Audioengine B1 Bluetooth - Really Surprised

For those of you who enjoy casual listening, and minimizing either financial outlay or the number of components it takes to get great sound, this post is for you.

I picked up the Audioengine B1 Bluetooth receiver to plug into our living room system, just sort of out of curiosity to see how simple I could make it for when my wife wants to use the system, or when we just want to listen to Spotify without wires across the living room. What a great little device - it never drops signal, and it sounds fantastic. And this post isn't specifically an endorsement of the B1 (or of Spotify specifically) as much as an endorsement of the idea of the B1 - from what I've read many of the Bluetooth devices from $100-250 all sound nice, with just differences in connections, signal range, etc. so you can pick your favorite brand and do the same thing.

The cool part is the simplicity it allows - with only three components...

- Speakers
- Integrated Amp
- Bluetooth Receiver/Dac (analog out into the integrated)

...not including the iPhone/Android/iPad which most people have anyway, you can listen to millions of songs without wires, without leaving the couch, and with sound quality that will probably surprise many others like it surprised me.

We'll play Scrabble and make it a game of musical-torture - whoever wins the round gets to pick the song and "torture" the other (I'll pick '70s AM-Gold love songs, she'll pick Nine Inch Nails) - but that would be tedious with CDs. With Spotify on the iPad, we can pick songs in seconds, no wires, the signal never drops, and it sounds much better than I expected.

I went into it with an "I'll just return this when I discover how limited it is" mentality, so this was a cool discovery for us, and definitely a keeper. Not that changing CDs (or LPs) is all that difficult, but being able to pick from 20 million songs using my iPad while planted comfortably on the couch, and without any wires, is really fun and I wish I'd tried it sooner.