Edifier S300 Review

Design

• 35cm wide enclosure
• fake leather outer
• retro-inspired physical controls

The Edifier S300 has an unapologetic retro appearance I wouldn’t usually expect from a Chinese brand often associated with value, like Edifier. But there’s nothing wrong with branching out. 

It has a chunky weave two-tone speaker grille, a synthetic leather effect outer that comes in three colours. This one its ivory, while brown and black are options too. It is a proper fake leather finish, not just a texture etched into hard plastic. 

Some of the Edifier S300’s retro elements are a bit more try-hard than what you might see in, for example, a Ruark speaker. There are not one but two screwed-in metal plates that bear the Edifier branding and otherwise have no reason to exist. In person they do not seem too indulgent, though.

On the underside are four rubber-capped feet dressed up in gold, for a little added flair.  

Unlike the slightly smaller models in this family, the Edifier S300 also has a bunch of controls along the bottom of its front. And these too are self-consciously retro. The power button is a two-position rotary dial with a very deliberate sense of soft friction to its turn and a positive click when activated. It’s ringed by a pleasant valve-like orange-glow LED too. You can’t turn this off, but it’s relatively unobtrusive as long as you don’t plan on listening in a full-on dark room. 

The Edifier S300’s playback controls are a trio of up-down flick switches that handle next/previous track and play/pause commands. Is it a bit silly to have a two-way flicker for a gesture with only a since outcome? Sure, but these things are all about tactility and what they represent visually. 

The last control is a nicely-knurled volume knob with clicky feedback and are turning — allowing for control via app and knob. This one can also be pressed in to switch between sources. A tiny multi-colour LED by the power dial lets you know the current mode, removing the need for a screen.

Features

• AirPlay 2 streaming
• LDAC Bluetooth
• Edifier app

These sources are Bluetooth, USB, the 3.5mm aux input and AirPlay. This means the Edifier S300 primarily caters for iPhone users, as the Android crowd cannot use Spotify Connect or Google Cast. 

This is arguably more an issue of convenience than sound quality, though, as Edifier more-or-less maxes out on what it can provide through Bluetooth. LDAC is supported as well as basic SBC, and using the Edifier phone app you can switch between 96KHz, 48KHz and non-LDAC modes. According to a codec analyser app I used, both AAC and SBC are supported in that latter mode too, despite AAC being left off the spec sheet. 

Using an OPPO Find X test phone, latency was significantly better when using LDAC versus the basic codec mode. It’s snappy enough to make watching videos with speech bearable, where the delay in the AAC/SBC mode was very obvious. You mileage may vary.

The Edifier S300 includes a remote, with an unusual volume scroll wheel, and a couple of cables. There’s a USB-C to USB-C and a 3.5mm audio cable. The power cable is also a simple figure of eight lead without a bulky external power brick — neat. 

Sound Quality

• Overpowering bass before EQ
• Solid bass depth

The Edifier S300 has a pretty common style of driver array for a mid-size lifestyle speaker. There’s a moderately large 5.5-inch woofer, which would dominate the front of the unit were it not hidden by the outer grille, and a pair of 1.25-inch titanium dome tweeters. One is placed to each side of the woofer to give the sound at least a hint of stereo presentation. 

Fresh out of the box, the Edifier S300 is massively, obscenely bassy. Even if you give the rear port loads of space it’s very obviously dominant. There’s a pronounced V shape to the default tuning: masses of bass and a syringe’s worth of treble enhancer to attempt to balance it out. 

It’s clear Edifier is proud of its 5.5-inch woofer, but this is too much.

I find it comically bass-heavy — and while there’s an enjoyable heft to the low-end, it’s far from ideal. You can largely fix this using the Edifier Home app, though. By default the Edifier S300 uses a sound profile called Dynamic, which appears to be the equivalent of the Dynamic mode seen in TVs in shop showrooms.

There are others too, including Monitor, Voice and a custom user-defined EQ mode. They are all far better-balanced than the standard mode. 

Tamp down the bass and the Edifier S300 becomes far more enjoyable, while still retaining plenty of bass power. For its size, the S300 has more than respectable low bass output, only bowing at at the lowest sub-bass registers by most genre standards.

Edifier rates its bass floor at 48Hz, and while this isn’t an absolute stat — subject to different standards — you can hear this is not a speaker with a normal 3-inch driver. It can pound. 

It also does have the character of its driver array, though, with a tweeter and bass driver combo. There’s plenty of treble presence and bass punch, but the lack of real substance and fibre to the mids is fairly clear if you listen more carefully to lower-register male vocals in particular. And there’s not a huge amount of refinement in the low treble and upper mids.

The Edifier S300 is ready for a party, but I can’t help but compare it to the Edifier S880DB MarkII I revewied before this speaker. While they don’t have the bass depth of this single unit, they do have deliver more natural-sounding vocals and altogether greater balance, not to mention better imaging when properly setup. 

Should you buy it?