Cambridge Audio Minx Go review

Cambridge Audio has built a reputation for producing good quality audio kit that costs less than similar gear from its rivals. Indeed, the Minx Go portable Bluetooth speaker is fairly cheap for its size and specification. It’s chunkier than most portable speakers, so is really designed to be used around the house, but is still small enough to slide into a backpack or shoulder bag.

The speaker has just three buttons: up and down volume and a power button. To start Bluetooth pairing, you double-press the Minx Go’s power button. There’s a 3.5mm stereo input on the back of the speaker, just above the power connector and below a USB port. The USB port is for charging a mobile device rather than playing back audio.

The Minx Go only supports the SBC audio codec, rather than the less lossy aptX standard, but we didn’t perceive differences in audio quality whether we played music via Bluetooth or the 3.5mm input.

The speaker has a bass port, which gives electronic tracks and synth-heavy pop substantial presence, and we were impressed with the wide, spacious sound emanating from the compact speaker. Rock tracks filled the room with pulsing bass and balanced mid-range, providing clean vocals with a very natural tone and timbre. Even busy tracks with harsh vocals sounded good, but we couldn’t discern some details, such as the reverberating slap of drum skins. The only flaw we noticed was a slightly harsh resonant edge affecting the upper mid-range, which produced slight distortion that was audible when listening closely to some acoustic tracks.

Despite this, the Minx Go is a very good speaker. It puts out a surprising amount of volume without distorting, although it does start to boom as you approach maximum volume. At mid to lower volumes it has decent bass levels for a 2.0 system and produces a spacious sound that’s easy on the ears during even extended listening sessions. Better yet, the Minx Go proved to have an impressive battery life of 20 hours and 48 minutes in our test, which we carried out at a volume that comfortably filled our testing room.

The Go has excellent battery life, is a lot cheaper than many rivals and sounds as good if not better than almost all of them. When we first reviewed it, we gave the Minx Go a Budget Buy award, but its performance in comparative tests against other speakers has earned it an upgrade – this speaker may be no-frills compared to some more expensive rivals, but its sound quality is uncompromised despite its low price.