Introduction
This is the Elysium Iron Mini, a portable Bluetooth speaker with retro design. If you look at the product page or even the product itself, you’ll find out that there’s a “by lofree” behind the name. Well, mainly it’s because the company licensed Lofree Poison Speaker‘s design. Pretty much the same thing as rebadging in the car industry. Without further ado, let’s dive into the full review!
Unboxing
The speaker comes in a pretty simple white box, my only concern is the Bluetooth logo looks quite weird, why not using the official Bluetooth logo?
The box contains the speaker itself, leather strap, screws, Micro USB cable, AUX cable, and the user guide.
Retro Design
As mentioned earlier, the speaker has a retro design, which looks like those FM radios in the 1950/1960’s era. Definitely not my era, though. Unlike its name, the speaker mostly made out of plastic, even the grill in front. My unit is the black variant, which comes with matte finishing, other colors will come with glossy finishing.
The top of the speaker has those control buttons to adjust the volume, changing to another mode, etc. There’s also the LED tube and the dial for adjusting the radio frequency. Additionally, you can press the dial to auto-seek for the next FM radio station. The LED tube illuminates Blue in Bluetooth mode, Green in radio mode, and Orange in AUX mode.
Looking closer at the grill in front, you’ll see the top part actually showing the FM radio frequency range. It’s kinda cool as there are light indicators in between each radio channel frequency, which will light up to show roughly at which frequency range you are at. One more thing, the lightning symbol will also light up when you are charging the speaker, took me quite a while to find out whether the speaker is charging or not when I plugged in the cable.
The back of the speaker houses the AUX and Micro USB ports. The center plate with “Elysium by lofree” logo is actually the subwoofer. I really like the design of having the exposed diaphragm behind the speaker, probably one of the reasons why the speaker’s bass is so good.
Powerful Bass
In terms of audio quality, the speaker produces a powerful bass, thanks to the two 10W amps inside. Playing songs like A Sky Full of Stars by Coldplay and other heavy beats songs is really nice. Even though bass is really quite important in a song, a recent study even stated that bass guitarist is the most important band member, I still find that the Elysium Iron Mini is not my favorite speaker. Well, mainly because the songs that I listen are more to soft rock, sing-songwriter, emo, this kind of genres. When there’s heavy bass, for sure there will be losing some clarity in the highs. The speaker just couldn’t deliver that kind of pleasing highs.
Great Battery Life
Juicing up the speaker is a 2,000mAh battery, which the company claims to have up to 6 hours of battery life at 80% volume. Based on my test, I was able to get around the 6-hour battery life as the company claimed. Charging the speaker to full will take around 1.5 hours.
Final Words
Retailing at RM299, the Elysium Iron Mini is no doubt a good Bluetooth speaker, it’s a bassy one, though. It produces great bass, but vocal-heavy tracks will lose the clarity as the highs just aren’t there. This is a great Bluetooth speaker to use if you are planning to have a mini party. In the end, there aren’t many Bluetooth speakers come produce good heavy bass like this.
Yay
- Retro design
- Produces powerful bass
- Good battery life
Nay
- The charging indicator is hard to find
- Not so good high-frequency response
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