INTRODUCTION

   When i got my first "real" PC back in the very beginning of the 90's (arrived a few years after an Amstrad 6128, a Commodore 64 and an Amiga 500) i paired it with a Creative Sound Blaster 16 and two very small stereo speakers which today some of you would probably mistake for compact wireless ones. By the mid 90's things improved for the better and thus i managed to get two large monitor speakers on my desk paired with a 32bit Sound Blaster card (AWE32) something which actually didn't last long since with the arrival of the very first 5.1 Dolby Surround sound compatible systems by manufacturers like Creative Labs (still have the Inspire Digital 5700 set) and Wave Master by the end of the decade it was now possible to play games and watch movies on the brand new DVD format (back then anyways) with unprecedented sound clarity. Since then speakers have changed quite a bit so now you don't really need a full 5.1/7.1 surround sound system to enjoy all your favorite games, movies and tunes while sitting in front of your computer screen. Of course finding a really "special" stereo speaker set is not very easy not when there's a massive number of such models in the market but after searching for quite a while we came across the NOVA Wireless Stereo Speaker System by Harman Kardon.

   HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets premier audio, visual, infotainment and enterprise automation solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets. With leading brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon® , Mark Levinson® and Revel®, the Company is admired by audiophiles, musicians and the entertainment venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of approximately 17,600 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and reported sales of $5.9 billion during the last 12 months ended December 31, 2014.

   One of the reasons we picked the NOVA Wireless Stereo Speaker System to review out of almost a dozen similar systems is its unique design and very good specifications a combination which we don't usually see in the market (it's usually either design or specifications, hardly ever both). So aside using translucent plastic for most of its body the NOVA features touch capacitive buttons, three different audio inputs (Bluetooth, 3.5mm and Optical), NFC (near field communications), DSP (digital signal processing) by Harman and delivers a grand total of 80W of power via its 63mm (2.5") drivers and 35mm (1.25") tweeters (two 88mm passive bass radiators are also present). We did speak about specifications however and so the NOVA offer a frequency response number of 55Hz to 20KHz with an impedance of 8 Ohm and a SNR of 85dB (all very good the their size). So the time has finally come for us to see if the NOVA Wireless Stereo Speaker System by Harman Kardon sounds as good as it looks.