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Audioengine B1 Bluetooth - Really Surprised

For those of you who enjoy casual listening, and minimizing either financial outlay or the number of components it takes to get great sound, this post is for you.

I picked up the Audioengine B1 Bluetooth receiver to plug into our living room system, just sort of out of curiosity to see how simple I could make it for when my wife wants to use the system, or when we just want to listen to Spotify without wires across the living room. What a great little device - it never drops signal, and it sounds fantastic. And this post isn't specifically an endorsement of the B1 (or of Spotify specifically) as much as an endorsement of the idea of the B1 - from what I've read many of the Bluetooth devices from $100-250 all sound nice, with just differences in connections, signal range, etc. so you can pick your favorite brand and do the same thing.

The cool part is the simplicity it allows - with only three components...

- Speakers
- Integrated Amp
- Bluetooth Receiver/Dac (analog out into the integrated)

...not including the iPhone/Android/iPad which most people have anyway, you can listen to millions of songs without wires, without leaving the couch, and with sound quality that will probably surprise many others like it surprised me.

We'll play Scrabble and make it a game of musical-torture - whoever wins the round gets to pick the song and "torture" the other (I'll pick '70s AM-Gold love songs, she'll pick Nine Inch Nails) - but that would be tedious with CDs. With Spotify on the iPad, we can pick songs in seconds, no wires, the signal never drops, and it sounds much better than I expected.

I went into it with an "I'll just return this when I discover how limited it is" mentality, so this was a cool discovery for us, and definitely a keeper. Not that changing CDs (or LPs) is all that difficult, but being able to pick from 20 million songs using my iPad while planted comfortably on the couch, and without any wires, is really fun and I wish I'd tried it sooner.
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Showing 1 response by mahler123

mahler123
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I had bought one at the time this thread was created and put in in a downstairs system.  I listen to Classical Music but use the AE primarily for pop.  When my wife and I are in the mood for some classic rock it was just so easy to pull out the phone, hit Spotify and play whatever tunes we wanted.  When my adult children came over, or house sat for us, they could also stream from there phones.  I was surprised at how good it sounded.
  A year later I had to have emergency heart surgery.  For a week after I was discharged I had to sleep on the sleeper sofa in the living room.  I couldn’t access my big rig and CD collection upstairs but I had a collection of mp3 albums from Amazon, when they give you the free download if you buy a CD.  That was the bulk of my listening, streamed from my phone to the AE.  I was surprised how decent my Classical albums sound as mp3 streamed through BT.
   Since  then I added Bluesound Node2 to the living room system and have burned about a thousand CDs so the AE main use has reverted back to stream some pop songs.  The Node2 also has Bluetooth but it sucks compared to the AE.  It is also a pain to disconnect because you have to go into the settings menu and make several changes.
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