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Both my brother and I bought these speakers and he was telling me they sound just like any other speaker. In other words, he didn't like them. I plugged mine in and they sounded absolutely incredible. Probably one of the best computer speaker sets I've owned (I've owned quite a few).
I decided to go listen to his (we don't live together) and his did in fact sound quite different.
We found that... for these speakers to REALLY shine, you need a decent sound card. I personally use the: HT Omega Claro Plus and my brother uses onboard sound. I will tell you, your experience with these speakers will be heavily influenced based on the sound card you currently use.
The other thing that I noticed is one end of the speaker cables are hooked directly to the speakers themselves but the other end actually uses positive and negative to plug into the subwoofer. This is especially nice if you need to extend the cable.