Today we have an artistic looking set of speakers, the Palo Alto Cubik speakers. Acoustically tuned by an engineering team with over 35 years of audio experience, Cubik’s drivers frequency response is on par with hi-fi sound systems. The Stellar sound of cubik resonates from its amazing digital amplification technology. Equipped with a high-resolution digital signal processor (DSP) and full-digital audio path, cubik is designed to eliminate all unwanted noise. Pair this with a digital amplifier as well as outstanding Danish-designed speaker drivers and the result is crystal-clear unadulterated sound. Young-se Kim has designed Samsung smart phones, LG fridges and iRiver MP3 players. For Kim, design can make people dream of the future and change their lives. With skillful tooling, he created a highly advanced enclosure design. Using an innovative manufacturing process and advanced materials Cubik gives you full bass without the need of a subwoofer. Now we are going to toss the Cubik speakers on our review table and see just how well Young-se Kim did with this design. Read on …
Packaging:
Specifications:
The Palo Alto Cubik Speakers:
The Cubik speakers are packaged very well to help reduce damage while being transported around.
Once we finally got everything unpacked, we laid it out on the desk to get a good look at everything. You will have the power adapter and connection cords as well as the 2 speakers and 2 stands for the speakers.
The stands screw into the bottom of the speakers and then to fully tighten, like we found out, you need a flat head screwdriver to tighten all the way.
The buttons on the side of the right speaker will let you control the volume, bass and muting of your music, movies and games.
The back of the right speaker has all the connections needed to get your system going. It is pretty self-explanatory, and if you find it not so self-explanatory, we don’t know what to tell you.
To give you a better idea of how big the speakers are, we hooked them up to our 13″ MBP.
Sound Tests:
We will be testing the Cubik speakers with several genres of music: rap, country and more. We will also be watching a movie, Rambo, as well to round out the testing.
With the music testing, we tested several genres to get the best overall feel of how well the Cubik speakers really perform. We started with the Christian Rock genre by listening to a few songs from Demon Hunter to figure out how accurate the bass is with the Cubik speakers. Now the speakers started showing its true beauty with the audio reproduction. The speakers provided a deep bass that was one of the better reproductions we have heard in a 2.0 system in a while. Happy with our bass testing, we moved on with our testing and went to the best genre, country! The guitars and string instruments came through clear and had the impact on our ears that we were expecting. Even the raspy voices came through more “raspier” than ever and gave us the full enjoyment of their hard-partying life style, without actually being at the concert. To put it all together we turned on some Mumford and Sons, to get a good feel for the speakers. Mumford and Sons are amazing on their own, but with the Cubik speakers, somehow they were even better!
For the movie portion of the review, we used “Rambo” circa 2009. We feel it gives you everything that you need to test the full capability of the headset with its huge explosions, surround sound fight scenes, quiet conversations and who can forget the .50 cal ending! Starting with the dialog, it’s clear and crisp in the quieter parts of the movie. The Cubik speakers projected the dialog crisply, even during the fight scenes, such as when the village is getting attacked by the army. During the attack, while the village, and the lady doctor, are trying to get away, you can hear mortars exploding all around her. However, the best scene in an action movie, probably ever, is when good ol’ Sly jumps on the back of the truck and mans the .50 cal machine gun. When he is mowing down the army, the deep bass of the .50 cal is portrayed nicely through the Cubik speakers. The sounds of the bullets striking objects was crisp with zero distortion, even when we turned the volume all the way up to soak in all of the goodness that the scene provides.
Conclusion:
After our testing, there is not much else we can say but, WOW! The Palo Alto Cubik Speakers packed a serious punch for such a little, dare we say cute, 2 piece speaker setup. We will not beat you down anymore with how great the speakers are so we will finish it up with this. If you enjoy a clean desktop and may not have the room for a full 5.1 speaker setup, take a look at these. If you enjoy the sleek look and artistic design of the cubik speakers, take a look at these. They do come with a price premium with an MSRP of $200 or so, but they are worth if you need a 2.0 system and not a surround side type system for your desktop or laptop system.
The Palo Alto Cubik Speakers earned the Techreaction.net Gold Silicon Award!
If you want more information on the Cubik speakers or Palo Alto, please visit their website!
