Hands-on Review: Mint 220 Digital Music Station

If you're an iPod user, you've probably noticed iPod docks are a dime a dozen. Once in awhile, an iPod dock comes along that go above and beyond the call of duty. The dock we're talking about is the Mint 220 Digital Music Station, a dock and wireless speaker system all in one. Before we start the review, let's look at the features list:

The Mint 220 Digital Music Station offers the highest fidelity digital audio, using Texas Instruments' PurePath Digital audio amplification for optimal performance.
Wireless 2.4GHz lossless audio streaming from your Mac or PC with the included Mint USB Wireless Transmitter
Mint's Di-Fi™ digital-sound is delivered from your PC or Mac wirelessly, with no loss of fidelity, up to 45 feet or 15 meters
Careful craftsmanship, acoustic engineering and sealed enclosure design offer precise audio usually found only in much pricier systems
Two 3.5" full-range Peerless® transducers for big speaker sound and compact, mini-speaker versatility.

Let's move on to the unboxing of the device.

You'll notice the standard everyday boxing of the Mint 220:

One thing you notice after the unboxing is how few hardware items there actually are:

Here's a close up of the Mint 220. The device is a a small unit with a nice glossy black finish that looks really good on any counter or desktop:

To connect the Mint 220 with your PC, you use the enclosed 2.4GHZzUSB dongle.

Now that've seen some of the images of the device, let's talk about the Mint 220 some more. Remember how we mentioned a little earlier how the Mint 220 comes with very little hardware. That has a lot to do with how simple this device is to hook up. Let me tell you exactly what we did to get the Mint 220 going. Without reading the manual, we took the USB dongle and plugged it into a laptop. We then double-clicked a music file on the laptop and instantly sound was wirelessly streaming over the device. There was no cds to insall, no sound device to configure. It just worked! The sound quality was good and the volume went pretty high. At the highest end, there was slight distortion but overall we were happy with the sound quality.

Let's go back to the setup for a second. After we had the wireless speaker system going , we went to the device settings in Windows and looked for the audio devices setup. The Mint 220 automatically sets the device as the audio device for you. As we said before the ease of setup doesn't get any better than this.

The Mint 220 is supposed to have a wireless range of 45 feet but that estimate was liberal in our test. After about 25 feet we started to lose our connection. Also the device needs pretty much a line of site to between the PC and the speakers to keep a strong signal. We also easily hooked up an Ipod to test the device and it worked well as we expected.

Overall Thoughts

The Mint 220 is a great device and is one of the easiest devices we've ever set up. Probably the biggest drawback of the Mint 220 is the fact is that it's can't be battery powered, the device is strictly ac powered. The best use for the Mint 220 is to stream music from a PC in an adjacent room since the range is limited.

At a $179 MSRP, this would be a good device to have if you like your music mobile throughout your house. Since the Mint 220 is so easy to set up, it's pretty easy to move to multiple PCs throughout the house. So if you're looking for a good audio device for someone that may be a fan of PC music without the complicated setup, the Mint 220 may be the answer.

Mint 220 Product Page

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Posted by William Hungerford at August 13, 2008 8:28 AM