Review on 🔊 Enhance Your Home Theater Experience with the 180W Sunbuck AS-25BU Wireless Bluetooth Stereo Amplifier - Enjoy Dual Channel Sound Power, USB, SD Card, FM Radio, and Remote Control! by Jason Vigen

Some background knowledge. During the day I work as a freelance engineer and mostly from home. I did a great job for a famous hi-fi audio company and they sent me some really high quality audio gear to keep and they also taught me to list the good and the bad. in speakers/electronics and how to encase a room to avoid awkward frequency reflections. So I have an incredibly high quality sound system in my home office, and I know I'm not an expert or a lifelong audiophile, but I know good sound when I hear it. These days, with adulthood, COVID and all, due to the stress and stupid stupidity of life, I've turned to mountain biking to (help) maintain my sanity. I spend a lot of time tending to my bike and have decided to convert my windowed patio (which used to be an off-season outdoor storage) into a bike shop. I wanted the music to sound better than a small Bluetooth speaker could deliver, but the space is small and the focus is on handling two bikes at once (since friends often drop by to do bike maintenance), so I didn't want to mess around getting a big one, a full featured receiver and taking up the space with big floorstanding speakers etc. After some searching on Amazon I found this little receiver and this is where this review will be really relevant to you. So for the price I was guessing it would be cheaply built with a bad rumble, too quiet and wouldn't last. But for now, that'll do the job, right? Well, I'm happy to report that I got it wrong on the first two. Can't comment on durability yet, but will update this post after experimenting with it a bit. The assembly is good, the metal case is more than adequate for home use. The buttons are a little clunky, but in general there is nothing to complain about, everything works. You just have to give it a few seconds when it says, for example, "switch to Bluetooth" over the speaker before you actually switch. I plugged it into two ports, 4 ohms, 45-25kHz flat frequency response from 100w reference bookshelf speakers I built for a client and hung them in the top corner of the room, pointing down to the Show center of room (not the best idea). sound quality wise lol), connected it to my phone's BT and stood back to listen. Now my real speakers are already cracking, so keep in mind that bass response depends not only on the speaker itself, but also on the condition of the speaker. When you plug in brand new speakers, it takes a while for the bass to open up and the mids are likely to be muddy and far away at first. In any case, it connected perfectly to my phone right away, I turned on Linkin Park from a 320kbps source, went to what I thought was the best point and, dammit, turned it on. I will say that this receiver adds no more hum or noise than any other Bluetooth speaker, confirming its 0.2% THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) claim. I can hear it clearly even on an air conditioned power line, but that's acceptable given the price and small size. I left the bass and treble in the middle and I would say that with the exception of all the reflections from all the glass in the room it produced more or less music without much coloration. Bass wasn't overbearing or muddy, treble was still a bit crisp (at least as crisp as Bluetooth can be) and mids sounded mostly believable (again, as good as Bluetooth can be. The technology has its limitations nonetheless). After switching to patch cords, the dynamic sound of the speakers was similar to that when connected to a better, larger hi-fi receiver, albeit a little flatter. This is difficult to quantify due to the room acoustics. A receiver should be able to do that! If you feel like you need improvement, your source just isn't good enough. This amplifies the original signal quite well without distortion. Given the room I was in I reduced the treble a little and boosted the bass a little and I think I'm getting a really great sound because the setup is so simple and inexpensive. I get more than enough apparent amplitude (perceived loudness when it reaches my ears) from the device on my speakers to fill 150 square feet with a 10-foot ceiling. This will vary depending on your speakers. For reference, my speaker volume was 92.6dB/1W at 1m. I doubt it could actually deliver the claimed 180W (a quick connection to my O-silly scope suggests @4 ohms, I have a 40 W/RMS channel and I've seen a peak of around 60 on one channel, 75 on the other) but at around 50% it's loud enough to annoy my wife around the house so I'm more than happy . FM and USB playback also work, and the line-in sounds clearer than Bluetooth. The remote works too, so the functionality is fully appreciated by this engineer, although I haven't tried the SD card. So, in terms of my backstory, based on my experience, is this a true HiFi amp? Spring. no THD over 2% is easily audible even for the layman, so this is an issue (this was true whether I was using BT, my cheap Amazon patch cord and phone, or a stupidly expensive patch cord connected to my dedicated 24-bit DAC is connected). . music player that I usually have in my office). Is the soundstage realistic and can the artist sound like the artist is performing in the room with you? Eh, about the same as in the car. Another issue is that one channel is slightly louder than the other due to the use of cheaper materials/manufacturing techniques. However, unless you use this for near-field applications, you will never hear any difference between the channels. Can it replace a really good, full-size, multi-hundred-dollar receiver with an APT-X or fiber optic input? nope Will you ever get a real $40 hi-fi setup in such a tiny footprint? nope The sheer cost of the fancy materials needed to make the hi-fi circuitry would have prevented this and also required a much larger footprint, if only for cooling. I would be very careful using it with a turntable as it doesn't have an input for a phono stage so you might miss frequencies that a phono stage would normally pick up. But if you have a standard preamp line out from an average turntable I'd say you're probably fine. If you want mind-blowing bass (no judgment if the answer is yes), you 100% need a powerful subwoofer with line inputs, as the power of this tiny package can't drive a big, heavy speaker cone hard enough. This is a physics limitation, not this receiver's fault. Only downside is that the device doesn't have a shuffle button for USB playback, at least that's not what I understood. This is a minor issue considering how most people will be using it over Bluetooth as the phone is obviously in control of this aspect. So if you have reasonable expectations and use it in the right space, this is a cove-uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu what you get for $40 is truly amazing. I would recommend it to a friend if they use it under the right circumstances.