Razer Mako review

Matthew Sparkes Read more October 7, 2009

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£315

Price when reviewed

Upgrading PC components often has a knock-on effect; a new processor may require a new motherboard, for example, while a powerful graphics card might require a power supply change. Until now, though, we’d never heard of a set of PC speakers that need a desk upgrade.

Nonetheless, with Razer’s hefty ‘desktop’ speaker set weighing in at nearly 10kg, it’s worth thinking about how your furniture will hold up.

The huge weight of the 2.1 speakers is mostly down to the main unit. It’s not technically speaking a sub, as it also houses a tweeter, but it sits at the heart of the set.

It’s an odd shape: mainly spherical with a flattened top and bottom. The lower half of the orb sports a perforated grill that allows sound to escape downwards, towards the desk, something which Razer claims provides more uniform sound distribution than with standard front-firing speakers.

The two satellite speakers are miniature versions of this, and connect to the main unit using cat 5 cables. These have long been used by audiophiles for home setups as the quality is remarkably good considering the price, but this is the first time we’ve seen cat 5 used for interconnects on a commercial product.

The wired control pad is hooked up with an unusual cable too, plugging in to the main unit via a serial connection. The pad is a circular touchscreen device lit with a plethora of LEDs – sounds great, but we found it tricky to control. The volume in particular often took several attempts to alter, which is particularly annoying given that there is no other means of controlling the speakers.

On the back of the main speaker is one phono input and one 3.5mm input, which can be flicked between via the control pad, allowing easy switching between PC audio and any secondary input such as a TV or DVD player. An additional 3.5mm input is provided on the control pad for easy access, which we found very helpful when plugging in portable media players.

Sound quality is impressive, but lacks the finesse of dedicated hi-fi components when playing music. This is understandable, given that the Mako is designed to perform equally well when gaming, watching movies or playing music.

Considering this, it does each very well, and powerfully too, thanks to its integrated 100w per channel output – each of the system’s six drivers has its own dedicated 50w amp circuit.

The main problem with these speakers is the price. At nearly £300 it’s a seriously large investment, and one we’re just not convinced by: it may be vastly superior to most computer 2.1 systems, but you can get much better quality sound by simply hooking up a separate hi-fi amplifier and speakers.