- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 59 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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6 out of 6 people found this review helpful
2.5 stars
"AMAZING sound... for 1.5 hours"
Pros: Incredibly high quality sound, reasonable price given sound quality
Cons: Amp died after 1.5 hours of use.
Summary: Nothing short of an amazing sound, for as long as it works. I read the opinions of others before buying, taking note of some who had their amp die within months of purchase. Being a current owner of a ProMedia 5.1 (not Ultra), and having had nothing but the best experience with it, I decided to take my chances. I purchased the set and plugged it into my Sound Blaster Audigy X-Fi card and without any doubt, the most amazing sound I've heard out of a set of speakers. Clear highs, good bass, all around excellent performance. I queued up a bunch of songs and let it play in the background as I did my work. After about an hour and a half of playing music, all sound suddenly stopped. The display on the remote pod still showed my volume and I could adjust it, just nothing else happened. Poweing off just produced as quiet click from the subwoofer/amp. Tried all I could and getting nowhere, decided to do more reading on the web. Turns out these speakers are PLAGUED with amp problems. Not just the odd user here and there. Klipsch's own forums contain similar experiences. There have been users who have sent their amp back to Klipch 4 times (paying the shipping charges each time). Others have complained of a month, even two months before receiving a replacement amp. This just is not acceptable. There are several theories out there as to the cause, but one big one seems to be that the amp is just not sufficiently cooled, overheats then dies. Who knows. Mind you, the feedback from other ProMedia Ultra users is completely positive, no problems at all.
This experience has been a colossal disappointment. In my mind, Klipsch has always been the pinnacle of audio quality. It would appear that recently they have let that reputation slip, which is very unfortunate. Until this experience, I have been a huge backer of Klipsch products, but I can no longer support them given this radical drop in quality. Under other circumstances, I would have taken this speaker set back, gotten an exchange, and resumed listening, but given what I read, I simply cannot chance getting stuck with a set of expensive speakers which will very likely need to be sent back for warranty work, with me paying the expensive shipping costs.
I decided to go with the only competing speaker system I have been able to find; the Logitech Z5500. Easily equal in quality in from my tests thus far.
I am am giving the ProMedia Ultra 5.1 a rating of 5 (Average), due to the quality of the components used. Any product which runs for 1.5 hours before dying would get a 1, but the sound quality easily deserves a 10, so I'm putting my vote right in the middle.
