You Spinnaker me round...

Introduction

A year ago, the Edifier Spinnaker was receiving the CES Innovations Design and Engineering Award, judged by a pre-eminent panel of independent industrial designers, engineers and members of the media to honour outstanding design and engineering excellence in the cutting-edge consumer electronics category.

The Spinnaker is quite an iconic speaker, standing at 15 inches tall, and looking like a Spinnaker (a special type of sail that is designed specifically for sailing off the wind from a reaching course to a downwind) or the Spinnaker Tower (a 170-metre tower in Portsmouth). Apparently the shape is designed to project sound towards you, with front facing tweeters and mid-range drivers, reinforced with and a downward firing subwoofer in each speaker.



The Spinnaker is also Bluetooth enabled and a wireless infrared remote controls the volume and track navigation within a 10-metre radius.

Setup and Use

Simple as ever. Get it all out of the box (and get the speakers out of their little travel bags that they come in - nice touch, but possibly not required unless you’re moving them around a lot). Plug thing A into thing B. Power up. Make some noise.

And it makes a lot of noise, and does a very good job of that. Like nearly every other Edifier speaker I’ve tried, it impresses straight away, and deals with whatever you throw at it, rock, pop, soul, r’n’b, spoken word, dance, folk, you name it, it plays them all well. A nice rounded bass sound from the built in subwoofers, and good high end reproduction from the tweeters. The striking design also seems to make these speakers sound very good.

The Bluetooth capability is dependent on the audio source that is being used to stream audio. Devices that have a low SBC setting (like Nokia mobile phones) will produce less than desirable audio quality when being connected to the Spinnaker – however when using devices that have high SBC settings (like Apple devices and Blackberry phones), the audio quality is fine.



I should also mention that Edifier holds the Bluetooth SIG Associate Member category with Bluetooth SIG, the same as Apple and Nordic. The Bluetooth version applied to the Spinnaker is the 2.1+EDR, and profile supports both AVRCP and A2DP for audio streaming and adjustments.

Conclusion

Another cracking set of speakers from Edifier. They just keep knocking out these excellent products. These are certainly their most visually striking speakers, but they perform just as well as the others in the range. A lot of money for a set of speakers from a lesser known name, but they are very good indeed, and Edifier have not really let me down yet.

The Bluetooth capability is an added bonus, and gives these speakers an extra dimension when used with modern devices that support AVCRP and A2DP.

Recommended.