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Cirnyan 17/02/2018
The battery power and charging functionality works well, it charges up to just above 4.1V. A battery is almost required for it to run well in my experience as it'll often cut out and restart the bluetooth chip on fairly low volumes when powered only by a 2.1A rated charger, but with a battery connected it plays without cutting out very far up in volume. It plays quite loud on a pair of 10w rated speakers, but towards the last 15-20% of the volume scale distortion happens that is clearly coming from the amplifier, as I can run these speakers much louder without any distortion from an old analog amplifier. The biggest problem though is that the bluetooth chip adds a very noticable noise just above 11khz, that is more or less noticable at midrange volumes depending on the type of music, but does not become any lower as the playback volume decreases. it's very noticable if you play at a low colume and pause playback, the noise continues for about half a second after it stops getting an audio signal and then the noise stops, too. I Soldered on leads to connect an analog audio source and that played back fine without that noise, so it must be coming from the bluetooth components. This may not bother you depending on your hearing, but those sensitive to such things will probably want to steer clear. For me it's a bit of a dealbreaker, because trying to use a lowpass filter to clear out everything above 11khz just kills all crispness to the sound. The jacks for the cables for speakers and battery are handy, but a bit strangely are a different size for the speaker ones compared to the one for the battery. The jacks can be desoldered if you don't want to use them, but there are no through-holes for the connections, only pads. tl;dr: noisy bluetooth chip kinda ruins it if you've got moderately sensitive hearing, otherwise it's a good board for a compact and easy installation for a small stereo speaker.
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