This past week I went out and purchased the Beoplay A1, the minirig 3, and the minirig mini. My hope was to buy a little line-in speaker I could use with my portable music making setup (began to feel a bit claustrophobic listening to things exclusively in headphones.) For my needs, I am only interested in wired inputs, so all my tested were done using the aux inputs. (I also really hate bluetooth. So much so, that I even contacted customer support for both companies seeing if there were ways to mod the speakers to physically bypass the microcontroller bits. props to them for putting up with me.)
Ended up returning all but the mini.
Here are my shallow biased thoughts, to be taken with a grain of salt:
Beoplay A1:
This was my first choice, as the recommendations here were glowing and the design looked great. Gotta say, I was disappointed. There was a distinct buzz happening when I plugged in my music player into it for some songs. It didn’t sound blown, so I sent some sines through it. Frequencies between 30-200hz caused some kind of buzzing. Sort of reminded me of a someone trying to sing lower than their vocal range? Not sure if it was a defect or not. At this point I was happy enough to live with this because my music player could EQ some of the low end and make the buzzing go away. I’d be curious if any other beoplay a1 users have experienced anything similar.
I then discovered the annoying gate that turns on after about 30 second of silence. And then I discovered that the device will sometimes shut off after 15 minutes of inactivity. I got in touch with them about this, and they gave me this reply:
The fact that the A1 shuts off automatically after 15 minutes while playing music through the line-in connection is intended by design. The line-in connection is not perceived as ‘music’ as the A1 was meant as a Bluetooth player only, however, at the time of manufacturing the line-in connection was still used widely, therefore, it was implemented as a " workaround " but the A1 is meant to be used as a Bluetooth speaker.
On update 5.3.0, after receiving feedback from users, we have added a way to circumvent the standby function. To do so you must plug in the A1 to the charger, as this will prevent it from going into standby.
So, aux input was kind of hacked in there I guess? I really do appreciate the transparency of the company, but I couldn’t justify paying a premium for a speaker where wired input was an afterthought. It was too bad. I liked the sound of this one. It had a surprising (yet tasteful) amount of low end.
Minirig 3:
I didn’t spend much time on this one, so I can’t say much/anything too useful about this one. I didn’t even turn it on. I can’t say anything about the sound of it, though I’m sure it sounded great.
I (the genius who didn’t read any manuals at this point) got a little freaked out that there wasn’t a physical volume knob, and just assumed that you needed to download an app to control it (the pretty pictures on the description page made it seem that way), and this made it an immediate dealbreaker for me. This isn’t actually true. You can use the speaker just fine without needing to download an app. I am an idiot.
The form factor of the speaker was a bit larger than I expected, and a bit too tall. This was the second reason why I returned it. I do not have a lot of room for packing, so smaller things are better in my case.
Minirig mini:
This one was the winner, for me at least. Firstly, the mini has a great form factor. Fits nicely in the palm of my hand. It also has a nice aluminum exterior which the minirig 3 did not have. I opted for the brushed aluminum. Like the minirig 3, the build feels very rugged. No case for the mini (you can’t even buy it separately), but I have a sock.
Aux input, so far, has been working flawlessly. You need to plug in the speaker into one of the two inputs (high or low gain, not sure what the technical difference is), and the thing automatically turns on. It has a decent amount of sound on this thing, and can certainly fill up a room.
I also contacted the minirig customer support. Considering the ridiculous question I was asking, I actually learned a fair bit. Both minirigs both process audio through a microcontroller, which was surprising to me. They also told me that bypassing the microcontroller would make the audio “not sound very good”. So this is making me think that they are actually throwing some DSP at it to make it sound better (not just hard limiting). What that is who knows? My last email were mostly questions trying to get more technical information (round trip latency, sampling rate, block size, fixed/floating-point, etc). I was already asking some pretty wacky questions, so I doubt I will be hearing back from them. If they do get back to me with more tech specs on the internal microcontroller, I will post an update.
