On Mon, 02 Sep 2002 00:59:44 -0500
Eric Gillespie <epg@pretzelnet.org> wrote:

> Russell McManus <russell_mcmanus@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> > It turns out that the speakers that I've got aren't really usb
> > speakers.  Sorry for the noise on the list.  They actually plug
> > into the cd output jack, and just use the USB plug for power.
> 
> Strange beast.
> 
> > They were very cheap and worth every penny.  After doing more
> > googling, I'm starting to seriously consider the Yamaha
> > YST-MS55D, which appears to be a very promising piece of
> > hardware.  Are your experiences positive with this device so
> > far?
> 
> Yes, definitely.  Easy setup (i.e. none :), beautiful sound.  I
> recommend the purchase.

An alternative, that I rather like as they look rather different, are
the harman kardon soundsticks, very nice sound, note the only thing I
can think of I don't like is that they don't have a volume control on
the speaker, volume control via the usb interface, you get used to that
eventually.

The website is:
http://www.harman-multimedia.com/

Note that the website makes you think they're Mac only USB speakers,
they're not they do the usb audio standard, hence a driver less install
on the mac.  Only quirky thing to be aware of is they only support 16bit
sound, (which nicely confuses /dev/audio as it likes to default to 8bit
8khz...)  My work around for that was to stick an audioctl line in my
rc.local to set /dev/audio to something sane.  They also work under
windows as well.

Chris