windstri85
New member
The ROG Gjallar finally has a price and it's China only so far: CNY 3,699, which converts to somewhere around $548. Asus showed it in early July without saying what it would cost, and there's already a page on the international site, so a wider release is presumably coming.
On paper it's 2.1.2 with a wireless sub, Atmos support, and a body small enough to tuck under a monitor. That last part is the whole pitch and also where I get sceptical. A 2.1.2 desktop bar means the two height channels fire up at a ceiling that, if you're sitting at a desk, is roughly straight above your head rather than out in front of you. Up-firing drivers depend on a first reflection point landing between you and the screen. At desk distance that geometry barely exists. You get sound from above, which isn't nothing, but it is not the effect the same bar would produce in a living room at three metres.
At that money you're also in range of a normal living room bar and sub, or a pair of powered nearfields plus a separate sub that will walk all over this on music. The premium is buying you the all-in-one control hub, the AEC mic for voice chat, the USB hub and the lighting.
Asus hasn't published driver sizes or output figures that I can find, which for a desktop product is the spec I'd actually want. Room-filling isn't the job here, near-field clarity at low volume is.
If you're at a desk in a headset most nights anyway, is a bar like this ever more than a novelty next to decent nearfields?
On paper it's 2.1.2 with a wireless sub, Atmos support, and a body small enough to tuck under a monitor. That last part is the whole pitch and also where I get sceptical. A 2.1.2 desktop bar means the two height channels fire up at a ceiling that, if you're sitting at a desk, is roughly straight above your head rather than out in front of you. Up-firing drivers depend on a first reflection point landing between you and the screen. At desk distance that geometry barely exists. You get sound from above, which isn't nothing, but it is not the effect the same bar would produce in a living room at three metres.
At that money you're also in range of a normal living room bar and sub, or a pair of powered nearfields plus a separate sub that will walk all over this on music. The premium is buying you the all-in-one control hub, the AEC mic for voice chat, the USB hub and the lighting.
Asus hasn't published driver sizes or output figures that I can find, which for a desktop product is the spec I'd actually want. Room-filling isn't the job here, near-field clarity at low volume is.
If you're at a desk in a headset most nights anyway, is a bar like this ever more than a novelty next to decent nearfields?
