The AS501 soundbar is a great idea; it's a few small speakers baked into a small package that attaches to your Dell Ultrasharp LCD on the underside. It draws power directly from the LCD itself (there is a power port for it on the LCD), and then attaches to the sound source of your choice. A simple power/volume dial on the right-side makes the operation easy, and on the left there is a set of headphone jacks incase you'd like to spare everyone else around you the noise. Additionally, there is a single RCA jack output on the rear for a subwoofer.

Sound quality is about what you would expect.. it's got good highs, but the mids and lows are a little lacking. That's to be expected, because they're such small speakers. The addition of the subwoofer output on the back is handy, incase you have a discrete sub, to fill out the rest of the sound. I wouldn't use this speaker bar to play back music, or play a DVD, but for generic sound on a PC (operating system sounds, mail notifications, etc) it's great. Because you're missing out on the full range, it would be lacking in multimedia/gaming applications, but for a general purpose user (surfing, email, productivity) I don't think you'll find something more convenient. I already have a nice 2.1 speaker setup for everything else, but I use the soundbar to play back podcasts from my iPod while at my desk.