#21

There are social/outdoor events that encourage participants to play music, such as burn events, house parties, and hippie drum circles. I’m working on a portable solar modular setup for this kind of situation and am interested in this thread because I’m looking for good portable speakers with lower electrical use than the ones I have currently.

Also, some cultures are much more tolerant of people bringing their own music or sound with them. Take a stroll through a park in mainland China, and you’ll come across a good number of people playing their own soundtracks on their smartphones well as others with boomboxes leading synchronized dancercize routines. I found the smartphone use in particular pretty jarring when I first came across it but it seems totally acceptable in the context.

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#22

I should probably add my own experiences here too, I guess.

I’ve had a Boombotix Rex speaker for about 6 years now, which was a gift from a friend. The Bluetooth has always been a bit finicky, but it’s tended to sound decent with line in, and feels loud for how small it is, certainly better than a phone speaker, but at this point, only debatably better than the sound from an iPad Pro.

They’re a small company, which I was originally happy to support, but I had a minor issue with the way they handled a customer service request, and have since come to find their marketing rather off-putting, so I am definitely not going to buy a speaker from them again.

Over time, I’ve felt like the sound quality has degraded quite a bit. I’m not sure if this is due to speaker cone issues, or if it’s actually torn or damaged. In any case, recently the battery has stopped holding a charge all-together, so I’m in the market for something new. Line in is requisite, Bluetooth is optional (but seems to always be present on the portable speakers).

The positive words for the JBL Charge are intriguing (I’d imagine you could power a Norns from that one too?), as are those for the BeoPlay.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something about the Minirigs, but my hesitations there are mostly related to price, size, and form factor – they seem mono until you get two? It’s nice that they offer a subwoofer, but then you’ve got 3 things to remember to charge instead of 1. Anyone swearing by the Minirig Mini’s? Or have thoughts on their app?

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#23

I was gifted a JBL PULSE 3. It has a cool light, Bluetooth, and a mini audio input. It lasts long if you dim the light and is pretty loud and has some bass but like all little speakers the bass isn’t accurate. Not sure I would of ever bought it on my own but it has gotten lots of use and I bring it around for my mobile set up. Here is it in use :point_down:t2:

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#24

Another vote for the Beoplay A1.

Sound is really warm, and it’ll happily fill a medium sized room. In fact it has been my main speaker for the past 2½ years; I bought for an itinerant work contract, but never felt a strong need to replace it with something more substantial.

The frustrating-at-the-time USB-C charging now seems remarkably forward thinking (especially for an audio company). And the thing is just quite beautiful in material and build.

Downsides are an annoyingly short (non-adjustable) auto power off, and squishy intactile buttons. It also has a degree of heft, but that mainly makes it feel solid.

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#25

I can give an anti-recommendation at least!

The JBL Flip 4 is a nice little speaker, but is very aggressive on saving energy. If it doesn’t get any audio input past a certain volume level for five seconds, it puts itself in a temporary hibernation. It will then “wake up” if you give it more audio input, but the first note you play will be partially gated (is that a thing?). Sort of fades in.

Here’s a video I made for JBL support to show the behavior (who said it was impossible to disable)

So it’s fine if you have a say loop based workflow with regular input (sound firing at least every five seconds), but at the time I was noodling on some ambient guitar stuff with a lot of silence and it was terrible for that.

No clue if other JBL battery powered speakers have this feature, I’d guess probably though.

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#26

That’s super helpful, thanks

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#27

Very interested in this topic. need something very portable (ie not a guitar amp with big battery) that can actually run at guerilla gig volume for many hours) Bought some expensive high end one to use for roaming performances at Supernormal a couple of years back but it was really bad, ran out of battery after like an hour despite supposedly being able to last 8 or something. I forget the brand right now. Ended up returning it and buying a no-name “DKnight Big MagicBox” from china for like 1/10th the price and it’s louder, as good sounding and lasts for ages. But still after something a step up in size/wattage to go bother people with harsh noise at outdoor free parties etc.

saw a hilarious fake JBL one in a local shop - looked identical but just had a blank orange rectangle where the logo should be

#28

For something like this, I would almost even be inclined to recommend the Roland Cube… It’s bass response is pretty poor, but it gets loud, and runs off AA batteries, so even if you run out, you don’t have to sit and wait for it to recharge. The size of it is more like a Radio Raheem boom box than one of these smaller options, but it’s still something you can carry on a walkabout. The line-in unfortunately doesn’t have a direct volume control, so you have to crank it on whatever the input is, or use the guitar input, but I had a pretty good experience using it to bother people with harsh noise (and dark goth techno) at a party once.

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#29

Next step up from the Cube is something from the Samson Expedition series. Even the smallest model has reasonable bass and gets loud. They are tough as hell too–I bought one for a friend who, among many other places, took it up to the Standing Rock protests for the whole winter. She left it behind but then got it back months later, and it still worked great!

I have a pair of the older XP40iw models, which are quite a bit heavier (~16 pounds) & larger, and I have used them as a small PA system by themselves.

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#30

Some instruments seem to want to dialogue with the world outside, or at least they trick us into thinking that’s what they want. This seems especially true of little droney electronics with built in speakers.

Michael Waisvisz, inventor of the Cracklebox, would take his larger Crackle Synthesizer out into the woods late at night. I think I understand this urge, because I have played my Cracklebox for flocks of feeding crows and while sitting along creeks and lake shores.

Michael Tyas walks in the woods with his homemade axoloti-based ribbon synth and Smokey Quartz sits on boulders and under trees playing his Tocante Phashi. A transistor radio plays what it wants without regard to its surroundings, but someone playing an ambientish instrument can add to the immediate soundscape as an extension of their being present and listening, I think.

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#31

But besides taking standalone electronic instruments into nature, on several occasions I’ve taken my busking setup, with a couple loud portable speakers (Oontz Angle 3 Ultras, which work quite well for this), several electronic noise makers, a mixer and effects, into business districts to make noise.

No one has told to stop making that racket (except one nice woman whose apartment was overhead and wanted to nap that afternoon), but where is the line between noise pollution and urban electronic soundscape?

Playing electronic music in public is a disruption, just as a parade or protest march is a disruption to free flow of traffic. And there’s a constant tension in the city between the forces of disruption and the advocates of business-as-usual. I’m on one extreme and think occasional disruption is a plus that enlivens a city, but I also recognize there’s a selfishness when one’s self-expression imposes on others.

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#32

My curmudgeonly take: cars are the biggest public disruption in terms of noise pollution (not to mention air pollution), and yet, most people seem to forget that they’re there, since they’re so ubiquitous.

Better to counter-pollute with pleasant noises :wink:

(Also, my primary use case for these recommendations really is “hotel rooms, and when i’m visiting family and whatnot”)

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#33

I recently bought some IK Multimedia Micro monitors. They are excellent!! Roughly 1/8th the size of my existing budget monitors, and I see no reason to go back.

Putting out ~50Hz, there is a suprising amount of bass coming from these.

Large amount of measurements here: http://noaudiophile.com/IK_Multimedia_iLoudMM/

Both Bluetooth and wired inputs. The only downside is digital noise when using the bluetooth :frowning:

Bargain for their performance and size!

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#34

I have a pair of the iLoud Micro Monitors too, and it’s amazing how full they sound given how tiny they are. I really like them as monitors or for general listening. The Bluetooth noise is a drag, not so bad that I never ever use them with Bluetooth, but bad enough that I usually avoid it.

No battery power, of course, and the GIANT cable that runs to the passive speaker is pretty awkward, so I wouldn’t really recommend them for an outdoor setup. They’re also not all that loud (despite the name), if that matters — I can imagine using them for a literal ambient performance where the goal was to provide background music somewhere, but I think they’d feel pretty quiet / struggle to “project” to a room full of people.

That said, when you can hear them well, they really do sound great. I don’t have experience with the Minirigs or other battery-powered units others have mentioned, so I don’t know how they compare — I’d be curious to hear from anyone who’s used or heard both.

#35

You will get no argument from me on there needing to be less cars around.

To clarify I am not completely opposed to anyone making any kind of noise in public places/open air or anything like this. I think there are places and times where it can be a great thing, and I encourage the active use and occupation of public space by all types of people with the hope of expanding it further to reduce corporatized/privatized space. I do however think this is sometimes worth a little self-reflection - are you contributing to/interacting with an environment or detracting from it? Are you doing this out of the desire to share something with people or as the term has been used several times in this thread to annoy people. Even if that is the case I do think there are appropriate times for that too such as sonic forms of protest - just annoy the right people, like the cops :slight_smile:

I’m also more than willing to admit that part of this comes from my own inability to understand why everyone needs to make every aspect of their work so incredibly public- in my eyes this is often more chasing after likes, follows, and content production than producing well thought out and executed and interesting new ideas. If someone produces a body of site-specific work that directly addresses various aspects of environmental performance this is interesting and valid to me. Instagram clips of some twee little scene of someone doing what was already not particularly exciting in a home studio situation, yeeeeah not so much. I don’t want to discourage enthusiasm and experimentation, rather to encourage people to think just as much about WHY as HOW. In the age of youtube tutorial glut and what I would consider stylistic exercises more than anything this line of thinking is missing from a lot of experimental/electronic music in general. I was even at a concert in a large park last night, some of it was interesting and worked for me, though a lot of it not so much- translating exactly what we do in clubs/concerts/studios to outside without thought for how the environment is both impacted but also interacts with and affects what we do in it to me is only doing half the artistic work. Much like trying to break down the often overused white cube gallery situation if anything I’d love to see more work in this vein that actually works with these considerations.

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#36

Back into theme, I went to the store yesterday to test listen to a few things. They didn’t have the B&O speakers at the store I went to, so I just poked around with Bose, UE and JBL.

Surprisingly, of what I listened to yesterday, the JBL Flip 4 sounded best, making that gate/timeout thing all the more frustrating.

Then I found this binaural comparison video, which is now convincing me that maybe I should be more thoroughly consider a single minirig as a starting point.

#37

after reading what @robbie and @autreland wrote about b&o speakers, i went to their store in my city to check out their whole range in person. regarding the a1, and with all due respect to their opinions in this thread, i think my minirig 3 is much louder and clearer sounding. in fact i was kind of surprised when i asked the salesperson to turn the volume all the way up on the a1 and i kept waiting until i realized that it was already turned all the way up. for sure it can easily have something to do with the acoustics of the store vs. the acoustics of my living room where i usually hear my MR3.

but recently i’ve been needing something better than the MR3 to use outdoors. i belong to a facebook group which is for street performers and there is a recent thread there about best portable speakers. it seems that the bose s1 is the most widely recommended, but then i came across another suggestion which seems even better: the MK4 from stuffandthings.co.uk

http://stuffandthings.co.uk/pa_mk4.htm

and the MK2.5 also looks like it could be the solution i’m looking for!

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#38

if people really want to use bluetooth I guess this counts for nothing, but… I looked at a few teardown photos of a lot of these speakers and they looks pretty damn involved to me. needing all the extra electronics around the bluetooth capability since you need the electronics for receiving, decoding, blah blah, means a lot more active electronics compared to just a straight up amplifier. I don’t know much about these chips, but if battery life is a concern I would think just going for the luddite cable route and skipping all the bluetooth would save significant drain on the battery. Also making DIY solutions that way is much easier.

From my brief looking around it seems these probably all use some variation of class D amps. Class D amps can be had pretty cheaply either bought direct from China or some other electronics supplier. I use them and similar mini amps a lot for multi-channel installations. Get yourself some rechargeable or li-po/li-on batteries and a charger meant for drones or an RC car, and find some good efficient little loudspeakers and there you go. Yes, you have to make a case then too and I suppose very quickly this all adds up the about the same price or maybe even more as some $25-$120 speaker thing if you don’t source your parts direct from China, but it offers a lot more flexibility/customization since you can design various configurations, use different types of speakers, etc. If you want something more interesting you can experiment with I’d highly recommend going this route.

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#39

I’m going down a similar avenue for another project, but haven’t gotten to sound quality or enclosure yet.

Tuning the amp circuit and EQ is also a thing to worry about there.

Does anyone have enough experience with both the minirig mini and minirig 3 to compare the two?strong text

#40

minirig are the speakers to beat honestly. they’ve been making speakers since before bluetooth speakers were a thing – their mk1 at least didn’t even have bluetooth, it was just line-in.

i also have a pair of the iloud micro monitors and they’re awesome. i travel with them and they’re great for little setups in hotel rooms or whatever. i’m not doing any critical mixing on them and wouldn’t trust them for it, but for production/tracking they’re great. they have a new slightly larger speaker coming out soon which is nonetheless still portable and looks very interesting: https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/iloudmtm/

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