Bluetooth Portable Speakers

[mwheelerk]

Is anyone playing around with Bluetooth portable speakers for mobile devices? I just got a UE (Ultimate Ears) Boom as part of a upgrade package at Verizon. I have not had much interest prior to that but it's kind of fun and sounds surprisingly good. Does anyone else have experience and opinions on the UE or other brand/models go Bluetooth speakers for mobile devices?

[wisnon]

Peachtree Audio had the Deepblue for $400 that had 5 speakers (incl a 5 inch woofer) DSP equalization and 240W of Class D power in a device weiging 22 pounds. It has been discontinued, BUT there is a version in Europe here called the Kenwin BT25 (and other names) made by the same Chinese supplier and costs about $150. It apparently sounds almost as good, with real bass!

[Boris75]

I own the Bose Soundlink Mini. The sound quality is really good (not hi-fi, but good), and the unit is very convenient to carry around when travelling. I like it very much. A funny thing with the Bose Soundlink Mini is that, when I use it with its analog input, it has a very different sound from when I feed it via Bluetooth. The sound is more natural, but less nice, on the analog input: surely the two entries have distinct DSP settings.

 

As an off-topic aside, I also have a portable Airplay device (Libratone Zipp), which offers better, crisper sound than the Bose, but is also heavier and bulkier.

[jhwalker]

I've been very happy with foxL products from Soundmatters. I have a couple of the earlier versions, but my current traveling companion is this one (Dash 7):

 

Soundmatters | DASH7 Soundbar

 

Very portable, but sounds great and also includes speakerphone capability via Bluetooth (as most do these days) - great for the traveling businessman.

[One and a half]

The UE Boom is quite a good unit. It has enough bass to let you know it's there, but it's not overpowering. There's only a certain amount of bass you can get from a large pencil case. The highs are on the short side, but all these comparisons are against a speaker that cost over $10k.

 

Look, you can't go really wrong with the UE, the battery lasts at least 20+ hours, and it can accept bluetooth from anything, smartphones are easy, for Jriver, you need to set the sampling rate to 48kHz maximum, as anything higher will go silent or just stall. It's reasonably drop resistant, I see them on construction sites a lot, so they are quite durable.

 

The Win7 interface is a bit of a kludge, as the applet to switch and detect the speaker is buried under networking IIRC, rather than the bluetooth console, but that's not the UE's fault or design quirk.

 

I take one with me on travels and in the garage or in the garden, or just to boost audio when on video conference calls as an extension speaker, wirelessly. Volume and EQ is controlled by the phone.