Home > Consumer Reviews > Creative Labs Inspire TD7700 7.1 Channel Speakers and Decoder DDTS-100

The TD7700 consists of the T7700 speakers and the DDTS-100, Creative's first stand-alone decoder. 7.1 speaker systems are normally associated with PC gaming, but useful for 6-channel surround. Setting up is simple but tedious- wiring and fixing to stands for each of the seven satellites, then plugging them into the sub/amp, and so on. Creative include labels and cable-tabs to help you keep track of what's going where, and the cabling from the decoder to sub/amp is colour-coded and bundled together.

My only bugbears at this point were that the cables are short (just about enough to wire up a small room, with the decoder within an arm's reach of the sub), and that the speakers don't come with floor stands- while the metal mini-stands the speakers come with are nice, I don't have a lot of things to place them on. You can buy adjustable flat-topped stands in plenty of places, though, or you can wall mount the satellites from the little keyhole slots in the back.

The decoder has a lot of inputs: three optical, three analogue stereo, and one coaxial, making it perfect to connecting several consoles, DVD players, and some other gear (satellite boxes etc.) at once. It comes with a good-quality coaxial cable and a fairly short optical cable; anything else has to be picked up yourself.

Feeling knackered from all that cabling and such, I sat down to have a look at the system. The sub is an oblong black box with a large lateral transducer pushing sound out through a port on the front. It feels solid and sits discreetly near a wall. The speakers are tidy, with removable black cloth covers if you feel like showing off the shiny bits inside. The decoder, on the other hand, looks a bit of a mess, with clear and silver plastic and LEDs all over the place. It doesn't feel very robust either. Thankfully, it comes with a decent little remote for all the functions, and it can be mounted upright or on either side to get it out of the way. The speakers' own volume/bass control and off switch is on a little external widget.

The next step was to balance the speakers using the test signal. The balance settings on the decoder are pretty basic (you can only adjust sets of channels- front, side, rear, and sub, and it doesn't affect the volume that much), so I was left moving the speakers closer or further away to get things right. I also hit the "Dynamic Mode" button on the remote- the decoder defaults to a compressed dynamic mode (it limits the maximum volume), and this has to be switched off each time the decoder is switched on. There's not a lot of difference on most things, but loud explosioney moments just sound wrong with it left on. The interface is on the decoder itself nice enough, although the remote has an easier, more direct set of controls. Except for the dynamic range setting, things are auto-detected and remembered as you'd expect.

I then tried the system out on pretty much everything you can think of- The Matrix' Government Lobby fight and the multi-weapons fight in the middle of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Metroid Prime, Soul Calibur II's sound test screen, and various TV programmes and CDs in normal Stereo and Dolby Surround, and a bit of a flatmate's PS2.

Dolby Pro Logic II, whether set to Music or Movie modes, was pretty abysmal. It sounded flat and artifical on just about everything. DTS Neo:6's Cinema mode, on the other hand kept the same directional information from surround games and TV shows while providing a more organic, wide sound. This might have something to do with the rear centre channel it throws in; it might not. Neo:6 also sounded better in Music mode, although the speakers didn't handle most music particularly well- Rob Dougan's "Will You Follow Me?" and Don Davis' "Neodammerung" had their strings and choirs reproduced impressively, but Dougan's "Furious Angels" and Davis' "Burly Brawl" were swamped by the beats, even with the subwoofer off. Non-Surround TV shows were handled reasonably by the decoder- the dialogue tended to go to the centre, but there wasn't much in the way of fancy positioning, just a sense of the sound from the front being spread out. Bear in mind that Neo:6, and the other 6-channel formats decoded, are upmixed on the amplifier with the same channel on the two rear centre speakers- the idea being that it spreads out the sound for that channel. Audiophiles note that you can't adjust the delay settings for the rear speakers- these are preset for Movie/Cinema and Music modes, and you have to live with them, but the seem good enough.

Dolby Digital DVDs were clear, organic, and smooth. Government Lobby's shell casings flew around tinklingly in all the right places while gunfire and music flew out exactly where they were meant to. The subwoofer, managed to rumble the floor where it needed to and fill in for the satellites' lack of very-low frequences without ever sounding like a seperate channel- it's pleasingly apositional. A hefty chunk of the system's power goes to the centre speaker, giving extra clarity to dialogue. The differing design of the front speakers (they have tweeters, where the other four satellites don't) doesn't noticably affect sound.

So as a whole, this is a good-sounding, well-built surround system. The speakers are of more than acceptable quality, and the decoder does all the formats you could reasonably ask for (Neo:6 in particular is a Godsend). The system even comes with a switch-box, so you can connect a 7.1 PC soundcard to the speakers at the same time as the decoder, and switch between the two, and there's a pair of headphone jacks on the front of the decoder, in case you ever feel the need to play multiplayer games without disturbing the neighbours. An excellent entry-level surround sound system, which is inexpensive, not cheap.

My friend bought this from amazon a few weeks ago, but he is to lazy write a reveiw. Since this product is so good i will do it for him!

This 7.1 really packs a punch for the average user. It has supreme amounts of bass capable of ripping through windows. The seperate speakers without the bass unit still preforms quite well, it shoots out teh audio reallt crisp and clear. The speakers not the bass unit can be wall mounted without buy a keyhole screw slot,the bass unit hasnt got any. All the speakers including the bass uniot is equiped with rubber feet to prevent if from slidind drukenly around the desk. The speakers themselves look really nice. it looks a bit like the interior of a sports car. The rear speaker cords are about 4-5 meters long, that is about as long as an SUV. The control unit has volume controls on it but the bass controls are right at the back of the bass unit making them hard to get at. There ar seperate stands purchasable for these speqakers. Personally i only think the rear speakers are nessecary for standes. The bass unit doesnt cone with one.
I would minus one star for the size4 of the control unit but its probably becuse of the small desk!

what can i say,with these coming from a company where you know you get decent quality these speakers do the job.they have good audio inputs and so not only your pc turns into a amazing sound machine but also your ps2, your digital tv, your DVD playercan turn your ps2 into a 7.1 gaming machine by plugging them into it. great stuff, worth every penny.