Braven’s new BRV-Bank is a ruggedized backup battery for your mobile devices, with some very neat/curious additions: It has Bluetooth, for one, and it can be remote controlled from your phone. WTF?
If there’s one thing the fine citizens of the United States love in their cars it’s cup holders. God knows why a car needs like 20 places to stow a bucket of coffee or soda, but it does. Which means, ironically, that the average U.S car has an average of 16[1] cup holders empty at any one time.
Thankfully, the SpeeCup is here to fill up at least one of them, although given the amount of free cup-holder space available, it seems almost silly to combine a speaker, a Siri-enabled mic and a cup-shaped vessel into just one single gadget.
The rush to announce products at CES means we often see CGI renders and vague price promises, just to get in on the news action. But we’re giving SuperTooth a break here for two reasons. One, the company makes great speakers, and two, pretty much every one of those speakers has started life as a dummy model on a trade-show stand.
Kanto’s YU2s seem to come from a time when speakers were solid, simple structures; proud temples to sound that said of their owners, Hey, I’m serious about music, and I know what I’m doing. Aesthetics were important, of course, but unquestioningly took a backseat to sound. Sound was king.
If you haven’t heard of Kanto before, that’s OK — the Canadian outfit just sprouted up in the Vancouver suburbs around five years ago. The YU2s are Kanto’s latest speakers, the smallest of their lineup of a half-dozen or so, and they’re designed to fit unobtrusively on a bookshelf or desk and play music from your computer or mobile device.
The YU2’s performance during our review, however, was nothing short of astonishing — and they could very capably substitute for larger speakers in a variety of roles. For those looking to elevate their desktop setup even further, pairing these speakers with a NuPhy Air75 V2 could create a seamless and high-quality workspace.
In our original Hidden Radio review, we said that the little twist-to-open Bluetooth speaker looked great, but sounded a little tinny and lacked any way to control playback and iPhone volume from the unit itself.
These have bother been fixed on the new Hidden Radio 2, but the speaker (and radio) [UPDATE: The Hidden Radio 2 no longer contains a radio] still looks as great as ever.
The Gramophone for iPhone and iPad certainly isn’t the first horn-speaker we’ve seen for our iOS devices, but it might be the most beautiful. The speakers, which run from $200 to $300 depending on size, is fashioned from wood and metal and will boost the sound output of your device by 3x.
Atoll’s SoundPad is a smart cover for the iPad Air with a set of built-in speakers. It costs $130, and snaps onto the iPad with Magnets. It’s flexible, and it connects to your iDevice via Bluetooth. And that is all the information available, which makes me a little suspicious.
The ClipR is a little disk that turns any headphones into a set of Bluetooth headphones. Or, to be more accurate, it turns any 3.5mm jack cable into a Bluetooth-enabled jack cable.
And it has a clip, so you can tuck that cable neatly away.
Wren’s V5AP is still one of my favorite AirPlay speakers, but recently I’ve been kinda off the whole AirPlay thing thanks to an the crazy East German walls of my apartment building. These walls are too crumbly to let me drill a proper hole for even a coat hook, but somehow thick and dense enough to confuse even a strong dual-band Wi-Fi signal. To recap: AirPlay speakers just won’t stay connected.
Thankfully, Wren now offers a Bluetooth version of the big, booming V5, called the V5BT, and it promises to be pretty good.
Remember back when a button was a button, and not a skeuomorphic touch-screen fake complete with drop shadows and gradients? Me too. Back in the 1980s and beyond, kids had tougher fingers thanks to all the button-pushing that went on, not like the kids of today with their weak twiglets which threaten to snap if they squeeze their in–0line remote’s play/pause “button” too hard.
Which is my way of saying that you can keep your pathetic modern-day children from playing any music by simply loading your iPhone into this retro-tastic iRecorder.
Edifier is a lesser-known company with roots in China, and a design lab in Vancouver, British Columbia. While Edifier speakers have seen table time in Apple stores in the past, they seem to be making a bigger push here in the States within the last year or two.
Their latest set is the e25 Luna Eclipse, Bluetooth-equipped speakers stuffed with some trick tech and 74 watts of power per channel — at the upper end for a set of desktop media speakers.
At just $40, I can’t help but think that the water resistant Jive is anything more than adequate when it comes to sound, especially as it packs Bluetooth 4, AVRCP (for remote control from your iPhone) and a 500mAh battery (good for four hours). But given its likely use case, this doesn’t really matter. Because the Jive is the modern-day shower radio.
You’ve seen IK Multimedia’s gear grace the pages of this site before — the company is at the forefront of popping out music-making electronics and software geared toward musicians. So it’s no surprise that now they’ve finally joined the increasingly crowded high-end Bluetooth speaker club, their take, the iLoud, is a reference-grade studio monitor — and as its name suggests, an apparently very loud one.
The Braven 650 is one of the best portable speaker I’ve tested. It’s small, tough, light and it sounds great. It even manages to include a remote play/pause function, although you have to be in on the secret[1]. And now Braven has come out with the 710, an update which adds a whole bunch of neat extras.
Ever wanted a pair of speakers that look like old-school toasters? (And I mean old-school: the kind of toaster that had bare, easy-to-touch elements and metal sides that were more likely to burn your hands than burn the toast.
Well, reader-with-oddly-specific-desires, we have you covered. For the Timbre Speakers are just what you’re looking for.
Braven’s 855S is the companion speaker to the 850. The internals are much the same, but the cases are as different as can be, with the heavy, rubberised 855S looking more like something you’d find in a military tank rather than on a tasteful shelf next to your fish tank.
That said, it looks and feels great. But how does it sound?
Marshall’s beautiful Stanmore brings some retro styling to the Bluetooth speaker game, looking a lot like one of the company’s classic combo amps or – if you want to really rock out – like the front of a speaker from a stack, with the head-unit controls concealed on the top.
It’s hard to exaggerate the effect that stereo has on sound. Sure, it gives you different sounds from the left and right speakers, positioning the musical instruments or the on-screen action in 3-D space, but it also opens up the sound and makes it seem a lot bigger… Even when used with tiny speakers.
And while candy-bar all-in-one speakers like the Jambox pack in stereo speakers and stretch the soundstage using electronic trickery, it turns out that old-fashioned physical separation still works great. Which is why the otherwise average Earshots speakers are worth a listen.
Despite the fact that the new Bluetooth speaker looks like it is little more than a regular JamBox that has been sliced lengthwise down the middle, the Mini Jambox a whole new thing. Built like the unibody MacBooks, the new Mini Jambox is carved from a single block of aluminum. This means that despite its diminutive size, it still sounds a lot bigger than it looks.
The Wren V5AP is just about the best-looking speaker I’ve tested, with a tastefully contemporary case finished with bamboo and silvered cloth.
It’s also one of the best sounding, and although it might not be as convenient as some other AirPlay speakers, it makes up for it in other ways.
You can thank Bluetooth technology for making cycling safer. “How’s that,” you ask, as you wolf down a Lemon Sublime Gu? The answer lies with the growing number of Bluetooth speakers designed to be mounted a bicycle; listening to music from a speaker obviates the dangerous (and often illegal) temptation to wear earphones on the bike.
The latest is Outdoor Tech’s Buckshot, a tiny, ruggedized (to IPX-5) shotgun shell-shaped speaker with a rubber mount for attaching it to a handlebar; it even doubles as a speakerphone. What separates the Buckshot from most other bike-friendly Bluetooth speakers is its diminutive size, and its price — the Buckshot is just $50.
Source: Outdoor Tech
Soen Audio is both new and experienced at making speakers. The young company is formed by a small group of engineers and designers from household names like JBL and Harmon. But Soen only has one product out so far, a portable Bluetooth speaker called Transit that started shipping this week.
Boasting a striking industrial design and surprisingly rich sound, the Transit is a more grown-up speaker than most of its competition. I’ve been using a Transit for the past few weeks, and it has become something I enjoy on a daily basis.
I’m always surprised how much bigger and louder stereo speakers make music sound. It might be the fact that the 3-D space it creates fools our stupid brains into thinking that the music is surrounding us, but the difference is huge. Try it: take a device that’s hooked up to actual separate stereo speakers and flip between stereo and mono with your source.
And so I expect the Earshots Stereo Speakers to sound a lot bigger than their 34mm diameter would suggest.
When I reviewed Kubxlab’s Ampjacket for the iPhone back in May, I found it to be excellent. And as I kept on using it after the review (always a good sign), I got to like it even more. Now, the Ampjacket is available for the iPad mini, and I expect it to be even more useful.
Speaker design seems to be drifting further toward the minimalist end of things, at least aesthetically. If that’s true, brand-new San Francisco-based NudeAudio has walked pretty far down this path, as evidenced by their just-introduced, four-model speaker lineup.