Cheap so unlike LAiV's stylish form factor and finishing were Beat's umbilicals compared to the locking kind a small surcharge got me with my $398 2x15V/3.5A LHY LPS-80 Dual which still brought it in for slightly less. True, it's popular to claim that power cords beyond generics don't matter. Will someone upgrading from a wall wart to a $494 linear power supply think so? If not, they could feel the need to hit up Audiophonics for some gussied-up DC cables. A 115/230V belly slider makes Beat an easy globetrotter without a voltage-conversion trip back to China. One size fits all. To size up what ear bliss it packed, Beat hoofed it up the stairs to where its stablemate Crescendo Chorus monos live.
As an inverted nearfield setup without xover from 120Hz-15kHz or energy-absorptive spiders on its isobaric Markaudio Alpair widebanders, this point-source rig plays at very high immediacy and time coherence. Usually its Shanling EM5 source serves not just as 1TB microSD transport but DAC/preamp. For these sessions I switched to fixed output and inserted the Audalytic as balanced preamp and headphone driver. As usual, this fed a Lifesaver Audio Gradient Box II active analogue crossover to route >120Hz signal to the monitors, <120Hz to a dual 9½" sealed force-cancelling Dynaudio sub on 4th-order mirror-imaged slopes. I call this my bonsai system because it consists of exclusively half-width components of which none plate in platinum pricing.
Below comes the view from the cheap seats. The seemingly tall stands compensate my half-lotus sitting position on a pillow where stands of standard height would fire these widebanders at my sternum. Steeply toed in to present as crisply face on thus showing no speaker side walls from the seat, set up wide and with loads of surrounding space, close proximity means minimal distance loss for nearly headfi resolution with most marginal room involvement. Whilst 'bonsai' could conjure up miniaturized sound, the opposite rules. Other than silly SPL which such nearness wouldn't tolerate, for soundstage immersion, sorting accuracy and that direct connection with the tunes, this system is more über than under-nourished. Before we count calories, it's fair to reiterate that LAiV's industrial design chops are really a few cuts above what's standard for this sector. Particularly when the nearfield presents our hardware on a virtual silver platter i.e. at very close distance, the mattering of cosmetics multiplies. Taking this serious earns LAiV bonus points for proper lifestyle support. This goes extra for applying it in two colour ways to a power supply which so often is treated like a doorstop—functional but meant to take a beating. Instead LAiV's Beat deserves pride of placement.
To avoid inline switches, these power ports are auto-sensing. If we only use one, the other remains off. Three white line LED show status: the left confirms AC power, the other a 15V and/or 5V DC connection. By lacking Chorus' frontal standby switch, Beat is happy to remain on whilst its rear IEC has a standard mains rocker should we prefer off. We need no owner's manual to know that a red LED would signal a power issue.
Now we're ready to listen.
