Thanks for tuning in
today we're going to be reviewing the
Loud Bicycle Loud Mini
bike horn.
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As a cyclist it can be scary to share
the road with cars as most people are
too distracted on their cell phones
to pay much attention to the road. Even
with bright lights and reflective gear
it's easy to be overlooked.
That's what brings us to today's review
we're going to be looking at the Loud
Bicycle Loud Mini bike horn which is
designed to make sure you're not only
seen but you're also heard on the road.
Now packaging wise pretty simple you
just have a cardboard box
not much on here. You have the loud
bicycle logo,
Loud Mini and their website and then not
much else.
I'll go ahead and take it out of the box
and while I do that we'll go over the specs.
Retail price on this is $149.
This is a 125 decibel horn which is
extremely loud.
It has a 500 milliamp lithium ion
battery
and what's interesting is they claim it
has 480 seconds of honking
per full charge which is about four
months of typical use. It's usb
rechargeable and has an all-weather
design
and it has a gopro style mount which is
really cool to see on this type of
product.
Now inside the box what we get are some
stickers which is always nice.
We get a charging cable and what's
interesting this is the older i think
serial style usb port
and you get the mount. Now this is pretty
huge as you can tell
so the mount itself comes with a little
padding to accommodate different
handlebar diameters a little
mount here and this has the gopro style
mount on there
with either the bolt or a thumb screw as
well as a little allen wrench
for the attached bolt.
You get a separate remote button it's a
wired button
and this attaches to the horn and lets
you mount this somewhere closer to
handlebar.
You get the horn itself which is massive
it's pretty hilariously large.
This actually uses dual diaphragm horns
that you actually find in a real car so
it's repackaged with the battery
enclosed and
get the cable sticking out.
You get the user manual which is always
nice to have considering
the complexity of this and one of our
favorite features
is this nice little graphic poster that
folds out here.
Despite being a 125 decibel horn
this is actually called the nice cycling
and it has some nice tips in here so as
you can see
it tells you to make sure you ride with
the flow traffic to
be safe. Make sure you're on the right
side of the road and
use hand signals and little tips like
that
so you don't want to just be honking at
people you also want to be riding
defensively of course.
Now let's take a second to look at the
weight of the Mini Horn.
Now even though they call this the mini
horn it's obviously quite large,
it's bigger than my hand it looks more
like a speaker actually.
So putting that on the scale that comes
in at 414 grams for just the
horn. If we add the little remote button
that's 20 grams and then the included
mount
with the little rubber grip is 34 grams
so fairly heavy overall.
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Now let's go over the fit and finish of
the Loud Mini horn.
What really sets this bike horn apart
from the electronic horns or bike bells
on the market
is that this sounds like a car horn
because it is a car horn.
For reference here this is one of the
horns out of my Mazda Miata
and you can see it's a diaphragm style
horn. What
Loud Bicycle has done they basically
take in two of these which
you typically have in your car placed it
in a housing and
packaged with a battery and made it bike
friendly with a gopro mount so really
innovative.
It's not particularly practical as you
can see the diaphragm style is quite big
and it's also heavy as well which is
why this thing weighs so much
but again it's very nice to have a horn
that actually sounds like a horn. A lot
of the electronic horns on the market
sound more like fire alarm so
they're more confusing than anything to
hear behind you.
now in terms of design it's pretty
simple the housing is a triangle shape
it looks a lot more like a
computer speaker than an actual bike
horn.
You'd mount this upside down on the
mount.
You have the dual horns here, you want to
try to point these forward but you can
mount this in different ways.
They offer different housing covers that
let you do
different colors on here so you can
remove this with the bolts.
They're about 26 dollars and there's a
variety of colors available.
On the back you have the usb charging
port.
Now Loud Bicycle doesn't have an
official IPXX rating for the
waterproofing but they do claim it's all
weatherproof.
You don't want to leave this out in
freezing weather or cold
but you can it should be able to handle
rainy weather no problem.
You also have this little port here and
this is for the button
so this is a little velcro button that
you can attach closer to handlebar or
stem.
Now unlike a car horn where you can sort
of modulate the pressure
this one's just on or off so that's one
downside there's only one horn setting
here.
It would have been nice to see a trail
setting and a car setting
maybe where it'd run both or single
instead
but if you want to be a little more
friendly on the trail although I don't
recommend using this on trail. You can do
a short
click or really lay into it if you have
a lot of road rage or someone's about to
cut you off.
So you do have a little bit of control.
The length of this cable is quite
long so
you can mount this in a convenient spot.
The included mount is a little bit small
two bolts just gopro on here the nice
thing is since it's gopro
you can actually attach this anywhere
you want or use different gopro mounts.
They also have a theft resistant
version bolt
to make it a little more difficult to
steal as the
thumb screw is really easy to take and
even with this if you had a simple allen
tool you could take this off.
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Here we have the horn mounted on the
bike, I've got the button here and you
can see you can sort of tap it
if you're really gentle with it to
modulate the sound otherwise
it's very loud. This can easily be
adjusted with the nice velcro strap
I've got to then run to the actual horn
here.
You can see with the horn I've
mounted on my own front mount instead of
the supplied one
and the great thing about this is
because it's GoPro adaptable you can use
any mount on the market
so i really like this one because it
works quite well and it still lets you
put a light on top or a computer
but as you can see it is quite chunky.
Even though it's called mini
it's a very large piece. Now let's
hear the horn from a distance what i'm
going to do here is ride really far away
and then honk the horn as i approach and
as you'll hear
it's pretty loud even from several cars
away so i'll definitely grab attention.
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Now let's go over the pros and cons for
the Loud Mini horn. What we like about it
is that it's extremely loud
at 125 decibels, everyone will hear you
when you honk it
and it also sounds like an actual car
horn unlike electronic horns which sound
more like fire alarms.
We also like the fact that it's GoPro
compatible mount design.
That means you can use a lot of
accessories already on the market
if you need to have a more creative
mounting for the horn.
Some of the cons for it is the fact that
it has quite a bulky form factor. It
takes up a lot of space and drivers
might not expect the horn sound from
your bike so you have to use it with
caution and assume
drivers will still cut you off. It also
lacks a battery status indicator
which means you do have to be careful
about the battery charge to ensure
there's enough charge there
so that when you actually want to use it
it has enough battery to honk.
Taking everything into account would
give the horn a 7.8 out of 10. This
really is the ultimate bike horn
it's pretty large and expensive but if
you spend a lot of time in traffic this
can be a big lifesaver.
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This is The Sweet Cyclist reminding you
to enjoy the ride!
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