I am on holidays now and after arriving in Calabria the next day I got a notification that my YouTube channel was suspended.
I have no idea what the real reason was and I am currently waiting for a response to my appeal. In case I won’t get my channel back, which is not a big deal you can follow me on Patreon for the latest news and any upcoming content which under these circumstances will replace YouTube.
There is a scammer on YouTube pretending being me, uploading my old videos again with horrible quality onto his fake channel, please avoid and report this asshole! Oluv’s Gadgets does not exist anymore, YouTube killed it, everyone pretending being Oluv’s gadgets contacting companies for free products is just a scammer!
First of all thanks to anyone who still finds it worthy to donate, I really appreciate any kind of contribution that allows me to cover my expenses.
Due to the strong interest I finally ordered the Brookstone Big Blue Party, which I only managed thanks to some income from the amazon-links you can see here. I still had to pay nearly as much for shipping and taxes to get the speaker here, just to let you know that I don't get this stuff for free.
Next I would like to excuse the lack of new posts, but I am a bit behind with my reviews because I got so many interesting speakers that I still have to cover including the Teufel Boomster, the BenQ Trevolo, but also the Aiwa Exos-9. In the meantime I had the chance to test out some further new speakers including the Canton Musicbox XS and the Audio Pro Addon T3 or the Denon Heos-1 and a promising low-budget tip: the Anker Premium Bluetooth speaker.
Now it seems as if I will even get some more soon like the long awaited RIVA S, the interesting KEF Muo and hopefully the Fugoo XL. Therefore it is hard for me to keep up with all the reviews. Writing a detailed review takes quite a long time, therefore I am considering to shorten my upcoming reviews a bit, in order to be able to finish more of them.
If you are interested in the latest news, please also check out my Youtube channel regurarly, as I keep that more up-to-date. I have more viewers and subscribers on Youtube, therefore I mostly concentrate on doing videos because these manage to generate 10 times more revenue than my site, otherwise I won't be able to do all this. Although my videos are maybe not best quality, they should nevertheless give you a pretty realistic idea of how the speakers sound as I really set a high value on audio quality. I already prepared some videos of the Teufel Boomster, of the BenQ Trevolo and also several videos covering the Aiwa Exos-9, including a funny loudness test if the Aiwa manages to annoy the whole neighbourhood:
You will also find a very recent sound comparison for the Canton Musicbox XS: (english)(german), and I am currently uploading a video for the Audio Pro Addon T3.
Although my speaker database is still in works and far from ready I am nevertheless trying to add new and new speakers. I just added the Canton Musicbox XS and the Brookstone Big Blue Party and I will add the Addon T3 and the Heos-1 next, but still need some time for additional recordings.
So coming up next I will hopefully manage to offer you some new reviews bit by bit. I will try to concentrate on the most newsworthy products that are still hardly covered anywhere yet, and then work off all the rest.
Please be patient and thanks for all your support!
I could not attend the IFA and I think all the hullabaloo wouldn't be the right place for me. But I read lots of announcements during my holidays and needed some time to sort everything before finally posting some summary. So here you have some late news about the IFA including some afterparty latecomers.
Thanks to this great community here, some anonymous contributor has published a way how to update the JBL Charge 2 on your own. The necessary firmware file was already posted by someone else some time ago, but so far there was no way how to perform the update without the right software. As many still seem to fight with JBL-support who is taking their customers for fools claiming that there is no firmware update available for the JBL Charge 2 I think we have to thank our unknown hero for posting this. He provided an archive including the 1.4.1 firmware-file, an installation manual and the CSR BlueSuiteNow.
Of course I cannot provide any warranty that you will not brick your device, but acoording to many owners they were able to successfully update his Charge 2 from 1.3.8 to 1.4.1:
I would also like to give my trusty readers the ability to try out my speaker comparison tool.
There is still some work to be done with this speaker audio database, but many will hopefully appreciate the ability to test it already now in an unfinished state. There are some bugs, and some features like "real volume" is not working properly yet, as well as "volume guide". The tutorial links at the top "how to use the tool" and details about the "recording setup" are also just placeholders so far and when everything is finished there will be an introduction video published on Youtube to make it really official.
There are currently more than 30 different speakers added, I also have measurements for nearly all of these speakers, but I have to edit and prepare them first before being able to add them to the database. I will also work on the description for each speaker, but as I am continuously adding more and more speakers (next will be the Marshall Kilburn for example and the JBL Xtreme shortly after), I have little time to work on all the small details now, therefore I would like you to try everything out as is.
The tool only works on desktop systems so far, as there seems to be a limitation with Android and iOS which are not able to play 2 videos simultaneously.
I hope you will enjoy it, feel free to play with it. I am not really sure yet, how good the tool will work and how much acceptance it will gain. But I hope it will become helpful at some point.
It is quite rare that iLounge gives an "A"-mark for a speaker, which according to them would mean "highly recommended". Now 2 recent releases got an A with the Braven BRV-PRO which got a straight flat A, the highest mark for any portable speaker (only some few other portable speakers received an A from them so far, like the JBL Flip, the G-Project G-Boom, Soundfreaq Sound Kick, id America TouchTone and the Soundfreaq Pocket Kick (you can find my own review of the Pocket Kick here btw). The other one being the UE Roll, which although just an A- is still highly recommended and impressive.
Of course I would like to test both speakers and give you some real unbiased opinion on them, but the Braven BRV-PRO costs 178€ here in Europe, when I could get two JBL Charge 2 for the same price with the recent offer from Deutsche Telekom. The UE Roll costs even 129€ in Europe and given that this is a European product, I find it questionable that it should only cost 99$ in the US. In this case I would definitely rather choose another Denon Envaya Mini instead.
Therefore folks, probably no review from me on these highly recommended speakers as I am not going to spend 300€ for these toys, but will rather invest the money in something more serious like the new JBL Xtreme, which in fact is already on order... This one will probably get a "C" on iLounge btw, just like the JBL Charge 2 which only got a "B+" from them. But I want to hear real music, not play lasso with my speaker or fetch it with my dog!
Of course any first hands-on experience on these is highly appreciated, feel free to comment if you already heard them and find them really that great!
The JBL Xtreme is already listed for preorder on the European JBL Site and should be available from 25.6.
There are new details regarding power and battery, and this Xtreme thing will have a 10.000mAh battery built in, which is obviously necessary to power the 40Watts amp.
The battery indicator is similar to the one on the Infinity One, but it was moved to the front now (clever!) As visible from the other product images the JBL Xtreme has an own kind of zipper to protect the ports. They finally seem to take water protection more serious with the Xtreme than with the Charge 2+, which has the ports completely unprotected.
Could be a real beast of a speaker, making the UE Megaboom sound funny...
Mediamarkt Netherlands posted another interesting video showing a supposedly new speaker similar to the JBL Charge 2 or rather Infinity One: the JBL "Xtreme". Similar to the JBL Flip 3 the JBL Xtreme will be water proof and have the ability to connect with multiple speakers wirelessly thanks to JBL connect, but what makes it extreme, is either the extreme sound quality as claimed in the video, or the fact that it can charge 2 devices at once!
It looks a bit as if this model was indeed based on the Infinity One with quite a similar form-factor and the same carrying lugs at the top. Instead of the useless rear drivers from the Infinity One JBL/Harman seem to have included tweeters this time as the blueprint rendering below would suggest. Maybe they finally noticed the overly strong intermodulation distortion of the Infinity One as well? This is what you get when little fullrange drivers are pushed too hard to deliver both high and low-end at the same time!
With all those new releases this is going to become a pretty interesting summer if all these videos are not fake but really showing leaked upcoming JBL products. No price nor availabilty yet, but the JBL Xtreme could be a new benchmark even outperforming the Infinity One among most other contenders in its class.
Not quite surprising 2 years after the announcement of the original Soundlink Mini, Bose just revealed the new Bose Soundlink Mini II, sucessor of the maybe most popular portable speaker worldwide that I reviewed here (although in German). According to some rumors the Soundlink Mini managed to sell about 10 million times, quite impressive for a little battery driven speaker.
Interestingly it seems as the Soundlink Mini II just appeared in some European Bose-stores so far and can be ordered from there immediately, but it is not listed in the US-store yet and they don't seem to know even any release-date. In the meantime it has appeared on the US-site for preorder as well.
The new model looks just like the old one, but it is available in black or white now. It gained some new features like speakerphone that was missing on the original model, voice prompts (probably the same as on the Soundlink Colour), it can finally be charged through MicroUSB and battery life seems to have been slightly improved, but no other obvious changes so far. I am not sure if the new one will really sound much different, there is not a single word about changes in sound etc.
To tell the truth I was expecting something completely new, more rugged maybe, water proof or whatever, but it seems as if Bose just tries to sell the same speaker again only with some new added features that were simply lacking from the original.
As soon as I can get my hands on a unit, I will check out if the sonic qualities have indeed improved over the old Soundlink Mini, if not the Soundlink Mini II will have to fight against some strong competition with the JBL Charge 2+, Denon Envaya Mini or the upcoming RIVA S.
Finally with the latest firmware the JBL Charge 2 manages to be what it should have been from the very beginning back in September, when it still suffered from teething troubles.
Until now I couldn't fully recommend the JBL Charge 2 without reservations, as the issues were too disturbing and it remained rather a "also-ran" speaker among all the others.
In the meantime there was lots of discussion on Youtube regarding all those problems with many users complaining about their units still to distort, while others claimed to have no problems at all. There were theories established about serial-numbers which would indicate when the unit was manufactured and when it would be without issues. I was enjoying all this similar to reading a crime thriller.
Then finally someone from Japan came up with an undocumented trick to check the currently installed firmware on his JBL Charge 2. He finally claimed that only the latest firmware "1.4.1" would fix all problems, while all firmwares below suffered from this or that DSP-issue.
It seems Dutch Mediamarkt leaked a video of the upcoming JBL Flip 3, as there has been no official announcement yet.
In contrast to the farting bassreflex port of the previous versions that were not able to produce any bass worth mentioning, the Flip 3 uses the same dual passive radiator design of the Charge 2 and rather looks like a shrinked version of it, but the Flip 3 is claimed to be waterproof with support for wireless pairing of several speakers (maybe up to 3 as the video suggests). I am not quite sure if stereo pairing with 2 speakers is also possible, but this would be great. If the JBL Flip 3 manages to sound as serious as the JBL Charge 2 which is to be assumed as the acoustic design looks very familiar, then the JBL Flip 3 might become a very serious portable speaker and a much better alternative to all this UE junk out there.
It will be available in 8 colors and comes with a handy wrist strap. Of course no information about availability nor price yet, but I guess it will be announced soon and come to the stores this summer.
I would like to briefly introduce the upcoming speaker audio database. All programming work has been meanwhile finished. I also finished the first recordings of most speakers I currently have at home, it will still take some time until I have all the content put together to finally publish everything. Here I just want to give you some information about the idea behind this database and what you can expect from it.
Yes, finally Minirigs brought us their great Minirig with Bluetooth included, something many owners were already asking for from the beginning.
The great thing about the new one: it supports AptX for best streaming quality and 2 of them can be wirelessly paired for stereo sound! Apart from that it is as sturdy and great looking as the old one. It is water resistant and still has the impressive battery life of 8 hours at maximum volume or up to 50 hours at moderate levels! If I think about the UE Boom which dies after 2 hours on top volume, but hardly manages to sound as good as the Minirig...
You can check out how both compare at maximum volume from my video I did last summer, although I was still using the old non-Bluetooth Minirig. The new one is supposed to have even better sound especially at lower levels as according to the engineer there is some bassboost included now, which makes the sound even more full-bodied than before, which also shows up in the specs: while the old Minirig was only rated down to 100Hz the new one should play to 75Hz which is on par with the JBL Charge 2 now.
Let's hope I can get one of the new Bluetooth Minirigs for a test soon...
When I had the idea of doing "fidelity-tests" of various speakers, I quickly noticed that it wouldn't be that easy to achieve really representative results.
Apart from room acoustics etc. the microphones have a too strong self-sound, to really allow valid results. I had tested more than half dozen different handheld recorders, from Olympus to Yamaha and Zoom. And all of them sounded so different that I doubt they would allow any neutral results.
To give it another try, I lately ordered a Zoom H5 and an optional XYH-6 capsule as I hoped these would give me significant improvements over the "cheap" Zoom H1 recorder that I am currently using, but in the end, the results were even worse. Not only did both mic-capsules emphasize treble too much, they did roll-off with low frequencies too strong, and there was a noticable divergency between left/right channel with the sound being not centered as it should be. Both microphones had a different bias towards left or right, therefore I sent both back totally disappointed.
Currently it seems as if I was still at the very beginning to find a better but still affordable recording solution which would allow the most neutral and flat recording.
You can hear some of my previous test-recordings here. In this case the JBL Charge 2 was recorded with all recorder/microphone combinations in the same room with the same settings/distance etc. As the XYH-6 capsule supports 2 different directional patterns, I did recordings with both, you can also check out the original track for comparison:
Excerpt of the original track:
Zoom H1:
Zoom H5:
Zoom H5+XYH-6 90°:
Zoom H5+XYH-6 120°:
I think it is pretty obvious that all the used microphones have a different sound, there is even a noticeable sound-difference between the 90° and 120° setting of the XYH-6 capulse. I also tried a recording with my current measuring microphone the MiniDSP UMIK-1, but so far I am still in the process to include the calibration file into the recording procedure and will post it as soon as I managed.
At the same time, I had also ordered a Roland CS-10EM binaural microphone. I wanted to try out something new and although these microphones are not really suitable for neutral direct recordings of a speaker, they seem perfectly suitable to record how a speaker would sound in a particular room thanks to a rather neutral sound. You have to wear headphones to hear how the sound was meant to be, or you can try playing it back through speakers with a crosstalk cancelling filter like "Liveaudio" from the Mini Jambox.
To understand better how the listening situation was, what kind of room etc, I also did a photo of each listening position, so that you can see what I heard when I did those recordings wearing the microphones inside my ears. I am curious what you think about this kind of audio-demo, and if I should continue using it in future for further speaker comparisons too. I did not normalize the recordings, so the difference in loudness you hear is real and represents the real situation.
Again I used the JBL Charge 2 (my current portable reference despite all the distortion issues, it is one of the best sounding portable speakers which can be already had for 129€) and recorded it in different rooms and positions from different distances, please have a look (and don't forget to listen through headphones):
Equally to the JBL I also tried recording some further speakers inside the shelf in the living room, I wonder if you can hear the difference in sound between all of them. I think that especially the increased stereo-separation of the EVA Blu and the Bose compared to the JBL Charge 2 and the mono Play:1 is pretty obvious:
Please let me know what you think about these recordings. Does the binaural effect work for you? Do these recordings sound more real than the previous ones I did? Which listening position does represent the most realistic situation for you?
One might think "not another Bluetooth speaker" every time a new model is announced.
Indeed the whole Bluetooth speaker market started becoming quite a bit boring. There are units costing less than 20$, others costing close to 1000$ or even more, colorful ones, swimming ones etc.
But there is hardly any innovation visible. Some Bluetooth speakers still refuse any quick re-pairing to already known devices...
But two recently announced Bluetooth speakers managed to catch my attention. They are both portable, which means they will run from a rechargeable battery, and they are both pretty compact to really deserve the term "portable".
I wanted to try out something new to allow for an even better judgement of a speaker's sound quality. Please let me know if you have some further ideas suggestions or wishes, so that this test could evolve to something helpful maybe.
So far I haven't even noticed any announcements about the new Sounddock XT, but today during my visit at the Bose store they already had one on display and I could have a look at it.
The design is pretty funky, not that old school as the previous models. I couldn't have a listen unfortunately as I still have my old trusty Iphone 4, while my wife got her Iphone 5 with lightning-connector only. The Sounddock is not equipped with Bluetooth, with so many speakers currently supporting multiple connections through Bluetooth, Airplay and even dock or Micro-USB simultanously, I am pretty surprised to see the Sounddock XT being just equipped with a lightning connector. This limits the usage to Apple-devices only, which is a pity.
Overall I really like the looks of the Sounddock XT, at the same time it got pretty cheap compared to the old Sounddock models.
According to the Bose salesman the new one is not as powerful in base, but to tell the truth, the old one was already a bit owerpowering, maybe the new one sounds more balanced now. I will have a listen next Thursday when I will be returning my review sample of the Soundlink Colour.
Bose announced the new Soundlink Colour, a completely new speaker with quite a different design than the Soundlink Mini but also cheaper and more colorful. It should become available worldwide during the next week(s). Biggest improvement seems to be charging through USB, it also seems to have track controls, at least it looks as if you could play/pause music, not sure how to skip tracks though. The Soundlink Colour supports multipoint pairing with 2 devices to quickly switch from one to the other. A pity it doesn't seem to support pairing with another speaker for wireless stereo as so many recent speakers already have this great feature included.
I have no clue how the new one might sound, but it looks quite a bit more rugged and portable than the Soundlink Mini which rather looks good on the shelf at home, than on a sandy beach. The new one seems to be better suitable for transport due to its flat form factor it is also slightly lighter, but I have yet to see it in person to be able to judge the difference in size between both.
Despite all the beautiful colors, I think I like the white one most. As soon as I can get my hands on one, I will of course compare it to the Soundlink Mini. Let's hope the new one is not just a cheaper trimmed down version, but will also have some ace up its sleeve especially regarding sound, maybe loudness, clarity etc...
I prepared a simple and rough 3d-sketch according to the specs the Soundlink Colour is not that small. It is about 60% larger in overall capacity than the Soundlink Mini and already reaches more or less the size of the JBL Charge 2:
Harman Kardon which meanwhile owns some known audio brands like AKG, JBL, Lexicon, Mark Levinson and Revel will now also launch new products for their Infinity brand, one of them being the Infinity One Bluetooth speaker.
JBL already offers the new Charge 2 speaker without making a song and dance about it.
It is not yet available in any other stores except JBL's own online store and Crutchfield. There's no known availabilty for Europe either...
The new Charge 2 has dual passive radiators to the sides, and it seems it has dual drivers facing to both the front and back of the speaker making it nearly omnidirectional. The bass-response is claimed to be 75Hz, which is quite a gain over the 150Hz of the original JBL Charge speaker.
Now this could finally be the real contender for Bose's Soundlink Mini, with more features, better outdoor usability and hopefully better sound too? The old one was rather a bad joke to tell the truth.
Update: You can find my final review of the JBL Charge 2 here.
