I know that portable Bluetooth speakers are hardly the sexiest or most technologically interesting gadgets out there, but indulge me for a moment. You see, the trouble with most portable Bluetooth speakers is that they are, almost universally, completely and utterly terrible. The cheap ones—the £10-£30 piles of garishly coloured plastic that you can buy from places like Amazon—are about as enjoyable to listen to as having a swarm of bees repeatedly attack your ear lobes, such is the tinny mess they try to pass off as music.
But worse—far, far worse in my book—are the expensive ones. I can forgive cheap speakers for being terrible; put it all down to case of “you get what you pay for.” But spending serious amounts of money and still ending up with something that sounds awful? Well, as they say in here in Blightly, that’s just not cricket. It’s not like my expectations are particularly high, either. A portable Bluetooth speaker is never going to be an audiophile’s dream after all. What’s weird, however, is that even though these speakers are being made by fancy design houses, they inexplicably lack basic, fundamental features that a good Bluetooth speaker must have.
The basics are simple: give me a small, portable design that’s easy to lug around to hotels, picnics, parties, and the like; an uncomplicated pairing system; a battery that lasts a good eight hours or more; and, most importantly, a speaker that sounds good at quiet volumes, and remains distortion free when cranked to fill a room. So far, scant few have managed to tick all the boxes. The Bluetooth speakers I’ve tried—the Beats Pill, the Anker Portable, the Sony SRS-X11, and the JBL Flip 2—have all come up short in one way or another.
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