When it comes to selecting a speaker system for your PC audio setup, you’ll often come across the options of 2.0 and 2.1 speaker configurations. Here I discuss the differences and help you decide which setup is best suited for your specific audio requirements. Be sure to also check out our list of the best budget computer speakers for under $100. Understanding 2.0 speaker systems A 2.0 speaker system consists of two main speakers or channels. These are usually referred to as left and right speakers. They’re responsible for reproducing sound in the entire audio spectrum including bass, midrange, and treble frequencies. Because they’ve only got two channels these speakers are valued for their simplicity; they’re straightforward and easy to set up, which makes them ideal for users who prefer a clean and clutter-free audio solution. With only two speakers, 2.0 systems can have a wide stereo soundstage which can enhance the listening experience for movies, music, and games. These speakers are also cost effective, and often more budget friendly than their 2.1 counterparts because they don’t have a subwoofer. See the excellent Creative Pebble, for example, an excellent 2.0 system for just $23.50. The only downside with 2.0 speakers is that they have limited bass. For that reason, they may not provide the kind of listening experience that a lot of users desire, especially for movies and games. Therefore, you should choose a 2.0 system if you mostly listen to music without a deep emphasis on the bass. You should also choose a 2.0 speaker if you prefer a simple and compact audio setup. Or if your space is limited, and you can’t accommodate a subwoofer. mentioned in this article Creative Pebble Read our review Best Prices Today: $23.50 at Amazon | $24.99 at Creative Labs A 2.1 speaker system is all about the bass A 2.1 speaker system consists of two main speakers (left and right) and an additional subwoofer. The subwoofer is responsible for reproducing low frequency bass sounds while the main speakers handle midrange and treble frequencies. Pexels: Fernando Arcos The inclusion of a subwoofer delivers significantly improved bass performance compared to a 2.0 system. That makes 2.1 systems ideal for users that enjoy deep impactful bass in their audio. The sound is also well balanced because the subwoofer and the two main speakers split the frequencies being reproduced. The enhanced bass response makes 2.1 speakers well suited to a wide range of audio content including movies, music, and games. These systems are generally more expensive than 2.0 systems due to the inclusion of a subwoofer. They also require more space than a 2.0 system which may not be ideal for users with limited space or that require a minimalist setup. You should therefore choose a 2.1 system if space allows for a subwoofer and if you enjoy entertainment with deep impactful bass. In the end the decision of whether to go with a 2.1 or 2.0 speaker system comes down to personal audio preference and how you plan to use the speakers with your audio setup. Each configuration has its strengths and choosing the right one will mean you get best from your audio setup. Related content: Best budget computer speakers: PC audio for less than $100 I ditched my PC speakers for a soundbar and never looked back Buying PC speakers? Avoid these 5 common mistakes Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Impressively lightweight Respectably long battery life Gorgeous display with excellent anti-glare Clean, modest looks Cons Slightly subdued performance Unimpressive speakers Subpar mics and camera Our Verdict It’s not without its faults, but the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI otherwise delivers a great all-around experience with extra points going to the gorgeous matte display. If you’re more often on the move than not, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI will make a great partner. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Acer Swift Edge 14 AI Retailer Price $1,499.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Acer has renewed its Swift line with a new compact model in the Swift Edge 14 AI, which not only boasts the thinness the Swift line has been known for but also an exceptionally low weight at just 2.18 pounds. Meanwhile, it packs in hardware that’s up to snuff for most workers and a display that looks great for entertainment — sharp OLED for the win — and for work from different environments thanks to a potent matte finish I’d love to see more of. For the right folks, this could be a very strong option.  Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Specs and features CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Memory: 32GB LPDDR5X-8533 Graphics/GPU: Intel Arc 140V Display: 14-inch 2880×1800 OLED touchscreen, 120Hz, Matte Storage: 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD – Kingston OM8PGP4102Q-AA Webcam: 1080p + IR Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C with Power Delivery and DisplayPort Alternate Mode, 2x USB 3.2 Type -A, 1x 3.5mm combo audio, 1x HDMI Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Biometrics: Windows Hello fingerprint, facial recognition Battery capacity: 65 watt-hours Dimensions: 12.35 x 9.03 x 0.66 inches Weight: 2.18 pounds MSRP: $1,499 as-tested ($1,399 base) The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI comes in a small number of configurations. Our test unit came with the specifications above and a $1,499 price tag. Acer also offers a stepped-down model for $1,399 that swaps to an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V and 16GB of memory, which is sacrificing a bit too much just to shave $100 off. Another configuration bumps up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V and raises the price to $1,599.  The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI’s display is perhaps one of the most glorious I’ve seen on a laptop. Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Design and build quality Foundry / Mark Knapp The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is a surprise. It comes out of the box feeling a little plasticky and cheap, but its chassis is actually a magnesium-aluminum alloy that proves surprisingly sturdy with little flex. In spite of that, it’s incredibly light at just 2.18 pounds — a precise weight I verified with a scale. It’s also fairly thin with the chassis measuring 0.66 inches thick at its thickest point, though its rubber feet bump that up to 0.82 inches.  It comes with an all white design aside from the black bezels around the display, which gets an appealing matte treatment from Corning. The two display hinges are nice and tight, avoiding any wiggling in use. That comes in clutch for touchscreen use, as tapping on the display and swiping around doesn’t see it start to lean away. The white lid looks nice with little gold accenting, though geometric lines on the lid aren’t quite as engaging as the sort Asus tends to employ. Underneath, the laptop is also simple with two wide rubber feet, a large intake vent, and two small down-firing speaker grilles. The rear edge of the laptop serves as an exhaust.  The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI comes across as fairly simple, and that works for it. It’s delivering on the promise of thin-and-light laptops.  Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Keyboard, trackpad Foundry / Mark Knapp After testing Acer laptops for years now and consistently being disappointed by their keyboards, I have to admit I didn’t have high hopes for the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI. But it seems like Acer may have turned a corner. The key caps seem just a little bit flatter than prior devices, and that makes a world of difference when it comes to staying centered by feel. Stabilization isn’t impressive, but is sufficient to keep the keys from tilting too much. I found myself much more comfortable typing on this keyboard than just about any other Acer laptop I’ve touched, and I managed a strong 122-word-per-minute typing speed with 122 percent accuracy in Monkeytype — about as fast and accurate as I can get on any given day.  While it’s good to have backlighting on a keyboard, Acer’s implementation isn’t ideal. White keyboards with white backlighting tend to look pretty awful as it turns into a sort of sloppy gray, and the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is no exception. On top of that, having the backlighting on in a bright room ends up making the keyboard less legible as it reduces the contrast. And Acer opts to turn it on automatically in some cases.  The trackpad is also excellent. It’s sizable, though not monstrously large. It has a smooth and pearly Gorilla Glass surface that’s pleasant to swipe around on. There’s also a little logo in one corner that lights when the computer is doing any AI processing on its NPU.  Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Display, audio Foundry / Mark Knapp The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI’s display is perhaps one of the most glorious I’ve seen on a laptop. Anti-glare and matte finishes can be contentious, because they lower the perceived contrast when viewing in extremely dark environments. But everywhere else, I find the lack of a reflected image a huge boon for visual clarity. The 14-inch panel has a 2880×1800 resolution that makes for very crisp details made all the better by the infinite contrast of OLED. The display has great motion clarity as well from its 120Hz refresh rate. Factor in the wide color gamut, which covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color space and reaches 398.3 nits of peak brightness for a full white screen, and you’ve got something special. The fact that you can enjoy all of that so well with the strong anti-glare properties of the Gorilla Matte Pro surface treatment is just wonderful. Acer even went the extra mile and made it a touchscreen, and it’s very responsive and super-smooth to swipe around on.  Sadly, the speakers on the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI are nothing special. They can put out a good bit of sound, letting you hear them even if you don’t have perfect quiet to listen in. But mids are over-pronounced, leading to a slightly grating sound at high volumes. The speakers also sound a little boxed in, especially at high volumes. For listening to speech, they do the job, but I wouldn’t count on them for music or TV and movies.  Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Webcam, microphone, biometrics The webcam on the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI captures a decent picture. It’s not stunningly sharp, but it at least has a good exposure. Its support of Windows Hello facial recognition makes for quick sign-ons but also comes alongside a very wide field of view for the camera. This makes me appear very small in the video feed it captures unless I have my face within a foot of the lens. It’s possible to crop in, but that would lower the resolution from the already modest 1080p of the full sensor. Acer’s microphones are disappointing. By default, the system wants to use its AI-enhanced Purified Voice setting, but I found its efforts to cancel out background noise also had a negative impact on actual clarity in what I was saying, sometimes outright cancelling out my voice along with background noise. Disabling the effects resulted in clearer sound, but with more background noise. In either case, my voice wasn’t very full. In addition to facial recognition, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI supports fingerprint login with a scanner built into the power button. In testing, this worked quickly, easily, and consistently. Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Connectivity The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI proved strong with its connectivity. It has a respectable array of ports for a thin-and-light, combining two Thunderbolt 4 ports that also handle charging with two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and one audio jack. A microSD slot would have been nice to see. Most of the ports are also on the left side with just one USB-A port and the AUX jack on the right. Splitting up the charging ports to offer one on each side would have been a bonus.  The system can handle fast wireless connections as well with Intel Killer 1750i Wi-Fi 7. It proved fast and stable in my testing. The Bluetooth 5.4 is a little letdown, as Bluetooth 6.0 has already landed, but even without it, the Bluetooth connected easily and remained stable when paired with headphones in testing.  Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Performance The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI may not be a high-performance machine, but with its Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, it’s no slouch. That chip is powering a lot of thin-and-light laptops, combining responsive speeds and strong efficiency.  It offers a level of performance that’s ample for basic office tasks, as we see it hit a solid score in the holistic PCMark 10 benchmark. Not only does it perform well for browsing, video calls, writing, and spreadsheet work, but thanks to its Intel Arc graphics, it also gets along modestly in content creation workloads — though it isn’t scratching at the capabilities of high-performance workstation.  One area that holds the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI back from more demanding workloads is its cooling. Being thin and light comes with trade-offs. There’s less room for air to flow effectively, and cooling hardware also adds a lot of weight. Some laptops will let their fans kick up a racket to try staying cool, but the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI opts for quieter operation. The result is that in longer, heavy workloads like our Handbrake encoding test, the system can struggle. It took over half an hour to perform this test while the 2.9-pound Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition running on the same CPU managed it in just over 22 minutes. Meanwhile, AMD’s hardware in the HP OmniBook 7 Aero actually proved even more stout despite also being in a light setup at 2.2 pounds, with the OmniBook hitting under 20 minutes by a hair. MSI offered the lightest laptop of the bunch, but its performance also lagged behind the pack. Cinebench can show us a bit more about the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI’s overall CPU performance. As we saw in Handbrake, heat is an issue for sustained performance in the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI. It lagged behind in Cinebench R24, which is also a longer test. But when running shorter, bursty workloads like Cinebench R23 and R15, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI roughly tied with the Lenovo Yoga 9i. Still, neither were a match for the HP system’s faster CPU.  So while the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI may not power through heavy tasks well, it can remain responsive and tackle light tasks quickly. That goes double for single-threaded workloads, where its Cinebench scores actually tended to lead the pack, even beating the AMD and Qualcomm machines.  While the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI may not have been a frontrunner for CPU performance, the Intel Arc 140V graphics on the chip is a little secret weapon for the system. Where graphical horsepower is concerned, it turns the tides on AMD’s integrated Radeon graphics (at least until AMD starts bringing its Radeon 8060S graphics to laptops). In 3DMark’s Time Spy test, we see the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI tied with the Lenovo system and both well ahead of the HP OmniBook 7 Aero. That repeats in 3DMark Night Raid as well, and those wins come in large part thanks to huge leads in the Graphics subtests, though they also lead in the CPU sub-tests likely thanks to their stronger single-core performance. Even the MSI Summit 13 AI+ Evo pulls ahead of the OmniBook, though not by as much. This also showcases a perk of the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI over some of the Qualcomm-powered thin-and-lights that it runs against: compatibility. The Asus ZenBook A14 is a reasonably strong machine, but when it has to emulate x86 programs — as in this 3DMark test — it can fall way behind native hardware from Intel and AMD.  Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Battery life Battery life can just about make or break a thin-and-light laptop. When they sacrifice performance, they need to make up for it in efficiency. And the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI just about nails it. In our 4K video playback test, which runs the laptop in airplane mode with the display set to 250-260 nits, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI lasted just shy of 18 and a half hours. While that may not be as impressive as some of the other systems, all of which broke the 21-hour mark (except the OmniBoo, which barely broke 10 hours thanks in part to its much smaller battery). That said, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI still deserves credit. It runs a sharper display than the MSI and Asus laptops and has a smaller battery than everything but the HP system. Our test also allows for the systems to dim their displays when they reach a low enough charge to enable Battery Saver mode, but the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI only dimmed its display to 48 percent brightness, which still sees it produce a comfortably bright 178 nits that is easily viewable with the matte display finish. More typical office and casual use saw no less impressive battery life. The system was typically on track for anywhere from nine to 14 hours of runtime. Three straight hours of active use only drained the battery by 32 percent. Another session of intermittent use that included watching a whole movie, some browsing, and a lot of idling with the screen on saw the laptop lose just 57 percent charge over the course of eight hours and 15 minutes. All of this was with the display still set to its 250-260 nit level, which is more than bright enough for indoor use thanks to the display’s strong anti-glare effect. And all of that was with the display running at 120Hz. More energy savings can be had by dialing that down to 60Hz.  Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: Conclusion The Acer Swift Edge 14 AI doesn’t knock it out of the park at every turn, but if you’re looking for a lightweight, reasonably speedy machine that’s ready to run all day and look lovely doing it, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is a homerun. The display is a special highlight for combining excellent visual quality with a rarely used matte finish that may have a minor impact on brilliance but has a huge impact on how easy it is to see the display in more conditions. Even the keyboard finally shifts away, however subtly, the slightly concave-feeling keys Acer has packed in in the past. All this comes together to make the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI a brilliant little partner for working and entertainment on the move, just bring your own headphones. Read...

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Micro RGB is shaping up to be the TV industry’s overriding theme at CES 2026, and Samsung is going all in. The new technology resides in the middle ground between increasingly mainstream mini-LED TVs and still ludicrously expensive micro-LED sets. Where micro-LED TVs use self-emissive pixels that can be turned on and off individually–much like an OLED TV–micro RGB TVs still rely on a backlight. But that backlight consists of red, green, and blue LEDs that reduce the need for a color filter. It’s a significant improvement on conventional LCD TVs, but it still relies on LCD shuttering. A host of Micro RGB TVs Samsung plans to ship eight new Micro RGB TVs in 2026, including a massive 130-inch model in its R95H series as well as the 115-inch model MR95F. The TV manufacturer is also showing 65-, 75-, and 85-inch models in its R95H series, along with 100-, 98-, and 85-inch models in the step-down R85H series. Some Samsung TVs, such as the newly reissued Frame Pro, will be compatible with the minty fresh wireless version of Samsung’s One Connect breakout box, which previously used a thread-like optical cable to connect to the TV. That leaves you need to hide just the TV’s power cord. It’s not quite the magic of DisplaceTV series, but Samsung is getting there. QLED Samsung is also showing a new giant-sized model of its The Frame TV that measures 98-inches, just in case your local art gallery has some extra large digital creations it wants to display. The company has also added a 55-inch model to its The Frame Pro lineup, which provides a brighter picture. OLED Samsung hasn’t forgotten its stellar RGB OLED series either. It’s refreshing the S95H series, which offers modest improvements to our favorite “puppies on black velvet” (i.e., fantastic black and warm color) TV viewing experience. AI and other stuff Samsung’s AI Sound now creates “stems,” aka separate music, voice, and audio effects streams. This is a feature that’s been around in the pro audio arena for a while, but not in real time. The feature is said to let you mute the announcers while still hearing the actual game and crowd noise. Now that’s progress! The same algorithms are used to create a more immersive sports audio experience called AI Soccer Mode, where the effects are boosted to make it seem more like you’re sitting in the stadium. Google Photos The company is also working to integrate Google Photos into its smart TVs for, so users can interact with their personal images, and manage their photo libraries directly from their TV. Speaking of such, my favorite quote from the show so far is from the president of Samsung’s display division, Seok Woo Yong: “Samsung TVs are not just screens. They are entertainment companions….” Err… In a world that’s moving away from live social interaction, that’s exactly what we need our TVs to be. Read...

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