quality headphones for way less money, the 50 Cal speakers are an investment in your gaming experience.
Another disadvantage of the 50 Cal speaker kit is that they're not designed for voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) use. If you like shouting at people on the internet, these speakers aren't for you. Finally, speakers can be quite room and placement sensitive, which means that if you don't set up the speakers correctly, they may not perform as well.
The main takeaway from this review is that audio quality is a crucial aspect of an immersive gaming experience. With the right equipment, gamers can truly lose themselves in the game environment, but it's worth bearing in mind that there are some caveats to using speaker kits like the 50 Cal. Despite these disadvantages, I highly recommend investing in good-quality speakers if you want to elevate your gaming experience.
In conclusion, the 50 Cal speaker kit is a top-notch choice for gamers looking to upgrade their audio experience. While they have some practical disadvantages, the immersive sound and realistic environment they provide make them well worth the investment. If you're serious about taking your gaming experience to the next level, consider investing in good-quality speakers – it could be one of the best decisions you ever make.
I'd like to extend my gratitude to CSS Audio for providing me with these amazing speaker kits to test out. Building them was an incredibly rewarding experience, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to put them through their paces. If you enjoyed this review, please consider subscribing to the channel for more content like this. The suggestion will pop up in a second, so be sure to check it out. Until next time, thank you very much for watching, and bye!
WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfor today's video i build what seems to be a universally loved high-end diy speaker kit by a company called css audio and let me tell you gaming on these speakers genuinely blew my mindthat gunshot i felt that in my chest wow that hurt but before we get to the butt-clenchingly visceral gaming experience these offer we need to build them firstlots of paper cool first we have this let's have a look at itand then look at that bad boy oh that is that is quite heavy oh that looks like the kind of thing you use to trigger earthquakes some nice die-cast aluminium action now i'm just gonna interrupt myself pretending to know what i'm talking about here to tell you a bit more about the speaker kit i'm unboxing this kit is called the one tdx and if you buy it with the baltic birch cabinet kit like i have here it costs just over a thousand dollars before attacks which is a decent chunk of change for a speaker kit but according to the internet they are well worth the money and that hype around them is one of the main reasons i actually reached out to css audio and asked them to send over a kit for a video which they very graciously did so now that we know what kind of beefcake diy speaker kit we're working with here let's jump past the rest of the unboxing and watch me squirm trying to do some basic carpentry now the first step is to glue up the baltic birch cabinets which i'm gonna do one at a time because for some reason clamps cost a million dollars eachthe sides of the speaker now according to the instructions you start with a side flat on the table and then you just kind of build it up from there it also recommends dry fitting first which may sound uncomfortable but you don't want to go stuffing wood in the wrong place and then getting your glue everywhere i'll start with this side for whatever reasonhey it's starting to look like a speaker a pretty big one at that and before i glued up the wood i just dusted the seams to make sure we got a nice tight bond oh i actually forgot to mention the reason that i went with baltic birch over mdf for the cabinet material was because baltic birch is easier to finish you don't need to put veneer or whatever on it you can just treat the cabinet itself but that does mean while gluing up i want to protect the wood from any glue spilling onto it making it harder to finish later on so i am going to tape up the edges with masking tapeso now we've got a little bit of protection so let's get to gluing and i'm just gonna put some glue this kind of glue like that oh so much poos coming out now so we want to kind of it's kind of where it's going to stick oh now there's so much of stress so then this goes in like that i did something wrong and it was at this point that i realized despite the dry fitting i still managed to screw it up oh no luckily my incompetence was pretty easily rectified oh i think we're okay we're gonna do that we're just gonna pretend like i didn't initially glue it up incorrectly luckily aside from that moment of terror gluing up the rest of the cabinet was relatively straightforward but now we need to clamp it now taking out a mortgage on the clamps was definitely worth it because i used the pressure from the clamps to force all of the panels into a final snug fit that's looking really good and while that's standing there building up strength i'm going to start preparing the panels for its twin brother and after so successfully cobbling together the first speaker cabinet i was now a carpentry master i was basically harrison ford which meant building the second cabinet was trivial for someone of my skillhey would you look at that i built my own boxes and they actually look really neat aside from a couple of little scuff marks that we'll deal with in sanding while finishing them i actually think they turned out really well it's very exciting which means we can move on to building the crossover now it's time to solder the crossover together which is the bit in the speaker which dictates which frequencies go to what driver and the speaker it's very important interestingly css audio does offer two crossovers for all of their speakers there's this stock kind of like loser crossover and then you can also pay 400 extra dollars to get like an uber epeed and crossover now when it comes to the hifi community uh the whole capacitor quality thing is quite a hot debate there are two camps the one side is like any reasonable quality capacitor is fine the only thing that matters is the values of the capacitor and then there's the other side of the argument which would probably disown their children if they found out their brain wasn't wired together with like honey beeswax dueling caps or whatever either way i think it's great that css audio offers you both options now this is a really cool part about this kit it comes with a 3d printed crossover board with little slots in it for all of the different components and then there's a wiring diagram on the back which should make soldering up the crossover pretty idiot proof so let's jump to itnow as is tradition on this channel i am going to be censoring my soldering work because even if i was the world's best solderer some of you would still find a reason to complain about itwould you look at that i finished the second crossover which was way easier to do than the first one and i'm actually pretty happy with the results so with that we need to go finish the speaker cabinet which anna has said she wants to dobefore anna starts finishing the cabinet i just wanted to drill some bigger holes on the back of the cabinet for a sexy different binding posts i wanted to use that didn't come with the kitdamn look at how good they look anna did such a good job finishing them they've got this really nice golden sheen to them which means now all that's left to do is assemble these suckersoh that looks nice all them different materials and texturesnow here comes the really fun bits screwing right next to a soft dome tweeter just one slip and whoop there goes your tweeternow it has been three weekends of work to finish these speakers it was quite a lot of effort but it was a very rewarding process and i think they turned out super well anna did a great job finishing them and yeah i think they look great and they also sound amazing playing battlefield 5 on this speaker setup in this room was a crazy gaming experienceit feels like i'm playing so i'm saving private ryan here whatit's quite difficult to explain what really good sound offers you but i think the best way to describe them is that they're like gaming with a really good pair of headphones but they have a couple of distinct advantages to headphones the first one is headphones are right by your ears and no matter how good they are at creating a sense of space in the sound everything still kind of just sounds like it's around your head whereas these speakers create a much bigger sense of space in their sound and they put the acoustics of the game environment in your room you can really hear the air if that makes sense it sounds really dumb but th the way it renders like distant gunfire as well it sounds like you can hear for miles and actually when i first set up these speakers i was quite worried that positional audio was gonna be an issue while gaming because they're just two speakers in the front of the room surely everything was just gonna sound like it's in front of you but these speakers encircle you with sound i don't know how but they're somehow able to communicate to your brain that there are things above and behind you and they have honestly some of the best positional audio while gaming i've heard ever pretty muchi could hear the tank drive over me like how is it doing that how are they creating sound that far around and then the second big advantage to these speakers over a good pair of headphones is their bass these speakers kick hard deep and fast it is really something to beholdand these speakers move a lot of air in the room so there's a real physicality to all of the explosions in the gunfire like when somebody gets on a browning 50 cal which is like a big machine gun on a tank it you can feel every round in your chest as it's firing off and it's because of these two advantages the very physical and crazy realistic sound and the way that the speakers encircle you with the air in the game it just leads to such immersion it feels like you're in the game environmentbut now that i'm done frothing at the mouth over the gaming experience with these speakers it's not all zeus tickles and baby smiles these speakers have some real practical disadvantages now the first one is that they're passive speakers which means they need external amplification and a digital to analog converter and those things cost more money and they take up space the amp that i used for this setup was and i'm gonna throw my back out here give me a second okay i think i'm gonna kind of rest it on my knee like that now i use this insanely heavy amplifier to power this setup uh it's called a primo unico i think is its name and funnily enough it is actually a 21 year old amplifier that i bought used it was apparently handmade in italy back in 2001 which is amazing it's got 80 watts of class a b power and it worked really well with these speakers it doesn't have a digital to analog converter in it though so i used a topping d7s for that which is another 400 now i did also try the speakers with a little smsl 8018 which is a small amp dac combo that you can buy off of amazon for about a hundred and fifty dollars and well it definitely didn't sound bad with the little ad-18 which also has 80 watts of class d power which that's a whole different story but um it didn't sound bad with that amp it's just that the the whole sense of space that i was talking about was a bit diminished maybe from like a 10 to an eight and the bass authority wasn't quite there in the same way and it wasn't quite as as girthy and it didn't kick as hard with that little amp now having mentioned all of the extra stuff you need the next disadvantage is definitely price you can pay thousands of dollars for a pair of headphones but you can also get a very good pair of headphones for way less money now the third disadvantage is that uh because they're not headphones you you can't do voip so if you like shouting at people on the internet you you can't do that with speakers and then the third caveat's a pretty big one speakers are quite room and placement sensitive so if you have like a weirdly shaped room and you don't set up the speakers very well they may not give you that same uncanny sense of game error environment and if the room's pretty big they may not punch as hard or they may have too much bass if you have them too close to a wall and there's a whole bunch of stuff like that unlike headphones where if you put them on they just always sound the way that the headphones sound so that's definitely something to bear in mind so there are definitely some caveats to this speaker setup but it did offer a genuinely spectacular gaming setup and i think the main takeaway from this video for me is that audio is definitely one of the most underrated aspects when it comes to an immersive gaming experience and yeah maybe maybe your next upgrade should be something audio related to really step up your audio game so yeah thank you very much for watching thank you very much css audio for sending over these amazing speaker kits i really enjoyed building them and yeah subscribe to the channel if you liked it watch another video the suggestion will pop up in a second and until the next video bye you
