It’s sometimes very hard to review a pair of low-end speakers. Weighing functionality against audio fidelity is an almost impossible task. And yet that’s what we’re having to do with the Parrot DS1120s.
On the one hand you’ve got a pair of speakers that barely scrape together 30W of power between them. On the other, you’ve got the convenience of being able to synchronize them with any Bluetooth media player in order to playback music. It’s a hard call to make.
So let’s get this out of the way right off the bat - the Parrot DS1120 speakers don’t sound great. If you’re used to a 500W hi-fi set-up in your living room, these are going to sound absolutely terrible. However, it’s all relative. And so if you’re more used to the small speakers on your digital radio or the stereo in the kitchen, these will sound pretty cool.
Swings and roundabouts
So now we’ve got that cleared up, we can move on to the DS1120’s main functionality – Bluetooth streaming. You can pair them with your phone, or your PC or even your MP3 player as long as it’s got built-in Bluetooth connectivity.
And as you’d expect from a Parrot product, it works pretty well, too. To test we used a Sony Ericsson K850i mobile phone. We tapped the Bluetooth button on the side of one of the speakers, and then ran a search on the phone, and the Parrot speakers appeared immediately. A quick tap of the ‘pair’ button later and the devices were all synched up and ready to go.
From then on, any music played on the phone is streamed directly to the speakers. And considering the small size and the low-power of the speakers, they don’t sound too bad. It’s all squashed into the midrange, there’s not much bass and the high-range cymbals are severely blunted, but in general the audio is clear and undistorted at low volumes.
Freedom of movement
One of the cool things about these speakers is that they aren’t tied together. You can plug them into different power sockets at different ends of the room and yet they’ll still synch up with each other and your device. That way you can create a bigger soundstage than your radio ever could.
