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Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on August 16, 2021Was a little skeptical about this, but I have two Polk Audio Atrium outdoor speakers that I use in the back patio and I just don't have enough space in the walls to run them permanently from the main HT room so that they can work as the Zone 3. I already have a 5.2.4 Atmos set-up in the main room along with Paradigm Monitor 11v7 in Zone 2.
So I had thought about a bluetooth speaker, tried the JBL Charge 5 for $250, lot of money - sound is fairly decent and it's waterproof but still, a lot of money. Tried this one for $88 given I already have outdoor speakers. It's actually not bad at all.
I have Acoustic Energy towers in my main room (4), Anthem MCA50 for power, Marantz AVR, 2 Paradigm Servo 15v2 subs, it's a good rig - obviously this won't hold a candle to that, but again this is a $100 pair of outdoor speakers (got them for 50% off the $200 MSRP) and an $89 little amp, what do you want?
Bluetooth pairing was easy, I had no issues streaming from my phone where I have lots of 320 Kbps mp3 files some 25' away, I set the volume to about 70% on the amp and used my phone for volume control. Had the treble around 40% and bass around 70%, treble sounded a bit distorted much above that which I thought maybe was too much signal strength resulting in distortion and blown sibilance. At the settings I was able to get a nice volume out of the speakers without distortion and had a great evening of music outside in the gorgeous 26C weather.
Why not 5-stars? Obviously the sheer output power isn't 100W RMS, it's probably 40-50W which is decent enough for small outdoor 8 Ohm 100W speakers like my Polks. But moreso, my banana plugs didn't sit snugly in the unit, so I had to use bare wire. The holes for this are too small for anything bigger than AWG16 and even that is super snug and requires you get the wire perfectly at how it would be when it's just stripped. If you have shaky hands, forgetaboutit! It would be nice if it the holes were big enough to accomodate 12AWG cabling in case you're doing nice long 30-40' runs to the corners of your garden for a real spacious stereo sound. Anyway, minor nitpicks but worthy of 1-star reduction.
No plans to return this, will make a great outdoor option whenever I need it.
