Nagase's Full Review: Merkury Innovations MI-SP100 -- Portable iPod®...
Merkury MI-SP101/MI-SP100
Quite frankly, these are one of the worst purchases I've ever made.
I found these speakers at a discount store, and because they looked so cute, I got them, and rather cheaply too. These miniature speakers come in all sorts of colors: White, black, teal, pink, purple. Mine was the black version. The glossy plastic and rounded style, with these "feet" planted around the speaker, make for a sleek, fun design. These are advertised as suitable for iPods, MP3 players, laptops, etc. It uses a regular 3.5mm audio jack, so it will plug into just anything. One of the features that caught my eye is that it does not require batteries; rather, it draws power from the audio source directly.
Performance
The sound is simply horrible. It's tinny, flat, no bass at all. It really sounds monophonic, despite there being two speakers. To make things worse, the volume is much too low on these speakers (there is no separate volume adjust control); even when I crank my MP3 player up to full volume, the music is still barely audible. For instance, if I have a bathroom sink faucet running, and the speakers at full volume, I still have a hard time hearing the music.
To make a comparison, these Merkury speakers sound worse in quality and lower in volume than my laptop (a current model Toshiba Satellite); the Toshiba actually has a fuller, richer, and louder sound. Admittedly, if plugged into my laptop, these speakers can have the volume raised high enough to be heard clearly; however, this seems a futile gesture when the original built-in speakers on the laptop sound better anyway. Compared to my Sony Ericsson W800 phone, with a built-in mono loudspeaker, the phone is actually still able to achieve higher volumes than when plugged into these speakers.
The Bottom Line
These really are completely worthless, as far as useless products go. In addition to not producing good quality sound, they also do not provide enough volume to be heard. I ended up paying only $8 for these, so it's not a big issue. However, these are sold online for twice that amount. Honestly, I would not use these even if I got them for free. The only good thing about them is the cute design... but what good is that if they are only going to gather dust on a shelf?
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.