The Bose SoundLink Mini II is showing its age with its average battery life and lack of features like NFC and waterproofing. The Bose SoundLink Mini II is showing its age with its average battery life and lack of features like NFC and waterproofing. While the lack of features may turn off some buyers, it would be a mistake to write off the SoundLink Mini II entirely because it remains one of the best sounding wireless speakers on the market.
On the left side of the speaker you’ll find the microUSB charging port and a 3.5mm headphone jack for using legacy devices.
Although light on features, the Bose SoundLink MIni II remains one of the best-sounding wireless speakers we’ve ever heard. While most compact wireless speakers struggle to output bass, the SoundLink Mini II has it in spades while still maintaining a lovely balanced sound.
The similarly sized Razer Leviathan Mini sounded wooden compared to the Bose and failed to retrieve as many micro details. We’re also impressed by the speaker’s ability to retrieve details like a musician’s breath and the clinking of glasses from the audience in live jazz tracks.
This diminutive speaker punches way above what its size would suggest, producing deep bass, sparkling highs and a lush midrange. If you want more features and are willing to trade off some sound quality, the water resistant Bose SoundLink Color II is a great choice.
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Bose Soundlink Mini 2 SE. A Great Speaker Updated.
This makes finding replacement parts down the line very difficult, but the speaker sells for $150US. I’m not purchasing diamond coated XLR cables kissed by the Pope or anything, but I do have standards.
They’re not amazing, but they’re a few cuts above what you’ll find near the front of your local big box retailer.
For others, the speaker appears to be a very long inverted trapezoid with very steep sides and slightly convex top and bottom surfaces when viewed from the front.
That front is dominated by a dark grill with a small rubber gasket surrounding it. If you squeeze the grills, they’ll flex a bit, but you can pick this thing up, and it won’t have a problem.
The top features the product logo and 5 rubber buttons that are all easy to feel out. The right side of the Mini features the USB type C charging port and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The bottom is dominated by a rubber pad that grips the surface it rests on and prevents the thing from rattling.
In typical Costco fashion, the speaker is only offered in black, and the real box was locked away in a plastic clamshell sealed shut with a comically gargantuan cardboard surround. The Mini ships with a partial charge, but you’ll need to plug it into power in order to activate the unit. Don’t worry, I’m not here to rag on how Bose is a stupid company and all of its customers are sheep, or whatever most audiophiles do.
This is thanks in part to the dual passive radiators; this is a feature common to many portable speakers nowadays. That means Human voices will sound rich and full, guitars and pianos will sparkle, and you’ll get the impression of a much bigger speaker. Music and voices sound good for the size, though the latter tends to be a little boomy, and watching a video with both will really show the weaknesses of the speaker. Background music can get lost, and people with particularly deep voices or a lot of chest resonance can be a little uncomfortable. Even if I didn’t the fact that this thing has actual honest-to-goodness accessibility baked in is enough of a selling point. I didn’t know speakers could even have such a thing, but here is Bose giving us voice prompts for identifying devices, callers, and the battery level.
Talkback users won’t encounter issues unless they connect multiple devices, and Windows users… well, I’ll get to that in the next section. It called my friend’s OnePlus 8t “pecan” instead of “beacon”, and it doesn’t handle names with all caps gracefully either.
Using this device on iOS with Voiceover is fine, but connect it to a Windows machine running NVDA, and be prepared to very quickly disconnect it. It’ll be no surprise that it handles high speed speech synthesis about as well as a bald eagle piloting a blimp. While it was still subject to silence from Talkback if another device was playing through the Mini (it didn’t stick to the phone like on iOS), there was no speech clipping at all. One quirk that is mildly annoying is the fact that the SoundLink gives no audible indication that it turned off.
Here’s a tip for you; hold the Bluetooth button down for 10 seconds to clear the pairing list. The Bose SoundLink Mini 2 Se has proven to be an excellent speaker with stellar build quality, good sound, excellent battery life, actual proper accessibility, and a beautiful design. It takes the fantastic design of the SoundLink Mini 2 and brings it up to modern spec.
Bose SoundLink Mini II review
Our review product is a smart two-tone grey – though we think the black alternative is equally slick and covers are available if you fancy something more jazzy. External features are kept to a minimum; there are the usual buttons for power, pairing (you can link two devices at a time and switch between them) and volume. There’s also an almost incognito pair of jacks on the side for USB charging (ten hours maximum claimed life) and auxiliary input.
Both nylon-string acoustic guitar and vocal are exceedingly rich, offering the warmth of a winter’s night by an open fire.
What the SoundLink Mini II does well – adding greater stability and richness to the mid and treble frequencies in acoustic tracks – is immediately undermined by the fact it loses all that as soon as you add a bass guitar or similar. If not, we’d suggest you compromise on price, size or frequency range, but not overall sonic capability and take a look at the Bose’s closest rivals, such as the Ausio Pro Adddon T3 or the JBL Xtreme.
Bose SoundLink Mini 2 review: A sound all-rounder now a tad cheaper
UPDATE: Since our original review, which was based on the £150 price tag, the Bose SoundLink Mini 2 can now be found for £130 – making it a more tempting offer for those who love a good-looking, powerful sounding Bluetooth speaker. That’s no bad thing, though, as the first SoundLink Mini had superb build quality, which returns here, and was a brilliant premium Bluetooth speaker. That holds true for its successor, too, as its aluminium finish remains as sleek and robust as ever, and provides a fine set-piece to add to your living room.
I wouldn’t recommend taking it outside, though, as it’s not ruggedised in any way whatsoever, so you’re likely to end up scratching the outer casing if you show a lack of care.
Nevertheless, at 670g, you’ll happily move it room-to-room and it could accompany you on trips if you aren’t too fussy about the weight of your luggage. An improvement over the original SoundLink Mini is that the DC jack has been swapped out for a more ubiquitous micro USB connection.
Battery life has improved over the original and is rated at around 10 hours of medium volume listening, which felt about right. Inside the SoundLink Mini 2 is a two speaker array with a passive bass radiator to flesh out the low range.
This is due in part to some digital signal processing that helps to bring out much of the detail and increase the perceived separation between the different sound frequencies.
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