Logitech G560 review

The RGB craze has officially taken the PC gaming community by storm, and Logitech’s latest creation is better proof than most. These are the Logitech G560 Gaming Speakers, and for 200 bucks or quid they’ll bring some serious hues to your gaming PC pod.

That said, the lighting effects aren’t quite as fine-tuned as we’d like for the price, though the audio is absolutely top notch. The result is a rather mixed product that’s still only most easily recommendable to RGB nuts looking to further deck out their gaming rigs.

Price and availability

Logitech is selling the G560 Gaming Speakers for $199, £209 or AU$279, which is quite a lot to ask for from a 2.1 set of computer speakers these days. Granted, much of that cost is wrapped within the LightSync RGB lighting system that works with your games to dynamically illuminate your setup.

Logitech’s own MX Sound speakers, which enjoy this set’s Bluetooth support as well, cost just $99 (£89, AU$99), but lack the backlighting. Then again, the Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX bring a similarly robust sound profile through a 2.1 system for just $149 (£149, AU$329) in comparison.

Regardless, the G560 speaker set price all rides on how badly you want to bring this next level of RGB lighting to your PC gaming setup, so let’s get on with answering that question.

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Design and setup

Logitech’s design philosophy here is clearly focused on these hardware elements disappearing in the light that they create, and they do so with great success. These speakers and subwoofer are all covered in textured, deep black plastic.

There are no lighting elements on the subwoofer unit, but on each speaker there are four bright RGB LEDs accompanied by strip LEDs within hollowed-out chamber elements. Each of these sets of lights can be uniquely illuminated.

Fabric mesh grilles are wrapped around the speakers’ 2.5-inch (63.5mm) drivers, but not the 6.5-inch (165mm) subwoofer driver.

All told, the designs are subdued and slick enough to get lost in the light that the speakers emit from behind them.

As for setup, that’s generally easy with the subwoofer acting as a hub of sorts, accepting the two speakers and connecting to the PC via a USB connection. From there, you just download the Logitech Gaming Software app and follow a few basic setup steps.

From there, you have the option to control the speakers via the software or via hardware i.e. Bluetooth or 3.5mm audio jack connection. The latter is how you can play music on these speakers from your phone.

Performance

That said, we found the lighting portion of the offering to be the most mixed in real-world applications, but nevertheless flashy and fun. You see, while the Gaming Software supports hundreds of games with custom lighting profiles, we only had one installed on our test system: Portal 2.

Considering we’re quite into games like Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and Fortnite, we would have hoped that this tool would support the latest PC games. But, fret not, for the speakers’ marquee Screen Sampling feature works about just as well as a lighting profile did in the arguably ancient Portal 2.

Now, ‘about just as well’ doesn’t say a whole lot for the feature, which sadly requires that games be played in borderless window mode – an arguable performance hit. You see, while it’s clear that the lights (customizable via digital zones set on your screen through the tool) are responding to motion and stimulus on screen, the colors rarely match the tone of the screen contents.

Rather, the lights simply appear to flash all sorts of colors in a sort of rhythm with the motions and sounds on screen during intense sequences. During moments of more steady motion and pure color, however, the speakers work beautifully to match the tones and hues. It’s sad then that those moments are few and far in between in most games.

In our testing, we found the audio visualizer function to simply not work on PC with browser audio and only with local sources, like Groove Music. Even this lighting setting seems to follow bass response most closely, however, doing more flashing and switching than mood setting.

Lighting in game-specific profiles, like Portal 2, isn’t much better than the Screen Sampler tool, if perhaps are a little more tame. You can also set general lighting patterns like breathing and color cycling, as well sync these settings across other Logitech RGB accessories. Don’t have those matching accessories? Then you won’t have lighting patterns in sync across your hardware.

That said, the audio output from these speakers is simply amazing. The bass is deep and rumbling and the high notes are captured with nuance and a wide range of tones. Your games and even movies are going to sound excellent through these speakers, that much we can guarantee.

The speakers even offer 7.1 DTS:X Ultra surround sound. It definitely sounds better than without, but it’s clearly still digitized surround sound.

Final verdict

Logitech has crafted some seriously superior-sounding speakers for the PC that aren’t quite as robust as they could be from a lighting perspective. For a rather steep price, however, what you will get here are speakers that will undoubtedly bring flash and fun to your PC gaming setup.

While our setup here looks so much more premium than it did before, the lighting isn’t as nuanced as we’d like it to be, especially when using the Screen Sampler mode. Also, the speakers need to support more of the latest games with custom lighting profiles. PUBG and Fortnight should be a given.

All told, if you long to bring even more RGB goodness to your PC gaming setup and don’t care for exactly how you get it, then the G560 will serve you well. Otherwise, you can find similarly decent audio experiences elsewhere for a bit less.