Edifier D12 Review

The Edifier D12 is a speaker for your home or office, featuring Bluetooth and wired connectivity, stereo sound and a line-out port for expandability all packed into a sleek and pleasant design that fits right into a home environment. At the time of this review, the speaker currently retails for £99.

Video Review

Design

Edifier D12

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The design of the Edifier D12 looks great and would fit in well to a home or office environment without sticking out thanks to its black and wooden look, combining a modern and traditional speaker design into a relatively compact form-factor. The black top of the speaker has a faux-leather texture to it and the sides are a laminated wooden print, it’s quite nice to have a speaker that has some texture to it both visually and physically rather than a solid matte box.

The front of the speaker is home to the two woofers and tweeters, giving the speaker a stereo sound output – the bass ports for the woofers are also on the front side. These drivers are covered behind a fabric speaker grille to protect them, but this can be removed if you wish to show off the speaker drivers. The grille looks nice and sleek, it has a small Edifier logo, which is the only visible branding, and a silver line across the middle.

For controlling the speaker, an infrared remote can be used to control the speakers from a distance, but there are also hardware controls on the top of the speaker. There are three dials on the top, a volume control/input selector dial which can also be used to power on and off the speaker as well as a bass and treble dial for adjusting the EQ of the speaker so you can get the sound you want.

Additionally, the remote has a selection of handy buttons, such as buttons for switching between movie and music sound modes as well as a quick mute button. The remote itself is a very glossy black plastic, which I’m not a fan of as it feels cheap and gets covered in fingerprints and scratches incredibly easily – a matte black remote would certainly be nicer for long-term use.

The rear side of the speaker is where all the physical connectivity is, there’s an AUX input and RCA input. As this speaker has a movie mode, it would’ve also been nice to have an optical input, but unfortunately, this speaker only has those two inputs – maybe this could be added in a future version. Additionally, the speaker also has a line out, this can be used to connect a subwoofer to the speaker or some satellite speakers – it’s great to see that there’s room for expansion with this speaker.

 The power cable for the speaker is not removable and is affixed into the back of the speaker, I think it would’ve been more convenient to have this removable as it allows for the speaker to be more easily transported and would also allow for a longer cable if needed.

Overall, the design of the speaker is quite nice. It’s sleek and modern but the wooden sides add a more traditional element that helps it fit in a range of environments.

Sound Quality

For the form-factor and price, the Edifier D12 provides an enjoyable listening experience. The speaker has a fairly flat and neutral sound out of the box, which some people may like for a more accurate listening experience, but thanks to the EQ dials on the top of the speaker I was able to adjust the sound to be a little more energetic and punchier, which I personally prefer especially for electronic and dance music which are the main two genres I listen to. For me, the dials ended up at around +4 for bass and +2 for treble.

The speaker unit features two 4-inch woofers for bass and two 19mm silk dome tweeters for the high-end, these four drivers paired with the 70W total power output provides a fantastic room-filling listening experience. The bass is present and able to get deep and the treble is clear with a frequency response of 54Hz-20KHz. The speaker can provide stereo sound, although you will probably not get the full benefit of this unless you are sitting directly in front of the speaker unit as all the drivers face directly forwards and are fairly close together.

As mentioned earlier during the review, the speakers also feature two modes – a music mode and a movie mode. By default, the speaker runs in music mode but can be switched to movie mode using the remote. The difference between the two modes is quite significant, in movie mode, the bass becomes much deeper and prominent in comparison to the more neutral sound of the music mode. I did notice some distortion in the low-end within movie mode, this doesn’t seem to be irregular, and Edifier even highlights this within the user manual for the speakers.

Overall, the sound from the speaker is good, it’s clean and well pronounced and works well for a range of different genres. The EQ dials on the top are a welcome feature to be able to tune the speaker specifically to my liking.

Features and Accessories

As one of Edifier’s more affordable speakers, the D12 isn’t as packed with as many features as some of their other products. The D12 features Bluetooth 5.0 wireless connectivity, so you don’t need to have any additional cables plugged into the speaker to play some music.

Edifier also includes all the extra cables you’d need, in the box, to get up and running. There’s a 3.5mm to RCA and RCA to RCA audio cable included so you can start using the speaker straight away and, of course, the infrared remote I mentioned earlier during the review.

Conclusion

The Edifier D12 speaker is a well-rounded speaker for your home or office that provides good sound for the money in a pleasant and unobtrusive form factor. Being able to customise the EQ from the speaker is great and, although it would be nice to have a few more input options, it offers a couple of different connectivity methods and potential expansion to a subwoofer or satellite speaker with the line out port.

The Edifier D12 speaker is available to purchase on Amazon.