andex has introduced the BORK Station, its most powerful smart speaker with Alice to date. Built in partnership with BORK, the device wraps its guts in an anodized aluminum body, adds a five-inch touch screen, and runs on the YaOS X platform.
You are essentially being offered a hybrid of expensive home audio and a TV set-top box packed into a heavy metal cylinder. The idea is obvious: combine premium design and maximum living room functionality to clear a mess of separate gadgets off your media console and banish stray wires.
Sound engineering and spinning vinyl
The acoustic setup uses a three-way design: three tweeters, three mid-range drivers, and two woofers pushing a total of 75 watts, plus three passive radiators for bass. Yandex claims a frequency range of 45 to 20,000 Hz with Lossless support, letting you stream uncompressed music in high quality.
Loudness compensation automatically shifts the frequency balance as you adjust the volume, keeping bass and details crisp at low levels—for now it only works on the BORK Station, but it will come to other speakers later.
Software-wise, it packs Room Correction 2.0, an algorithm that analyzes room echo across frequencies and retunes the six-band equalizer on the fly. To control playback, there's a vinyl mode: you twist the top aluminum ring like a record on a turntable to skip tracks. For movies, it adds Dolby Digital Plus decoding, mixing 5.1 soundtracks down to stereo so spatial audio sounds decent even without a full set of rear speakers.
Smart home autonomy and a movie screen
For smart home needs, Zigbee 3.0, Wi-Fi, and Matter over Wi-Fi protocols are supported, making this the first Station with a built-in temperature and humidity sensor. The main technical perk is local automation: your smart home routines keep running even if the internet drops.
Routines involving Zigbee and Matter devices keep chugging along without an internet connection, including voice control.
Via HDMI, you can plug the speaker into a TV to get YaOS X with video up to 4K and over a hundred live TV channels. The logic falls apart the moment you realize you likely already own a decent smart TV: you're paying for a duplicate YaOS X interface and a screen built into the speaker anyway, because this is priced as a luxury item for people willing to splurge on monolithic design and every feature under the sun at once.
The speaker goes on sale November 3 in Russia and Belarus exclusively through BORK's website, flagship stores, and the official Alice store, with Kazakhstan sales following later in the year. A light blue version drops at launch, with a dark blue option coming later. Yandex crammed TV box features into a heavy audio body, expecting you to spin an aluminum ring just because you wanted a smart speaker with an imposing living room footprint. I wouldn't take it.
What doesn’t add up
Yandex rolled out its most powerful 75W smart speaker with a vinyl mode for audiophiles, yet crammed a five-inch screen and a full YaOS X TV-box into it. The design aims to clear the media console of clutter by bundling premium acoustics, a smart home hub, and a video streamer into a single BORK metal cylinder. However, anyone who already owns a capable smart TV is forced to overpay for a redundant media interface and an extra screen just to get the top-tier sound. Will buyers accept paying for a built-in TV box inside the BORK unit when their existing TV already handles the screen?