Digital Trends

Logitech Z Cinema

February 26th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We plugged the Z Cinema into our test system and had to fiddle with it for awhile and even reboot to get it to work, which is how it’s supposed to work according to the installation manual. Regardless, we eventually got it working and started our tests with some music.

First we fired up some music, and were reasonably impressed with the overall fidelity and balance between the satellites and subwoofer. We played everything from acoustic tracks to hip hop and thought it sounded decent, but never amazing. The speakers sound decent, but neither their overall volume nor audio fidelity blew us away. We would say on a three-tier scale of poor, decent and awesome they rank as “decent.” They certainly get loud enough for a mid-to-large size room and at max volume they are loud without any distortion at all, which is good. The subwoofer delivers the kind of power you’d except from a unit of its size. The bass sounds great too, and is very well-balanced with the output from the satellites. Next we decided to try out a movie with the SRS Surround Sound enabled, to see if the Z Cinema really could producer believable surround sound. We fired up Roy Orbison’s Black and White Night which is notable for its surround sound since you can hear the backup singers behind you on a proper 5.1 setup. We noticed some definite ambient “surround” sound when SRS was enabled, but it wasn’t nearly as good as having actual rear channel speakers. The two satellites did a good job of opening up the soundstage a bit from simple stereo but it was not as convincing as we hoped it would be.

The Z Cinema software ties it all together, and is comprised of two elements; a system tray icon that you can click on with your mouse to change settings, and on-screen displays that appear when you make changes to volume, sound levels, etc. For example, when you select a song its title appears at the top of the screen, the volume level appears in the lower left and the SRS Surround setting appears on the lower-right. After a few seconds it all fades away so as to not block your view of the screen.

Z Cinema Software

The Z Cinema software has its pluses and minuses. When you click the icon in the system tray a small control center opens on screen that lets you tweak various settings such as volume levels and what program opens when you click a button on the remote. There are three tabs for music, photo and video, and each tab lists supported programs. Surprisingly, the software supports a wide array of programs and all of the most popular ones, including iTunes, Winamp and Rhapsody for audio, as an example. Even better, if the program you use isn’t listed, you can select “other” and use any program you want.

So for example, if you set Winamp as your program of choice for music, pressing the “music” button on the remote opens Winamp. An “iPod” style spin wheel adjusts volume, and you can pause, skip, stop and fast-forward tracks. It’s easy to use and the remote works very well with the software, but we did have a few issues.