Altec Lansing iM510 Portable Sansa Speakers

Reviews: Multimedia

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Bradford Day
Kurtis
Altec Lansing
Mar. 12, 2007

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Testing: Sound

So all fonts aside, how do the speakers sound? I would give them a solid "not bad, considering". For my testing I didn't opt for Max's sound engineer set up of 10 Hertz incremental tones and classic violin concertos. I don't even think I own a concerto. But what I did use was a selection of MP3s loaded onto both a Sansa e260 and c240 player.

Heading straight for the most obvious test, I pulled up some Beastie Boys to get the bass question right out in the open. As you might expect the 4 1" drivers don't deliver a shed-load of bass. But, as the brochure states, they do create room filling sound. The volume levels the 4 tiny speakers can achieve is impressive but gets down right annoying at the highest settings due to a large amount of distortion. Less complex music like folk and country sound good with less distortion entering the fray. Even loud and obnoxious punk or rock sound good at medium volume. Turn it up and heavy bass drum beats and resonating guitars get pretty muddy with a tinny reverb in the high end. In general for most music there lingers a bit of brassy treble. The mids sound as good as can be expected but the over powering cymbals and highs get a bit annoying at anything over mid-volume. There was no noticeable difference in the sound quality between the e260 and c240.

But what if you utilized that extra little output "round back and hooked up an external subwoofer? Would these little speakers suddenly transform into a full fledged sound system? Altec Lansing didn't send along one of the BB2001 subwoofer units for me to play with. And in fact the user manual suggests that only the BB2001 be used with the iM510s. But I just had to know. So I hooked up the SUB out port to one of my powered 2.1 computer subwoofers. The manual wasn't lying. All I received for my troubles was the hum of a pissed off subwoofer.

Also around the back, barely noticeable, is a USB Mini 4pin type B connecter on the rear of the sliding cradle. It's just hiding there inconspicuously until you want to plug in a USB cable (not included) and sync an e200 or c200 series player to you computer. "Excellent" you say, "it's a sync cradle too". Well, yes except that you have to turn off the speakers AND unplug the power connection before the USB pass-through becomes active and allows data syncing. A little annoying but at least you don't have to detach the player from the speakers and use the SanDisk proprietary USB sync cable. Kind of a 50/50 situation I suppose.

The iM510 will also run on battery power. Four AAs to be exact and Altec Lansing claims a 24+ hour music session between charges. I didn't get a chance to drain my batteries down to empty, but I can say that the sound quality didn't appear to suffer while running the unit on the dry cells. And also in the plus column, when running on batteries all you have to do to use the above mentioned USB sync cradle is turn off the speakers. No need to remove the batteries entirely.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Testing: Sound
Page 4: Testing Sansa e260 & c240 Usage
Page 5: Conclusion

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