Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi Review – Feature-Rich, Solid Audio

Unboxing & Walkaround

The small box that houses the Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi (not “Mini”) wireless earbuds immediately greets the user with an instruction card for installing the companion app, along with initializing the earbuds themselves. There are quite a few items included, as shown below.

Here are all the items you’ll get:
– SXFI app instruction card
– Creative app instruction card
– Drawstring pouch
– Quick start guide
– Charging cable
– Eartips (4 additional sizes)
– Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi earbuds & charging case

The charging case of Aurvana earbuds adopts a pebble-like shape housing a pair of earbuds, with the charging port, battery indicator LED and a pairing button located down below. On its side there is a hook for straps, and on top is the engraved marking that reads “SXFI Ready”. SXFI (Super X-Fi) is a technology developed by Creative that simulates multi-speaker audio setup like you’ll find in theatre rooms, which we’ll discuss in a bit.

The earbuds themselves adopt a stem-based design, which typically houses the drivers on top and batteries in the stem. There is an LED indicator on top of the each stem (this spot is also where touch controls are located), while the microphones – three on each earbud – are located right next to the eartip, behind the driver (near the LED indicator), and at the bottom of the stem.

The driver responsible for delivering the audio includes the new xMEMS solid-state driver paired with 10mm dynamic driver on each side, the combination of which can deliver a very wide range of frequencies, down to 5Hz on the low end and 40,000Hz on the high end. For reference, typical dynamic drivers deliver between 20-20,000Hz, right on humans’ listening range.

Specifications

Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi

Full specifications available in product page.

Form Factor	In-ear, rubber eartips
Drivers	xMEMS Solid-state driver + 10mm dynamic driver
Microphones	3 omnidirectional MEMS microphones (per side)
Frequency Response	5Hz – 40,000Hz
Connectivity	Bluetooth 5.3 SBC, AAC, LC3, LDAC codec Bluetooth Multipoint support Auracast support
Active Noise Cancellation (ANC)	Yes (hybrid) + transparency mode
Companion App	Creative App
Battery	Earbuds 52mAh (per unit), up to 7.5 hours playback with ANC off Charging Case 470mAh, up to 28 hours playback (combined) with ANC off Qi wireless charging support
Dimensions & Weight	Earbuds 34 x 23.3 x 25.8 mm / 4.7g (per unit) Charging Case 64.7 x 49.1 x 26.9 mm / 37.2g
Colors	Midnight Blue
Ingress Protection	IPX5

User Experience

The Creative app comes with a fairly straightforward interface, starting with the devices list where you can see all the supported Creative-branded devices. In the device menu, there are five items – Scan Broadcast (for Auracast), EQ tuning, ANC control, audio personalization, and button remapping (the Edit button is simply for rearranging the order).

The equalizer menu offers highly detailed tuning with a 10-band EQ along with tons of presets, ranging from basic sound profiles to game-specific settings (by default, there are a whopping 71 options to choose from). If none of these suits you, you can simply tune a custom profile and save them as you go. For ANC though, option are limited to two stages (Min is essentially off), though you do get a decent level of customization for button controls. Finally, you can enable LDAC for high-quality audio streams, and low latency mode for gaming use.

There’s also the Personalization section featuring technologies from German-based audio company Mimi (hence the product’s name), which provides an interactive test to evaluate your hearing abilities across different frequency range. This data is used to compensate the volume to give produce a more balanced audio for your ears, although you’ll have to sign an email to use this feature. It’s an implementation similar to Adapt Sound found in Samsung smartphones, though in Samsung’s case it’s built right into the system.

There’s also a second companion app called Super X-Fi, although this app is not strictly designed for this earbuds only. It’s more akin to a music player app that aims to recreate the audio in styles of “high-end multi-speaker system” according to its claims, and it does have specific profiles tuned for some of the high-end headphones and earbuds on the market, although the Aurvana earbuds we have here seemingly is not one of them (the third screen indicates it has the profile, but the list on the second image doesn’t show it in the list).

Either way, if you’re listening through online music platforms like everyone does these days, this app is unlikely to be any use for you – you’ll need local music files for this app to work at all (sign-in is also required), but I say it’s worth a try if you have all the prerequisites.

The Good

One of the unique feature the Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi has is the xMEMS solid-state driver paired along the traditional dynamic driver, which gives this pair of earbuds great sound quality – if that’s not enough, the 10-band EQ should be more than enough to get that perfect sound profile. Moreover, the audio personalization feature is another aspect in complementing the audio prowess of the Aurvana earbuds, making this a very good pair if sound quality is what you’re looking for.

Audio aside, the battery monitoring can be done in several ways: either through the onboard LED on the earbuds, or through the Creative app. The app can display battery level of both earbuds precisely at 1% steps, so you get a clearer picture of the charge remaining onboard.

The earbuds also offer modern features like low-latency audio, LDAC codec support, Bluetooth multipoint support, while the case can also be charged wirelessly if USB-C charging is not your preferred charging method (it can also be convenient if you have a smartphone with reverse wireless charging support).

The Bad

There are a few noteworthy things regarding the Aurvana earbuds, one of them being the ANC feature. It’s not as good as some of the earbuds I’ve tested so far, particularly against Sony’s WF-C700N – it does an excellent job at cancelling the low-end frequencies (i.e. noises produced by cars and trains), but its high-end frequency performance isn’t exactly stellar. Think noises like power tools and baby crying – these will easily get into your ears despite the earbuds’ best efforts (the relatively shallow depth of eartips also doesn’t help with adequate sealing, which is important at blocking high-frequency noises).

Earlier, we mentioned that the app provides precise monitoring on earbuds’ battery level, but oddly enough case battery is omitted here. The only way you can tell the case battery level is to look at the bottom of the case (press the button once), and here it’ll only give you LED indicators that only gives you a broad range of levels to figure out. I do believe this is something that can be fixed through firmware update, though.

Speaking of which – the most recent firmware update seems to introduce bugs that caused the earbuds to occasionally crash, like your PC does when Blue Screen of Death hits (imagine the audio stops playing normally and you hear a constant loud buzzing sound). When that happens, putting the earbuds back and taking it out again (effectively restarting it) will solve the issue, although this is a bit annoying and should’ve been avoidable.

Another complaint I have relates to touch controls. Since there isn’t a clear spot on the touch sensing, sometimes the earbuds struggle to register my inputs – and when it does, the delay is quite significant; there’s also a lack of automatic play/pause feature which would’ve been a neat feature for the price it’s going for.

Verdict

We haven’t see the official local pricing of the Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi at this time, although Creative’s website does list a converted price tag of RM607 (more precisely, US$130), which puts it in the upper mid-range segment. That’s still a solid price for all the features and the sound quality it offers, although it’s always good to try it out for yourself to see if this is what suits your ears.

Special thanks to Creative for providing the Aurvana Ace Mimi earbuds for this review.