Home > Consumer Reviews > Altec Lansing 221 Amplified Speaker System

The speakers sound good, but there is no seperate control to turn the bass down. It is set way too high and I can't find any software controls to turn it down a bit. I have seen some pretty [inexpensive] 3-piece speakers, but they always have a control for the woofer, this set assumes that you want too much bass.

I wouldn't recommend it.

I picked up this speaker system because I needed a 3-piece for my computer. At the time, I really didn't know what really good sound was, but after hooking these up I could tell something was wrong. The tweeters are really nice, unbelievable crisp and clear. However, the sub was really funky. Something must have literally been wrong with this thing. It not only lacked a volume control, but the thing was literally off-key and out-of-tune. It was merely a thumper-in-a-box. The sub was so bad I returned it and got the Logitech Z-340's and was very satisfied. The sub was so horrible on this 221 set it just killed my music and made it sound horrible. I listened to my 8 buck headphones until I returned these because they sounded so bad. Really dissappointing speakers from such a high quality speaker manufacturer. Altec Lansing makes such nice speakers, but these speakers in partilcular were horrible. Considering the AL 621 is such an awesome system, I'm guessing the budget limited this system's quality.

bottom line: Don't buy. ....

These speakers are inexpensive, compact, good looking, easy to install, and most importantly-they sound good. Others have complained that the bass is too loud, but you can easily adjust this from your sound software. You don't need a bass switch on the subwoofer and I for one would gladly give up such a redundant feature to save some money. The only drawback of this system is that the subwoofer unit is not magnetically shielded so it must be kept a couple feet away from hard drives, storage disks, and monitors. The satellites are shielded and can be placed anywhere.

These were bought for my dad's computer. He has an intergrated sound card, but the speakers sound great.

The only thing i did not like is that the subwoofer is very over powering, and would sound awful from the other room. And the subwoofer does not have a way of adjusting the bass, so it was stuck like that.

The only way i could componsate for this is using a program with ajustable base.

After that though they sound great.

I disagree with all of the negative post about these speakers.I just built my wife a pc that has on-board 5.1 audio and i must say these speakers were a great add-on to the system. To put it simply they sound great. Much better than my 3 piece yamaha's. I agree that altec should have put base controls on the sub, but then again there's always something the manufacturer could have done better. I think that if your audio card is old or poor these may not be the speakers for you. But if you have a good audio card then rock-on,, just my 2 cents