Introduction
Portable Bluetooth speakers are all the rage these days, with examples coming from well known audio brands like Jawbone and Kitsound to relative newcomers like Beacon and BassBuds. Today, we’re looking at a a speaker from an even lower profile manufacturer, Xenta. It’s called the BeatBar, or the W-04EBY if you want to be pedantic, and costs just under £30. Let’s take a closer look at how this speaker fares against similar budget speaker offerings and its more premium competition.
Specifications
- Battery: 1050mA
- Power Output: 3W x2
- Speaker Units: 1.5“ x2,
- Impedence: 4ohm
- T.H.D:〈10%
- Frequency Response: 70Hz—16KHz
- Separation: ≥40dB
- S/N: 80dB
- Sensitivity： 550mV
- Power Adaptor : DC5V/500mA-1A
- Dimension: W151xH48xD58mm
Physical Features
The BeatBar resembles a black, rubberised brick, with perforated metal wrapping around the front and smaller sides to act as a speaker guard. The rubberised design lends a nice weight in the hand that feels robust without being cumbersome.
It is equipped such that the speakers can be pointed horizontally or vertically to suit the listening situation, with unintrusive supporting feet on one side of the body to keep it flat when on its side.
The BeatBar only comes with three operable buttons, the standard multifunction call/end button followed by 2 direction arrows. These operate as the track skip buttons when pressed once, and volume controls when held down.
On one end, we have the 5V charging port, a 3.5mm stereo jack to connect to non-Bluetooth devices and the on-off switch. Sliding the hard switch on the side to the on position turned on the speaker and immediately put it into pairing mode. It paired with my Nexus 4 without any trouble, and responded near-immediately to the play/pause button. Skipping a track or changing the volume emits a beep, but it’s not too distracting.
