Problem: You have a kick-ass stereo, or a pair of excellent studio monitor speakers, and you want to hook up your iPhone to listen to some music. Only you don’t want to dig out the headphone dongle and plug in a cable.
Solution: The Kali Audio Bluetooth Module. It hooks up to your speakers via cable, adding a Bluetooth receiver that lets you get the music out of your iPhone or iPad. It seems simple, and it is. But it’s also super-duper handy.
Kali Audio Bluetooth Module
The Kali Audio Bluetooth Module is designed for use with a pair of powered studio monitors. That is, speakers that have their own amplifiers built in. To this end, it has sockets for the two standard speaker connectors, TRS jacks, and balanced XLR plugs. Just plug these into your speakers, plug the unit into power (it uses a 5-volt DC adapter), and hit the pairing button.
Photo: Kali Audio
Your iPhone connects to this just like it would to any regular Bluetooth speaker. The difference is, you get to use your awesome monitors instead of a little battery-powered plastic cylinder. And if you use a phone or computer that supports it (not the iPhone), you can stream audio using the aptX codec.
Finally, there’s a 3.5mm input jack for hooking up any other devices, and a big volume knob.
Uses
While the outputs (TRS and XLR) are meant to be connected direct to a pair of active monitor speakers, you also can run them to the inputs of a mixer. Thus, you can hook up this box to a spare pair of inputs on your mixing desk, and use it to add a Bluetooth input to your setup.
The Kali module’s 3.5mm jack input also adds a handy stereo patch point for connecting all kinds of other devices, from keyboards to mini synthesizers to cassette players.
Perhaps $99 is too much to pay just so you don’t have to plug your iPhone into a mixer (let’s forget for a second that even with a wired connection, you’d need some kind of box to get from the iPhone’s jack cable to the speaker inputs). This Bluetooth module also lets you use your awesome speakers when you watch movies on your iPad.
Because it’s just standard Bluetooth, audio will sync with the video just fine, and in this case, running a wire all the way to the speakers might be a lot more impractical.
I’m totally into this little box. And it even has a cool LED display to indicate volume level.
