Polk Magnifi Mini Soundbar Review – Big Noise, Small Box

Use

Polk managed to pack a bunch of functionality into the tiny box set it wants to sit under your television. Some of it works like a charm, and other aspects could use a little work.

My favorite aspect might be the VoiceAdjust control offered by the system. If you’re attached to your 5.1 setup, you might call this “turning up the center channel,” but that’s technical enough to put off grandma, dad, or a friend who is hard of hearing.

That latter person is someone in my life. One of my friends loves movies, but has a hard time picking out dialogue from the other audio in movies. She loves disaster movies, so the problem is doubled up. Normally, we watch movies with subtitles. I invited her over to watch one of my favorites, Pacific Rim, in glorious 4K. While her infant giggled and squealed every time a giant kaiju was tearing up the city (what the heck, kid?), she was able to watch the movie without subtitles at the bottom of the screen, and all it took was pressing “up” on the voice-adjust control.

That in itself, in her eyes, makes the Magnifi Mini worthy of strong consideration.

On top of that, the bar offers Bluetooth and Google Home connectivity for wireless music streaming, bringing the total possible ways to connect to this tiny thing up to five. That Google Home connectivity also plugs the system into your home network and allows it to get updates over the air. Early iterations of the Magnifi Mini reportedly got warm during use, but a later update allowed the system to put the unused hardware to sleep, bringing the temperature and power consumption down, so it seems like Polk is making use of that connectivity to make meaningful improvements to the product.

There are a few oddities worth mentioning, though. HDMI ARC, which turns one of your HDMI ports into an audio and data channel, is intended to make using the soundbar simple by letting your TV tell it to turn on and off and to pass the volume adjustments over the HDMI cable to that device, leaving you with one remote for your whole setup. When it works, it’s awesome. Smart TVs have attractive interfaces, and seeing the volume indicator pop up on my screen after years of using a dedicated device was fun. Everything just works, right?

Well, not exactly.

I’d say that about one out of five times, the Magnifi Mini just wouldn’t turn on, and the TV, now set to auto-detect its audio outlet, would just use the TV’s onboard speakers. Ew. I had to grab The Magnifi’s dedicated remote and hit the on switch to force them to start communicating again. If you’re using a universal remote, you may be able to dedicate a button to toggle the device’s power, or set a step in the power-on process to make sure the thing turns on, but it’s frustrating to have this happen so frequently.

Further, if you’re a gamer and plug in a headset frequently, you may find the speaker turning off due to inactivity and then not resuming automatically when you unplug your headset to go back to regular use.

If you really dig the VoiceAdjust feature, using your TV’s remote may be unappealing as well, and it may become difficult to disconnect from that included remote, nullifying the benefit of HDMI ARC in the process.

Speaking of the remote, it has all the functions you’d want in a remote like this, but the layout isn’t great. Instead of discrete buttons, everything is buried under a membrane of soft-touch rubber. If the lights are on, it’s pretty easy to switch between inputs and audio profiles, but in the dark they’re bumps. Worse is that the volume is the central vertical column on the remote, set in as a concave area meant to make it easy to find. Instead, though, I found myself more likely to hit the raised VoiceAdjust and Bass controls on either side. The audio control buttons are raised, as well, and right below these. While they’re unique shapes, though, it’s hard to differentiate them in the dark and I found myself occasionally mistaking “Play” for “Volume Down.” The remote also requires a painfully direct line of sight to manipulate the bar’s settings.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/reviews/polk-magnifi-mini-soundbar-review/