Features and Design

The Strata Mini’s are big. If you’re into those little cube speakers, then stop reading right now and go visit your local Bose outlet, because the Strata Mini’s aren’t small. Believe it or not this is actually one of their mid-sized offerings. They have plenty of bigger speakers, and plenty of smaller ones too.

The speakers are finished in a pretty “South American Rosewood” with a satin sheen, and capped, at the top, with a glossy black “crown”. The rear portion of the speaker that houses the subwoofer and amplifier is finished in a satin black, smooth vinyl material. The variation between finishes and colors seemed a little distracting to our eyes. We could have gone with one less color/finish component.

The speaker cabinet has a slight tilt-back that phase-aligns the bass, mid, and tweeter drivers. It’s debatable how much of a difference this makes in a casual living room listening environment. But this is a feature typically only found on extremely pricey speakers so we’re not complaining. The driver array is also unique for this price point. A planar magnetic tweeter and midrange are in place to provide an airy, crisp, detailed tone that is extremely articulate at any volume level. Planar magnetic speakers are known for their high frequency output (higher than standard tweeters). But they lack low end response. So accompanying the array is a 5.25” mid-bass driver that handles the lower mid bass spectrum before the powered 8” sub takes over. The sub is powered by a built-in class A/B amp with 350 watts of power. It comes with the typical adjustment controls: Variable crossover, gain, and phase. The Strata’s stated frequency response is 27Hz to 35KHz.

Setup and Use

Setup with these speakers is a bit more complicated than most because of the built-in active sub and the way AV123 designed it. On most powered tower speaker offerings, the speaker inputs are internally bridged over to the sub amp. But on the Strata’s, that’s not the case. The sub’s amp is not directly connected to the main high level inputs on the speaker. AV123 says this gives you more freedom in that it gives you the ability to wire up your powered sub direct to your receiver or main amp, which may be preferred by some audiophiles. For those that just want the thing to work, there’s a set of “jumper cables” included with the speakers to make the connection between the main speaker input and the sub amp inputs. But figuring out how to properly connect the jumper cables was a bear. So we referred to the owner’s manual for help. Unfortunately the manual, filled with jargon and poor diagrams, didn’t clear things up for us. We’d recommend instead jumping online to the AV123 site to get the nitty gritty on setup from other folks in their online forum, or just calling up an AV123 support representative.

Besides the poor manual, another oversight (in our opinion) is that there’s no auto on/off sensor on the sub amp. So when the sub amp is turned on, it stays on, even when you’re not listening to anything. A negative point for energy conscious consumers, but not a big enough “turn off” for us considering the way these speakers sound.

The speakers were set up in a listening room that was about 10 x 15 with a 9 foot ceiling. They were powered with an Onkyo TX-SR797 receiver. Source material was played through both a Toshiba HD-A2 DVD player and Apple TV (connected to iTunes). Cobalt’s Ultimate Speaker cables were used.