you need to take a rest after 2 hours of sitting in front of your screen anyways!

beside the harsh highs, several people have reported some inferior build quality in them, specifically the right tweeter

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Is it pointless to get small/medium sized desktop monitors without a subwoofer?

I have some m-audio's but my car has a far more expensive setup and the bass just isn't there. You can't feel it in your chest for example with these speakers (though I enjoy them for films).

If you can't feel bass in your chest, is that a good indication your desktop audio isn't setup adequately for making music and mastering?

I recently had my second child, which moved my studio from the awesome 26/20 room on the far side of the house (now called the kid's playroom) to a smaller guest room much closer to the nursery. This meant my Alesis M1 Actives were suddenly way too loud to use during naptimes and after my kids are asleep. I was interested in finding something with more control over the volume, keeping the relatively flat response and if it was possible extending my low end response either with monitors with better range or moving to a 2.1 system.

After searching all over I found that damn near everything that fit my specs were more expensive than 2 kids would allow in the budget.

Talking to a buddy of mine that works for Corsair, he told me "You should check out our SP2500 speakers, we really put a ton of research before we released 'em, separate amplifiers matched to the woofers and tweeters, top quality speakers..." And here I responded with my instinctual musicians reply of "yeah but systems set up for gaming are colored to make movies and music sound 'better' which makes em no good for mixing". He said "and the crossovers are controlled by an onboard micro-controller and the 'default' setting on it is flat as a pancake."

At this point I asked if he'd take em back if they didn't work for me...

Long story short, the Corsair SP2500 speakers are better in almost every way than my Alesis M1 Active's, really do give a better mix that sounds much closer when I do the old "TV, Car, crap computer speakers, headphones, earbuds" comparisons. If you want good monitors with a matched subwoofer for a WAY cheaper budget than M-Audio, Gemini, or KRK, with comparable quality it is definitely a system I personally vouch for as 'studio quality'. (I've been a musician/producer for 20+ years and I'm probably more picky and elitist about my gear than most.)

The only drawback is that they only have RCA and a 3.5 jack inputs instead of XLR like I'm used to, but I have not heard any issues with line noise at all.