Best Buys Audio & AV 2019-#7
The Pulse Mini 2i is a substantial and
attractive unit, 34cm across a curved front-
age which allows a spread of its two-way
stereo twin 19mm tweeters and four-inch
woofers. Backing these is a quoted 100W
of total system power — a figure at which
one might shake a cellar of salt were it not
accompanied by a quoted distortion (THD)
figure of just 0.03%.
The Pulse Mini 2i is well-equipped with
a combo analogue/optical minijack input,
Gigabit Ethernet and dual-band Wi-Fi, a
rear headphone jack and a USB slot which
allows playback from attached USB drives.
Another indication of sonic credentials is
the ability to stream high-res formats —
FLAC, MQA, WAV, AIFF to 24-bit/192kHz,
and other common formats to CD quality.
(There is no DSD support; Bluesound
suggests you convert these to PCM. )
The sonic balance is not flooded with
false bass, as are many
wireless speakers, so
that at lower background
levels the sound is
clean and non-intrusive
whether playing across a
room or right by you in a
desktop scenario.
Better still, the sound
scales perfectly as you
go louder, the bass
content rising with it
but remaining tight and
controlled, not flabby,
overfull or dominating.
Effective high-tech
streaming and multi-
room, then, with sophis-
ticated sound quality
powerful enough to play
loud without strain.
The RRP is $999.One of our favourites from the Bluesound
range has always been the Vault, because
it offers something that rival systems don’t
— hard-drive storage for your music. You
can rip music from CDs, or copy it into the
drive over the network, then you can play it
directly into your sound system of choice,
or over the network to other BluOS players
and speakers around the home.
There are big advantages in hard-drive
playback, notably removing the vagaries of
network playback, and potentially having
the full data path under a single clock.
Yet as is evident by the lack of rivals, it
is not easy or cheap to achieve with the
traditional reliability of consumer audio.
Who trusts a hard drive? Getting this right
is something that both explains the Vault’s
pricing, and delivers its value — music-
specific drive-based players can run to tens
of thousands of dollars, and Bluesound’s is
one of the cheapest.
But the Vault is not only
a CD-ripping hard-drive
music player. Using the
BluOS app (right) you can
also use the Vault as a
streaming preamplifier,
with two USB slots, a
combo analogue/optical
minijack input, plus all
the ways of BluOS. There
is Bluetooth streaming
from your phone and
also Bluetooth out to
stream music to wireless
headphones. And through
the network the Vault can
directly access all those
music services. Add it to
an existing system as your
Bluesound music hub for
the home. RRP is $1999.Perhaps best described as a smart amplifier,
you can just add a pair of speakers to the
Powernode 2i to create a zone of Blue-
sound music anywhere in your home, using
the BluOS app to play all the streaming
services from online and your own files
across the network up to 24-bit/192kHz
high-res, and also in its 2i version offering
two-way Bluetooth using the latest Blue-
tooth 5.0 so you can stream to wireless
headphones, though there’s also a head-
phone output for direct connection.
You can create a bigger system by plugging
in local sources, using its USB-A, optical
and analogue minijack inputs. Also new is
Apple’s improved AirPlay 2, which brings
more options for control in Apple house-
holds, including using Siri for voice
assistance. It also allows voice control
from Alexa devices. We quickly decided
that an amp like this needs a physical
remote control, which isn’t supplied with
any Bluesound product, but there’s a clever
trick -- you can program Bluesound 2i prod-
ucts to recognise any remote control you
like for 15 functions; just select the chosen
function in the app, point the remote and
hit the button you want to use. It took us
less than a minute to get an old TV remote
control working with the Powernode 2i. At
last, a smart amp with good old-fashioned
touch-of-a-button control from the couch!
Best of all, the Powernode 2i sounded
immediately like a hi-fi amplifier, and no
surprise, really, as it uses NAD’s Hybrid-
Digital circuits, rated (and being NAD,
probably understated) at 2 × 60W into
eight ohms. From the first serious listen-
ing sessions, the difference in musicality
seemed obvious, more dimensionality in
every way, more attention grabbed, more
information detail combining to deliver a
wide acoustic studio-stage. RRP is $1599.
POWERNODE 2i - REVIEW VAULT 2i - REVIEW PULSE MINI 2i - REVIEW
The BluOS app proved attractive, responsive,
and easy to switch between rooms.