I went on vacation this weekend to musical heaven thanks to my new Audioengine A2 speakers. There was a bit of a shipping delay, but let me tell you – the sound is well worth the wait!

First impressions:
On receiving the package I noticed that there was an inspection sticker on the box, stating that they were possibly damaged during shipping, but were fully inspected before making the final delivery to my house.  I noticed on the FedEx tracking page that when the package got damaged they actually sent it back to the East Coast to be inspected.  I opened the package thinking, “Well, as long as they inspected them…”

Upon opening the FedEx box, inside was the actual product box for the speakers, and it was damp! The cardboard was all floppy and everything.  Somebody had probably left it in the rain, which is why it needed to be sent back and inspected for damage.  I continued to unbox the speakers and was happy to find that each speaker was individually packaged inside it’s own suede textured cloth drawstring pouch.  Also included were two other pouches, one of which contained the power supply, and the other which contained audio cables for speaker setup.

I rushed to set them up on my desk and plug them into my MacBook.  The volume knob on the back of the left speaker also functions as the on/off switch, and has a very smooth, solid, heavy feeling to it.  Turning this knob clicked the speakers on and then increased the volume.  I turned on ATB’s Trilogie Part 2 and the sound seemed to come from the whole room, and not from the two little speakers that found their way onto my desk.  This was enhanced of course by the fact that the song has an echoey feel to it.  The sound was superb.

Naturally I proceeded through my collection of music, which contains mostly Hiphop, RnB, Alternative, Piano, and Trance music.  I was in heaven.  The most surprising thing about these speakers is how much depth the sounds seem to have, especially when sitting directly in front of the two speakers.  The depth literally seemed to go out the window, as I kept hearing the sound of a car revving it’s engine (I thought somebody was revving their engine outside).  I kept pausing the music to see if I could hear the sound again, and finally realized that the sound was coming from the speakers.

Of note:
Two things that I feel must be mentioned about these speakers before you rush off to buy them as well:

First, the bass production is obviously not going to be extremely strong, as these are very small drivers.  This is actually one of the things that drew me to these speakers in the first place.  I live in an apartment and can’t really enjoy heavy bass speakers because I don’t want to irritate the crap out of my neighbors, so I find these speakers to be exactly what I was looking for.

Second, I was surprised by the lack of balance there seemed to be between the tweeters and the midrange drivers.  It seemed that the music was all very thick until I opened up the equalizer and in iTunes and changed the settings.  This cleared everything right up, and my worry was quickly subdued.  Of course, if you’re using these as computer speakers, most media players have equalizers that will allow you to fix this issue, but you might want to take this into consideration when buying these speakers.

They just released all of their charts for free (which is something I’m surprised wasn’t free before…) so you can go back and see the music charts for whatever date in the past.

The COOL new thing that’s going to keep me coming back though is the music that you can listen to for free.  You can browse their top 100 list and listen to “every” song on it (I noticed that lots of the songs play buttons were missing – not sure why, but this sort of irritating).

The only blatant downfall right now is the implementation of the player, and the layout – which is sort of sloppy.  Things overlap funny, and if you’re playing music and you click the back button the music starts all over again.  I’m sure they’ll fix these bugs, but they were noticeable to me.

Nice job Billboard for giving me a reason to visit your site.

UPDATE: Crap!  I forgot to give his name.  “This guy” is Ronald Jenkees.

And my personal favorite: