FiiO SP3 BT Review | Trusted Reviews

Verdict

The FiiO SP3 BT are detailed and clear-sounding speakers that can fit into all sorts of home office scenarios. They are small but powerful-sounding, have heaps of cabled and wireless connectivity options, and the bass dial on the back can act like low-fuss room correction. They sound sparky rather than neutral and would be better without the hissy noise bed, but they pair beautifully with a laptop or desktop PC.

Introduction

The FiiO SP3 BT are plucky little speakers made to accompany a laptop or desktop PC. But they could be the right fit for a whole load of other situations. 

These are active speakers, meaning there’s an amplifier inside, and they support Bluetooth wireless transmission too. 

In typical FiiO fashion, the SP3 BT are conspicuously tough and have a great spread of features. That includes a wide array of supported codecs, including aptX HD and aptX Adaptive. 

How do they sound? Good, although studio monitor-like neutrality isn’t the aim. The FiiO SP3 BT instead have quite pronounced treble, for a detail-forward and sparky impression. And the fast and, for the speakers’ size, punchy bass is a delight. Mids don’t get the same kind of attention, though, so make sure the style is a match for your tastes. The slight bed of hissy noise will get on some folks’ nerves too.

Don’t need wireless? You can save a chunk of change by buying the standard FiiO SB3, without Bluetooth.

Design

• 1.95kg (primary), 1.66kg (secondary speaker)
• Included wedge stand
• Aluminium enclosures

FiiO loves metal. Almost all the FiiO products I’ve reviewed have been made of the stuff, in order to exude the sense of tough build quality you might not expect from what was traditionally considered a budget or value-led brand. 

The FiiO SP3 BT have tough metal shells, with a sort-of corrugated effect to doubly reinforce how hard they look. As a result, these speakers are far heavier than the otherwise pretty similar plastic Kanto Ora speakers I reviewed recently.

There’s no optional grille here, so the woofer drivers are exposed to the elements, and younger kids’ probing fingers. But the far more fragile tweeter sensibly sits behind a sheet of tough metal armour. 

All that ridged metal and the carbon fibre weave of the speaker drivers adds up to an aggressive look not everyone will appreciate. We’re miles off the Scandi minimalism of the Kanto Ora. But they absolutely are petite, tough and — as far as I can tell — well constructed. 

The FiiO SP3 BT also only require one power adapter. A braided cable connects the left speaker to the right one, which is home to all the connectors, including the power socket. 

Here we see another classic FiiO trait: using thick woven cabling to, again, try to impart a sense of higher build quality. 

There is also an LED strip at the bottom of the speaker. This can display different colours to signify the source currently in use: Bluetooth, USB, optical and so on. 

You can see the diffuser by just picking up a FiiO SP3 BT unit, as the rubbery bottom is loose, letting you see the plastic diffuser layer. It’s only designed like this because some folks will want to use a speaker-tilting rubber wedge base instead of the thin and flat one you see here. 

The LED strip looks neat and is handy. And, yes you can dim it or switch it off entirely. A button on the back of the right speaker toggles it, while the FiiO mobile app has an intensity slider. It’s not going to get on your nerves if you like gaming or listening to music in a darker room. 

I would have preferred some form of control on the front, though. To switch between sources you have to reach around the back to press a button. And you might need to do that fairly often if you want to use the FiiO SP3 BT for both laptop audio and to play music from your phone. An easier-to-reach volume control would be welcome too.

Features

• Wireless codec support
• Multiple cabled inputs
• Codec LED indicator

The FiiO SP3 BT have a good spread of physical connectors as well as the option of Bluetooth. There’s a coax input, optical, a pair of classic stereo RCA connectors and a 3.5mm aux input. 

You’ll probably want to use the USB-C connector for a PC, though. This turns the FiiO SP3 BT into a sound card, feeding the speakers a pure digital signal. 

The Bluetooth wireless side is even more impressive in its comprehensiveness. As well as good old SBC and AAC, the FiiO SP3 BT support aptX HD, aptX Adaptive and LDAC, for truly high-quality streaming even though we’re using Bluetooth. 

What we don’t get, though, is another form of non-Bluetooth wireless streaming. The rival Kanto Ora use a dongle for super low latency wireless transmission, and that’s just not possible here. 

However, the app does let you manually select the codec used, should you want to try for the best latency results. 

The FiiO SP3 BT are not at all for portable use, despite their diminutive size. There’s no battery inside, and their 24V laptop-style adapter is fairly chunky. They are instead made to not take up too much space. There are quite tiny.

Sound Quality

• Detailed, non-fatiguing treble
• Taut, if not deep, bass
• Mids take a slight backseat

The FiiO SP3 BT have a 3.5-inch woofer, a 56mm silk dome tweeter and a bass port on the back. This is a traditional arrangement that, unlike most lifestyle Bluetooth speakers, doesn’t have a passive radiator to increase bass depth and output. 

As such, the FiiO SP3 BT are incapable of rendering much in super-low sub-bass region. Despite that, I think the bass might be my favourite component of these speakers’ sound. 

It’s punchy and fast, with a taut decay that avoids any sense of flabbiness. If you buy the FiiO SP3 BT you should also investigate the bass knob around the back. You might consider this manual room correction as I found these speakers sound better with the bass dialled back a fair amount in my test position, near the corner of a small-to-mid-size room. 

This bass control is well designed enough to even at the full -8dB setting the FiiO SP3 BT don’t sound thin or bass-free. A stated bass floor of 65Hz tells you everything you need to know about the limits here: there’s no sub-bass.

Treble is the clear focus of the FiiO SP3 BT character, though. These speakers have quite pronounced, searching treble that aims to bring crystalline clarity to music. The impressive part is they do this without introducing noticeable harshness or sibilance.

FiiO makes a lot of noise about the tweeter’s abilities on its website, stressing its wide frequency range (down to 800Hz), so a good chunk of the budget may have gone into this driver. 

I don’t think it has the transparency and sweetness of a great electrostatic tweeter, for example, but if you enjoy a brighter sound signature, you’ll love the FiiO SP3 BT. 

Between these two strength areas, the mids do not seem all that capable of gaining much attention. The mids are not hollow, but it’s a classic case of the treble having so much energy that it naturally dominates in representing detail to your ears. 

You can alter this a little in the FiiO SP3 BT app, which has a 10-band parametric EQ. However, after reducing the treble a little in one session, I found it sounded a bit too much like an obviously EQ’d tone the next day and switched it back to the default. And, well, if you aren’t game for the treble-forward style you probably shouldn’t be considering the FiiO SP3 in the first place. 

There’s another black mark against the FiiO SP3 BT everyone should consider. These speakers’ amplifier circuit is not the quietest. There is a noise floor, a slight hiss, that is noticeable because of the near-field way you typically use these speakers. 

While there’s a form of noise gating, the hiss popping out of existence a few seconds after they’re left without any audio to play (likely the amp circuit reverting to standby), I find it disappointing in speakers of this grade. 

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