Ion Desk Rocker USB speakers

The Ion Desk Rocker USB speaker system makes short work of getting impressive sound both in and out of your computer. It's not the most attractive or best-sounding system we've tested, but at an affordable $99, the Desk Rocker delivers big sound with an extensive set of features.

The Ion Desk Rocker system comes with two speakers, a power adapter, a standard USB cable, a detachable speaker link, and a CD of bundled recording software. Since each speaker measures 7.5 inches tall by 5 inches wide by 6 inches deep, the system isn't low profile, and neither is its sound. Each speaker includes a 3-inch woofer and a 1-inch tweeter, and both are covered with a sturdy metal grille and are powered by 10 watts per channel.

The Desk Rocker's rear panel includes USB, RCA, 3.5mm minijack, and power adapter connections, as well as a bass boost switch and a mono minijack socket for bridging the left and right speakers.

The Desk Rocker's recording inputs and bundled audio software distinguish it from conventional PC speaker systems such as the Creative GigaWorks T40. Built-in universal hardware drivers allowed our Mac and PC computers to treat the Desk Rocker as a USB sound card, and within minutes we were playing back music from iTunes and making digital recordings from our old, beat-up cassette deck.

During informal recording quality testing, the Desk Rocker captured clean, distortion-free recordings, without any hiccups or dropouts. We were disappointed to see that the Desk Rocker lacks a grounding jack for connecting older turntables, though, and a recording input gain control knob would have been handy. The default recording resolution of the Desk Rocker is 16-bit, 44.1kHz (CD quality); however, a maximum resolution of 16-bit, 48kHz is possible using the included Audacity recording software.