Quote Originally Posted by Garet View Post
Hello. So my old Altec Lansing 2.1 speaker seems to be starting to have problems now so am wondering what is a good speaker to buy nowadays. Is there a speaker now that does not need a subwoofer to sound good?

My speaker is still working at the moment but getting errors like windows saying there is no audio device plugged in even though I have Realtek audio driver installed (Reinstalled already) and there are still sounds coming out of my speakers.

Thank to everyone for you suggestions.
I used a Yamaha receiver hooked up to a stereo system. The sort you might ordinarily find hooked up to a TV as a poor man's home theater, or way back in the day, separate CD players, turntables, etc. In short, it's meant to play high quality audio from a variety of sources. You can hook them up to a PC too.

When I was in college I was stuck using headphones because I wasn't willing to annoy my roommates - and let me say moving up to even an entry 5.1 stereo system has been godly.

The only annoying thing is the only decent way to connect them to a PC is via HDMI. So you have to mess with your display settings. Mine's an older one that only supports 1080p passthrough and I don't have any 1080p monitors, so I basically have a dummy display that doesn't really exist, but it's annoying when a window is "lost" on it. On new models they should support 2k, 4k, etc, so you can just tell windows to duplicate your main screen even without any display hooked up to the passthrough - and then you won't have my particular problem.

I know you said you don't want a subwoofer but I'd consider it as an option. It's pretty great if you don't want/dislike headphones.

And to echo what others are saying, even if you must go for 2.0 speakers, don't buy any speaker system with "gaming" in the name.