[section_title title=”Performance”]Performance
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the LT-201 given i’d never heard of them personally and couldn’t find anything about them on the internet. However, I think the reason Xenta don’t appear to be easy to find is they seem to be an OEM of sorts with fingers in every kind of pie, but not the courtesy to bestow upon the other three fingers and a thumb.
What do I mean by the above? The audio performance from the LT-201 is mediocre at best, I feel, across every aspect of the sound produced by the LT-201. The whole sound produced by the LT-201 is one garbled mess of nothing. Perhaps the biggest offender in pure audio terms is the the complete omission of anything mildly resembling bass. Usually you’d find entry-level items such as the Xenta are tuned more towards the bass-loving nature that appears to have gripped people these days, but the LT-201 falls short there. I even tried various settings from within Poweramp on my phone and the EQ setting itself was in-effective and wringing any sort of ‘oomph’ or ‘boom’ out of it. Take a given artist’s song and replace anything resembling a drum with a snare and you’ve got the LT-201’s bass.
The lack off bass hasn’t been made to accommodate other aspect of the produced sound, either. Highs, mids and even a good portion of the commercially used vocal range appears to be decimated once the LT-201 has its way with the source file. I tried some acoustic and more vocal heavy tracks  to see if the LT-201 just happened to struggle with ‘complex’ tracks but there is still the same muffled sound that feel like it needs turning up around 10 notches again to be even decipherable. Eminem’s ‘Rap God’ was just horrible, frankly, and I don’t just mean the content of the track. Eminem’s voice is completely drowned out due to the fact the different layers of the track are all spewed out as one frequency. Larua Mvula’s live/acoustic performance of ‘Sing To The Moon’ to the moon suffers the same fate. It’s a powerful vocal showcase on most audio equipment, the Xenta LT-201 not so much, if at all. There is but one sound produced by the LT-201 and it’s muffle at every volume. I also tried the auxiliary connection just in case for whatever reason the signal was being molested over Bluetooth but results, such as they were, were the same.
However, it is not all doom and gloom. The Bluetooth performance of the LT-201 was actually quite good. Whilst I couldn’t quite validate the advertised ‘~10 metres distortion free range’, the LT-201 kept level pegging with other Bluetooth speakers I reviewed earlier his year all of which were around the same price or more expensive.
There is also the control panel itself which is odd. I’ve already touched on the pulsing blue light which is likely to drive people mad but the volume wheel is peculiar, too. The wheel has a notch on it to indicate where on the volume scale you are, but the volume wheel has no limit and can just be turned unto infinity. If you power the unit off and on again, the volume will be at ‘low’ again even though the notch is at the would be ‘75%’ mark assuming a clockwise dial. It isn’t unit-breaking or even difficult to use, it’s just an odd oversight – if it is one.
With the performance of the Xenta LT-201 covered, let’s move on to the conclusion.
