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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Pimp my JBL Charge 2 - protection tweaks for transport


A portable speaker which can be easily damaged during the first transport is pretty useless. I am not the only one who thinks that the unprotected passive radiators of the JBL Charge 2 are the weakest part of the speaker, so some owners already came up with some tweaks to protect their new gadget.

Mark from Germany is pretty skillful and he tried his tweak by cutting apart a 0.75l mineral water bottle from Vitell. He managed to form his protective caps to such an accuracy that they can even stay mounted during playing music. He was very precise in defining how big the holes must be to avoid any port-like noise or whistling. According to him the holes must have at least a diameter of 7mm. One single drawback: His speaker won't stand stable with the caps mounted because the bottom base doesn't have any function any more, apart from that a pretty nice job:





Sweetback44 from YouTube came up with his own solution for the same problem. His protection is easily "removeable" but seems quite stable for transport:




My own protection is rather simple, I just bought the bag from DuraGadget. It is a bit big though, the JBL Charge 2 has a lot of space inside. This bag might nearly be able take the larger Infinity One if opened and stretched well:



Here is another DIY solution, this time thanks to my Mum. She did this pouch from a scarf and it was originally ment for the Soundlink Mini. She chose the size quite generously, so that it could also accommodate a larger Sony SRS-X3 and now even the JBL Charge 2 fits inside with some stretching. Good thing is, the JBL Charge 2 can stay inside when playing, assumed you manage to hit the power button blindly. You lose a little bit of treble definition as the material filters high frequencies, but as the Charge 2 is not too shy of treble it doesn't do much harm to the sound. Maybe I will even do a measurement to see the impact on treble-response with and without pouch:




I welcome any other suggestions for the best protection tweaks, please leave a comment to contribute!