Cons — The Gravastar Mars Pro is expensive
– Heavy for portable use
– Mono output unless you buy two of them
– Bass distorts at very high SPL
– Too much sub-bass boost drowns out the mids
– Treble lacks definition and clarity

INTRODUCTION

Gravastar comes up with the craziest of designs that look unlike anything on the market. It’s TWS IEMs, the Sirius Pro, stood out in terms of overall aesthetics which is more of a “love it or hate it” affair. I personally find the Gravastar offerings to be unique in their design language, and hope that the brand keeps doing their own thing.

The Mars Pro is Gravastar’s flagship bluetooth speakers, coming in at a premium price-tag which pits it against some established Bluetooth bookshelf speakers. However, the Mars Pro has the same ace up its sleeve – the unique design language. Nobody who glanced at it for the first time could tell that it was a speaker, which tells a lot about the intention of such a product.

Gravastar Mars Pro not only intends to be a conversation starter, it also tries to be a competent speaker in the process. Does it hit the mark, or is it all skin-deep? Let’s find out.

Note: the ratings given will be subjective to the price tier. Dunu was kind enough to send me the Luna as part of the Review Tour (thanks Tom!)

Price, while reviewed: $330. Can be bought from Gravastar’s Official Website.

PHYSICAL THINGS AND USABILITY

PACKAGING AND ACCESSORIES

The package itself is quite a looker. Inside, you get the speaker itself, a type-C to type-C cable for charging, and another type-C + aux cable. More on the last bit in the build section.

BUILD QUALITY

Now, where to start…

The Gravastar Mars Pro looks like an alien trooper, for the lack of a better description. Depending on the edition, you can get weapons and shield on the side of the speaker (Shark 14 version) or a set of half-broken horns (Aurochs). Really, it’s one bizareness after another, but they all somehow mesh into the overarching theme.

Onto the more material side of things, the chassis is hand-painted zinc-alloy for the most part. The attention to detail here is extraordinary, and I can’t quite recall such a feat on a product that’s not marketed as artisan or boutique. There are subtle bumps and damage marks on the chassis that feel real to the touch.

At the bottom, three adjustable feet (with integrated LEDs) provide the balance and act as a base upon which the speaker stands. You can fold and unfold the legs to set the speakers in various angles. Unfortunately, the feet only have three adjustable positions, so maneuverability is a bit compromised. There are rubber nubs underneath the feet for better grip.

At the front of the unit there is the speaker grille, which also houses a bunch of LED strips. The conical driver dome is entirely encased by a metal cage, which also protects it against external damage. The bass port is one the back but it’s exposed, which is the only weak-link in this otherwise bullet-proof build.

At the bottom there’s a type-C port that also doubles as aux-in via the supplied type-C+aux cable. At the top, there are three buttons for operating the unit, and a touch-sensitive volume bar.

One thing that’s not apparent at all from the pictures is the sheer heft of the unit: it’s about 1.5 kgs. Yes, you read that right: 1.5 kgs of metal put in a shell that’s about 18 cm in diameter. This makes for a very dense and hefty speaker that’s on par in terms of weight with much larger speakers.

However, I’m not gonna dock points for this simply because Gravastar made the Mars Pro to have such heft by the material choice alone. Thus, the Mars Pro is the best built Bluetooth speaker I’ve ever laid my eyes or hands on, bar none.

GENERAL OPERATION

General operation is fairly simple. There are three buttons on the back of the device. The center buttons acts as power button, and is flanked by the LED control button and the Bluetooth pairing button.

Pressing the LED button cycles through the RGB colors, whereas long pressing the power button turns the unit on or off. There is also a touch sensitive volume control bar on top that is only activated during playback. I have made a short video to demo the entire thing so please have a look below:

DRIVER SETUP

The only driver description we get from Gravastar’s site is that it is a “full-range subwoofer”. The exposed bass reflector on the back is suspended by a flexible material to allow better low-end control.

TONALITY AND TECHNICALITIES

The sound is where I am a bit disappointed in the Mars Pro. Sure, it gets loud, and sounds surprisingly full for a single speaker, but it’s all in… mono. For stereo playback, you need two of them, which makes the total cost go over USD$500. Ouch!

Judging them as a sole unit, the lack in sub-bass rumble is immediately obvious. Even far higher tier floor-standing speakers fall short here, so nothing against Gravastar. However, they decided to boost the bass despite the physically limited driver. This results in distortion in bass-heavy tracks when the volume is pushed very high.

The mids are recessed, and highs even more so. The rolled-off highs help in reducing fatigue, but it also imparts a sense of muddiness and mushiness across the spectrum. Imaging, staging is out of the equation as, well, it’s a mono speaker by itself. I did not have a second unit to judge those factors.

Dynamics are again mushy, with sudden bass drops getting compressed into a puddle of bass. Crescendos lack the upper octaves because, well, rolled off treble.

I think I wouldn’t mind the sound of the Mars Pro on a $50-$100 bluetooth speaker. But these are three times the price at least, so based on sound quality alone – not a good value. The likes of Sony SRS-XG300 costs lower while having a more controlled sound that’s more balanced across the spectrum.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The Gravastar Mars Pro is one of the, if not the most unique Bluetooth portable speaker you can find around. It resonates with my geeky heart in terms of design and overall finish, and I have saved a spot for the Mars Pro on my table since getting the unit.

Unfortunately, too much attention was put into design and not a lot of it was spared for the sound. Given the asking price (which is magnified due to the unique chassis), one should and probably would expect better sound.

I hope Gravastar rethinks the tuning of the Mars Pro, lessens the bass a bit, and focuses on getting a more balanced sound across the spectrum rather than heavy, dense bass that clouds everything it touches.

The Gravastar Mars Pro only gets a recommendation if you need something to decorate your desktop or side-table and like the particular steam-punk aesthetics it is going for. If sound quality is the priority and nothing else – better look elsewhere.

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DISCLAIMER

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PHOTOGRAPHY

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The post Gravastar Mars Pro Bluetooth Speakers Review – Form over Function appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Additionally, Arylic also sent me a pair of their RK30 Satellite speakers, to be assessed with the A30+ of course. You can find them too on Arylic site, costing $149,00 on their own, or on Ali Express again.

At-a-glance Card

Features and description

Externals

A30+ is a small (13x8x3cm) and lightweight device. Its enclosure is metallic, and comes with an external 18V/4A non-audio-grade PS.

The front panel offers on the left side a quite big colored led light indicating the current selected input (more on this later). On the right side there’s the (invisible) IR receiver for the handheld “classic” battery operated remote control.

On the back panel instead we can find the connectors for 2 antennas (one for wifi one for BT), an RJ45 ethernet connector marked LAN, a USB-A female connector marked “USB”, a micro-USB female connector marked “micro-USB”, a 3.5mm audio connector marked “AUX”, a green block connector marked “SPEAKER” and the female barrel connector marked “DC 18V/4A”. As a complement, the back panel also includes a “RESET” button.

Internals

Arylic offers a quite wide range of wireless audio devices, both in form of ready-to-use turnkey (sub)systems like this A30+ I’m assessing, and in terms of DIY or at least macro-DIY components, basically populated PCB boards which one can more easily integrate into his/her own audio infrastructure project.

Inside the A30+ there’s a board which is also sold separately under the name “Up2Stream Amp V4“. Simply put, think to it as a SBC-class computer (e.g. a raspberry pi), coming with a certain kit of communication subdevices (the ethernet chip, usb chip, etc), and of course the audio related ones. The board is apparently competently engineered and realised, and most if not all the components involved are “customised” so it’s not easy to “recognise” standard chips on it.

One very important thing to note on the features side is that in spite of its tagline (“Wireless amplifier”) A30+ is not a mere amlifier but a DAC – AMP too, which if course scales its applicative flexibility up a lot!

Connectivity

From the hardware input standpoint, A30+ can connect to music sources in 4 main ways: ethernet (both wired and wireless), bluetooth and USB for digital input, and 3.5mm single ended cable for analog input.

Wired ethernet connectivity is 100base-T grade, via an RJ45 connector. Wireless ethernet connectivity is 2.4G only, quite stable indeed. USB connectivity is USB2-grade, and Bluetooth connectivity follows BT5.0 standards.

On the hardware output side, A30+ offers just one option: connective a pair of passive speakers. It supports both 4 and 8 ohm speakers. There is no preamp output, no s/pdif, no bt out option to connect onto active speakers.

In terms of control input, A30+ obviously does not offer any physical commands on its main chassis. The way for the operator to interacti with it is solely by accessing its sw by remote control.

A30+ offers 3 remote control “channels: 1) a physical “tv-style” battery operated remote control, intended to select inputs, setting volume and tonal control, and little else; it works, although the range is nothing to write home about 2) a web page published by the device’s internal firmware, and accessible by means of a normal browser from any active device (phone or pc) on the same logical network; I was totally unable to make this work – all my browsers on all platforms got stuck on the home page very likely due to some insecurity rejection; 3) an android App (called 4Stream, free to download) allowing full control of the system; the GUI is quite basic so is the UX, but it works solidly, and it’s therefore “the” way to use the A30+

Last but not least, by means of its sw A30+ can be configured as a part of a multi-point Arylic system – for example to obtain multi-room simultaneous playback, or multi-speaker rendering. This is set via the controlling App.

Sound inputs

Input capabilities are no doubt A30+’s strong point, both their number and their apparent reliability.

A30+ can be set up as a system to play music coming from a plethora of online musical streaming services including Tidal, TuneIN, Qobuz, Deezer, Amazon Music and others. No MQA support for Tidal though. No support for Apple Music.

To use any of such services you simply provide your service credentials once via the App. The trick is that the app calls the provider’s own authentication service, and once you log in there the A30+ gets authenticated as a remote device. The good thing is that your credentials don’t (or at least don’t seem to) ever be known let alone saved into the A30+ itself.

Apart for active accounts on the relevant services, prerequisite to this is obviously ethernet connectivity with internet access – no matter if wired or wireless of course. Also: once the configuration is done, the entire operation happens autonomously. You need a phone or a table with Arylic’s app to browse music and play it, but the same phone / tablet may well not have the original service’s own app installed, nor any other phone or pc is required to be linked to A30+ on the same network for this to work.

In addition to the above, A30+ offers DLNA / UPNP connectivity. This means that you can both use the 4Stream App to browse any DLNA-capable NAS or Media Server accessible on the same A30+ network and “pull” tracks in and play them as if they were resident on the A30+ itself, or you can use UPNP-capable applications on Windows (e.g. Foobar, or Musicbee or many others) or Android (e.g. BubbleUPNP) to “see” the A30+ as an eligible “music card”, basically as if it were an active speaker system connected to the same host device.

Intersting to note at this point: on its back panel A30+ carries a USB-A port allowing for the connection of a pen drive, or a hard disk. Once that’s done, the 4Stream App will be able to browse through the tracks saved on that drive and play them out. This to this as a way to avoid DLNA connectivity to a LAN-connected NAS, and just “plug the disk directly onto the player”.

To complete the ethernet picture, A30+ also offers AirPlay1 and Spotify Connect compatibility, together with QPlay which is however not useful outside China .

In terms of Bluetooth connectivity, A30+ makes it quite straightforward to pair a host – provided on remembers to switch to “Bluetooth” input from the 4Stream App in advance. Basically, when A30+ is set to one of the other modes, BT connectivity gets switched off. I found it out the hard way Supported BT protocols are SBC and AAC only. No APTX nor LDAC are offered.

As I guess you got at this point, A30+ is mainly thought as a small box you put someplace in your sitting room (or kitchen? or bathroom, why not!), just “visible” enough to facilitate wireless connectivity if need be. Once turned on it will act as a wireless gateway between mutiple digital music sources (a home nas, online services, and/or personal mobile devices) and the speakers. That said, A30+ offers some further wired connectivity options, too.

One is a micro-USB port, allowing for the connection to a wired host (a PC, Mac, Linux machine, or a DAP / Transport with USB-out capabilities). When connected this way, A30+ behaves as a “desktop DAC with integrated speaker AMP” – nothing more nothing less. To use it you need to switch over to “USB DAC” input on the 4Stream App, then control volume and tone as you wish.

The last connectivity option is the 3.5mm analog (Line) input. That’s to receive input from a preamp, or a DAC with single ended analog output, or the TV’s AUX OUT for example. Similarly to the above, when connected this way A30+ behaves as a “desktop speaker AMP”. As you guessed by now, to use it this way you need to switch over to “Line In” on the 4Stream App.

When A30+ receives digital input (which is pretty much always, with the sole exception of the analog Line In option) it processes the data with its internal DAC first, then amplifies it out on the speakers. The DAC accepts only PCM formats (FLAC/MP3/AAC/AAC+/ALAC/APE/WAV), no DSD is allowed. Maximum PCM resolution is 24bit / 192KHz, which is consistent with the maximum connectivity speeds allowed by A30+’s ethernet and usb interfaces.

Sound output

A30+ can exclusively output to passive speakers.

Either 4 or 8 ohm speakers are allowed. Of course on 4ohm speakers a double output power (35W max) will be deliverable compared to 8ohm speakers (18W max).

Sadly A30+ required passive interconnects to be screwed into a block-connector, so it was not straightforward to test A30+ with my existing Roth Oli RA1 speakers, which of course I did anyway by taking off the existing bananas from them.

RK30 Satellite speakers

These RK30 Satellite speakers impressed me very positively.

We’re talking about 8 ohm passive “satellite-class” speakers, which means by design their Frequency Response does not take bass and sub bass into account (specs indeed specify a 120 Hz minimum frequency). This should of course be imperatively considered when putting them to work. Taken alone, they can do a good job for “piped music” type airing, or for voice-centric applications as audio/video conferencing and such. For musical applications, they obviously need to be included in a wider system, at the very least a 2+1 one (being the “+1” a companion subwoofer of sort).

Neither the A30+ nor my current desktop speaker amp (an Allo Volt+) can directly manage a subwoofer, so my auditioning of the RK30 Satellites has been “surgical” in a sense. More on this below.

On the structural level, RK30 Satellites are well built. They can be wall-mounted and oriented by means of a turn-tilt base. Very interestingly, their housings are IP66-grade so they can bear rain and moderate watering – which means they can be installed in the garden or on the balcony too.

Sound

A30+

As reported above, A30+ is fundamentally a DAC/AMP offering a very wide range of digital input options.

When used in such capacity, in terms of “audiophile expectations” A30+ delivers very, very modest results. The DAC in particular offers just very basic performances: extension is limited at both ends, presentation is clearly mid centric and fundamentally dull, soundstage is intimate to be generous, and totally bidimensional (lacks depth and height); there is no significant layering / separation capability that I could spot.

Simply put: A30+ is a very nice flexible “low-fi” wireless renderer. Nothing less, but nothing more.

For completeness, the output quality situation gets a bit better when I test the A30+ as a mere AMP, i.e. by pairing its Line In port with one of my existing DACs. In this case A30+ is by far not the best 130$ amp I auditioned, but believe me not the absolute worst either. I am ready to bet, for example, that by simply swapping the IT-grade power supply coming within the package with an at least entry-level Audio-grade PS clarity and dynamic range would furtherly go significantly up.

RK30 Satellite speakers

As I previously already mentioned, RK30 are Satellite speakers not offering (by design) a full frequency range coverage: low-mid-bass and sub-bass are totally absent. What is not supposed to be there in the first place cannot be called “bad” of course.

When auditioned for what the offert, RK30 are actually quite nice inexpensive speakers. Considering what I reported above regarding A30+’s modest sound reconstruction quality, I mainly tested these RK30 with my Allo Volt+ and I must say they do not leave tooooo much to desire on the mid and treble ranges when compared with my Roth Oli RA1. Mid range in particular is quite sweet, with good body and clarity.

Specifications recap

A30+

RK30 Satellite speakers

Considerations & conclusions

From a nice little device like the A30+ offering such a well designed and working (!) host of different input options costing well less than 150$ one cannot reasonably expect top sound performances, and this is indeed the reality.

Very simply put, A30+ should not be scored within the audiophile-grade devices market, as that would be quite unfair to begin with. Taken as a non-audiophile-grade device (a “low-fi” wireless dac/amp, if you wish), A30+ is a very nice electronic gadget helping anyone to obtain pleasing sound output easily, coming from an impressive host of different possible sources.

Arylic RK30 Satellite speakers are within their category even better than A30+: when properly integrated with a good subwoofer companion in a 2+1 or 4+1 configuration than can surely offer some good sound quality for a modest budget.

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The post Arylic A30+ Network Amplifier And RK30 Satellite Speakers Review – Nice Low-Fi appeared first on Music For The Masses.

So, of course, Gravastar decided to one-up on that with the Mars Pro Bluetooth speakers. These look less like speakers and more like a miniature report straight from a dystopian future.

The attention to detail is exceptional. The zinc alloy shell (which weigh a lot, but feel that much nicer in hand) is hand-painted. The version I received for review is the “war damaged yellow” which also has literal scratches on top of the shell. It’s all very convincing and for once I am enamored by the design of a bluetooth speaker.

Full review is in the works. Meanwhile, enjoy these photos I took.

Specifications: Gravastar Mars Pro

Images

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