Product Reviews

Designed by Neil Poulton, LaCie's FireWire speakers look as though they might have been inspired by a trip on a cruise liner, so closely do they resemble ships' funnels. Then again, they could just as easily have taken their cues from the Teletubbies' Moo Moo.

However they came about, these speakers look much more attractive than your average computer speaker assembly. They connect to your Mac using a FireWire 400 port, rather than the more usual 3.5mm jack. This has two advantages: it means the signal

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passed from your Mac is data that's only decoded when it gets to the speaker, which should result in a better sound, and it means you don't need to plug the speakers into mains power, as they get all they need over the FireWire bus. Should you connect them to a device without a FireWire port - an iPod, say - there's a 3.5mm input jack and a DC power input (you'll need your own adaptor).

Setup was fairly straightforward, with one unnerving caveat: having plugged the speakers in, connected them together, and made the relevant settings adjustment in the Sound pane of System Preferences, pressing play in iTunes resulted in Camera Obscura's Hey Lloyd, I'm ready to be Heartbroken being played at several times its normal speed.

The fault turned out to be an incorrect setting in the Audio Midi Setup utility, a bug affecting PowerPC-based Macs and these speakers. With that sorted, sound quality was excellent. Deep bass, crisp treble, and plenty in the mid range. At £69,they're not cheap, but these LaCie FireWire speakers are elegant, save on cable clutter and sound great.