Wavemaster Base 2.0 Stereo active speakers in review - Small, affordable and a (not only) optical déjà-vu with Bluetooth | Page 2

Teardown and components

No test without a slaughter, that's a point of honour. And so I quickly removed the four screws on the backside and took out the plate, which also serves as cover, mounting field for the connectors and as carrier for the mainboard. The body shows no defects in terms of workmanship, even on the inside, only the gap dimensions of the planking need some practice. The cables are neatly attached and fixed with hot glue on the board side.

Besides the rather average Bluetooth module, the motherboard (Shenzhen Yinghaixingye Electronic Co Ltd) has an AD52580 from Elite Semiconductor Memory Technology Inc. (ESMT) as the actual heart of the whole circuit. This chip implements a filter-free Class D stereo amplifier with up to 87% efficiency that does not even require cooling at output powers of up to 20 watts RMS per channel into 8 ohms. The power supply placed in the depths of the box delivers exactly the right amount of voltage to the power amp, so that the Wavemaster Wave can deliver a clean 15 watts per channel to the 8 ohms. The rest of the circuit board is self-explanatory.

The control panel including the circuit board (also Shenzhen Yinghaixingye Electronic Co Ltd) carries the rest of the circuit and you don't save with hot glue. The headphone jack with its switch completes the control orgy.

One more word about the crossover for the high frequencies: here Edifier greets again. Because instead of using a real crossover, you simply keep the bass away from the tweeter chassis by means of a simple longitudinal capacitor. This is disadvantageous in so far as the high frequencies continue to run parallel across the midrange/bass driver and the impedance is shifted downwards due to the parallel connection of both drivers. This compensates almost completely for the drop in height, but also somewhat reduces the possible overall level.

Fine, we are in the 70 euro price range here, you can turn a blind eye to that. Apart from that, the inner workings have been implemented in the best possible way and more is simply not possible for this price point. This must be accepted and also taken into account in the evaluation.