Okay Geek Farm
t3ch Review - Mint Studio
Ricardo Trejo
If you have a laptop then you have first hand experience with sub-par audio volume. Yeah, it can happen to the best of us. Those puny speakers just don’t cut it, unless of course you have one ear pressed against the computer itself that is. So what can you do if you don’t want to be imprisoned by the wires of headphones? Well, you can stream to an external speaker! Enter the Mint Studio.
Product: Mint Studio (Wireless Computer Speaker System, Multi-room)
What it says it does: Provides crisp, room-filling audio wirelessly from your PC/Mac
My experience: First off, when I unwrapped it the first thing that caught my eye was the glossy finish, and as much as I love the look of gloss finishes, I can’t stand how much they’re dust and finger print magnets. So because of that alone I made sure to only touch the Mint by its bottom - this isn’t a problem, it’s just that I’d hate to blemish the appearance of its otherwise sexy look.
In the box comes the Mint Studio, a remote, a/c plug, usb transmitter, and a flexible usb adapter.
Set up is easy. Just plug it into a wall outlet and you have a couple options in what you want to do next: stream over a computer’s audio to the speaker, docking an iPod onto it, or connecting a separate MP3 or audio device over an 3.5mm audio jack. For the purpose of this review I’m going to go over the streaming and iPod functionalities.
To stream audio from my laptop all I had to do was plug in the USB transmitter into an open USB port on my laptop, and my machine automatically detected its presence. From there I followed the paper instructions included and pressed the CONNECT button on the transmitter. Once the LED light on the transmitter stopped flashing it meant that it was now paired up to the main speaker. Next, I opened up iTunes and played some music, and within mere seconds of setting it up I was hearing great sounding quality audio from my laptop, wirelessly, by means of the Mint Studio. In a nutshell, the experience was completely painless and was truly plug and play - as easy as plugging in a pair of headphones.
For the iPod it was pretty self explanatory; I set my iPhone into the dock and pressed the INPUT button on the side of the dock to change the Mint’s setting from Wireless over to iPod. I could control the iPod with its usual touch screen or by using the Mint Studio’s included remote. Now the remote I would say completes the package as it can fully control everything that’s handled within the iPod itself. The remote has quite a few individual buttons dedicated for the iPod; buttons like select, play, pause, stop, skip, previous, shuffle, volume up, volume down. Though a downside of this is that while it can fully control the iPod when it’s docked up to the Mint Studio, you’re unable to really do anything besides adjust the volume when streaming over from a computer. Yeah, I know it’s a technical thing and it’d be pretty hard to do that without some sort of software, but just saying. Oh, and one other thing to note about the iPod dock is that it also charges your iPod, which earns the device 10 respect points in my book.
My studio apartment is pretty tiny so I don’t really need to stream audio over long distances, but the transmitter is said to be good for up to 100 feet. Now I didn’t get a chance to test this in a practical setting but I did manage to walk a far off distance with my laptop and still get great sounding audio from the Mint Studio speaker receiving the signal. It also has functionality to be paired up with additional Mint Studio speakers for a multi-room set up using only one transmitter. Now I don’t know a lot of people who would shell out that much money just to hear their computer’s audio in multiple rooms, but I suppose there are socialites out there who hold shindigs all through out their house. So if you’re one of those Richie Rich types well now you know that this might be ultimate solution for you.
Overall, the time I spent with the Mint Studio was filled with nothing but good things; finally being able to hear what my laptop was trying to say this whole time made it all a worth while experience. The Studio gave off a nice steady quality of sound, though I do know for audiophiles this may not cut it. Mint compares this device with competitors such as Bose but I don’t think it’s anywhere near that high level of audio excellence. It’s a great wireless speaker system for the price, and for those who just want to finally hear their laptops, well it doesn’t get any better than this. And it’s also a great looking iPod dock!
Pro’s: sexy look, remote iPod controls, charges iPod w/ dock, loud, wireless works as advertised
Con’s: audio quality isn’t perfect but it gets the job done exceedingly well
Price: $149
Where you can buy it: Mint Wireless Audio
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