Nakamichi's My Mini Plus

Cubic volume

 

by Ryhan Bte Mohd Yazid

04:45 AM Jan 25, 2012

 

 

FINDING a small set of speakers is easy enough. Finding a small set of speakers which sounds like a big set of speakers is the challenge.

It was a bit of a surprise to find Nakamichi's My Mini Plus on my desk. Given the Japanese brand's reputation for high-quality, well-built products, with an emphasis on home theatre and car audio, a metallic 5cm cube weighing just 139g wasn't what we were expecting.

The possibility of bringing home a Nakamichi product for a shade under S$70 seems almost too good to be true - My Mini Plus, which comes in eight colours, retails for S$69.90 at Technobay, on the third level of CK Tang - so we were keen to put it through the paces to see if it lived up to that famous marque's high standards.

It's portable for sure, but for a wee little thing, it sure can carry a tune. Like Snooki, it's small and loud. Very loud. We threw the speakers in a conference room, closed the door behind us, turned the volume up to the maximum, and were nearly deafened. Across the newsroom, we got weird stares from folks wondering who brought the disco to work. Proof that you don't need volume to produce volume; the My Mini Plus is perfect for house parties.

(As long as your party doesn't go on all night - when fully charged, the speakers can play music for up to five hours straight.)

So how do you get the boom into the box? Three ways: Via a MircoSD card slot, a USB line-in cable to your PC or laptop, or, if you like your parties interrupted by on-air deejays, using its built-in radio.

A minor complaint about that last option - the line-in cable doubles as a radio antenna, but we wish the antenna had been built into the Nakamichi's housing, much like the metal strip around the iPhone 4. But it seems pretty harsh to fault a S$70 gizmo for that. By the way, you'll also need that cable to charge your speakers, sucking power off your PC or laptop's USB jack.

My Mini Plus, in eight words: Small cube, big noise, nice price, why not? Ryhan Bte Mohd Yazid

Source:  www.todayonline.com/TechandDigital/EDC120125-0000001/Cubic-volume