Hi everyone. So today I'm taking a look at a Bluetooth portable speaker,
a Bluetooth portable speaker that packs a real punch.
Now this is by Reactiv Sound and this is called the R Instinct
and essentially what we get in the box is
some nice introductory material telling you how everything works,
the actual Reactiv sound unit, a really cool
little case or slipcover and
some actual accessories. Hurrah! One of the things that really annoys me
when you get some of these Bluetooth speakers etcetera is
you know, they don't give you a very good cable in the box, it's not particularly long for
charging
or they don't give you something as simple as a 3.5mm headphone jack
so that you can
jack in additional equipment as well, not just over Bluetooth but
time for the big reveal. Let's actually have a look at the Reactiv sound unit itself.
So, you can see that it's actually fairly small
but it packs a helluva sound. Now,
on the side what we have here is an auxiliary
on-off switch and your charging plug, and on the top
the Bluetooth triggering button, so you press that down to put it into Bluetooth mode,
two volume controls. It's fairly simple from the point of view
of features. Now inside this little unit
we've certainly got some serious sound quality so what I'm going to do I'm
just going to turn this on. I'm going to get my Nexus 5
and I'm just going to pop this into Bluetooth mode. Got Reactiv
already set up there. The pairing process is really straightforward
you press down the Bluetooth button on the top of here
for six seconds, that will put it into pairing mode the obviously do the connection on your smartphone
and off it will go. So dead easy to do that. Now,
just for argument's sake I'm going to pop a
track on. Now bearing in mind that you're hearing the audio quality kind of second
and third-hand.
It's being picked up by my camera, it's then having to be compressed by YouTube
and then you're listening to it
back over your headphones or speakers so audio quality
is not going to be the same as what I'm hearing but it should give you a
fairly good idea. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a quick
little bit of track. Obviously from a copyright point of view I can only play a very short
piece of each track without breaking copyright but this should give us
just enough so you can kind of hear.
Now at the moment the speaker is obviously facing the wrong way as it were
it's facing up towards the camera and actually on the bottom you have a subwoofer
like set the egress holes here and this is where your sub kicks from.
Now, the bass quality is really good.
You get quite a nice thumping bass sound out of it which is
kind of to be expected given how big the kind of bass egress are on the bottom of
this
but the main problem I had
with this particular device was these rubber feet
just aren't good enough to actually keep the Reactiv unit
stable under heavy bass. So unfortunately what you get
is let me just quickly pop something on some heavy bass...
So as you can see, the main problem this has is when it's kicking out heavy bass
what I did there was actually turned up the equaliser on Google music to really
push the bass as hard as possible. These little rubber feet
are just not capable of keeping it stable. Now what we found was
if you get a little bit of rubber matting, you can pick that up for about a metre of stuff
for a quid, pop that underneath it and what will happen is it keeps it nice and
stable. Essentially the rubber feet are just kind of vibrating
across the table surface. If you put an extra piece of rubber matting under there
it keeps it perfectly stable and actually reduces some of that vibration coming from
the
subwoofer kind of pounding in against the desk. Overall,
for the price of this particular unit which is £99 it
really is a cracking speaker. The only downside of it is
that like I say, those rubber feet don't keep it particularly stable
under really heavy bass. The battery life is supposed to be around
6-8 hours, I'm still trying to get this battery to die,
and that's a week later and I've been using it for 4-5 hours a day.
It's quite remarkable actually. I don't know what kind of battery they've put in it but
something tells me it's probably running on like uranium or something,
it just seems to keep going and going and going, even with the Bluetooth running
full-tilt, the bass and the volume controls ranked right up,
it still will not kill this battery so congratulations to Reactiv for creating
such a great little product.
The only thing I would say is they just need to improve these feet really
but otherwise this is a great little product. If you're in the market for a Bluetooth
speaker that really puts out some juice,
this is the one to go for.