- I guess I'm kind of a Sony fanboy.
I got the Sony phone,
I got this big (beep) off Sony speaker,
I even got this Sony shirt.
Today, we're gonna have a look at the Sony XG300.
And if Sony's marketing has anything
actually reasonable to say,
I think it's gonna be loud more than good.
(moderate music) Sure.
We've been using this on a few ShortCircuits
actually for background noises, that kind of thing.
Simulating for ANC and all those kind
of extra headphone testy features,
the microphones and all that garbage.
God, this thing's giant.
Comes with this other little tiny box.
(plastic packet rustles)
(cardboard box thuds)
(plastic packet rustles)
It's just a USB-C power brick.
Few feet, maybe four feet, something like that.
Three amps, that's pretty good.
Five volts, three amps.
Oh yeah, the carrying handle.
So it kind of slides to the side,
it's really nice and sturdy.
There we go, we've got the aux cord in.
We've got a charge output,
so you can actually use this to charge,
I guess, other devices, maybe your phone,
something like that.
Got the USB-C, five volt in, battery care, indicate...
I don't know.
Do I hold it and it does battery care?
And then it's also got a light button,
but none of these seem to do anything right now,
'cause maybe it's not on.
(speaker thuds)
The texture wrap's quite interesting.
It's a very weird kind of weaved pattern,
and it feels incredibly tough.
I think it is some sort of cord.
The cool thing about this speaker is it's IP67 rated.
So this thing can go in a meter of water.
It's dustproof, it's everything proof.
I don't even know how they get sound out of it
if it can be fully submerged.
Sony's branding is kind of interesting,
and their marketing wank.
I think they're trying to be nice and refined,
and come off as a high-end brand.
But everything that they put into this speaker,
it seems to be designed to be loud
rather than like a quality audio product.
And I think that is exactly why this was designed.
It was designed to be a really nice robust party speaker,
loud, clear, all that type of thing.
The reflex ports on the side are nice and beefy.
You can even hear the sort of bongo effect
that you get from those.
Got a very prominent mega bass button
right on the front here.
You generally don't get that
in a refined audiophile product.
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Got a nice big power button over here.
Here we go.
Oh, got a green light.
(speaker chimes)
Ooh, made a noise.
Our app over here is the Sony Music Center.
Give Linus a little boop here.
There we are, the SRS-XG300 needs setup.
Add a new device, next.
- Bluetooth pairing.
- Bluetooth pairing, pairing.
SRS, there it is, connect.
And I think it's that easy.
It better be that easy or I'll cry.
(speaker chimes) - Bluetooth connected.
- Oh we can do LDAC for spicy music.
Immediately, we have battery display,
we can see our Bluetooth, what we're looking at.
One of the neat features that their new Sony speaker lineup
can do is group with other speakers.
So if you have a bunch of people
who have Bluetooth speakers everywhere,
or you buy six of these 'cause you have too much money,
so you could do a whole area with these.
I think we can, yeah,
Party Connect and then Stereo Pair as well.
We saw this with the LPX glass speaker.
You can check out that video too,
I did that one first.
You can use a Stereo Pair.
So if you have two of these,
you can put 'em over there and use 'em as monitors.
Or if your party's facing one direction,
you can do that type of thing too.
And then some settings.
So let's have a look at these.
We've got sound, ClearAudio+,
which I think is on at the moment.
We have sound effects, Mega Bass.
Live Sound, if you want your audio to sound distorted.
And custom.
So Custom EQ is always really nice,
but looks like they're just giving us bass,
middle and treble.
Wow, the UX in this is awful.
I have a Sony phone and it's this tallwise.
Why is it this big?
Come on, come on, man.
DJ Effect.
What the hell?
Okay, we're definitely trying that.
It looks like we can isolate certain frequencies, maybe,
and turn on a Flanger.
Cool, so we can just make the music sound worse for fun,
and piss off every single one of your guests.
And yeah, we can prioritize a connection quality,
or a stable connection.
We have little LED rings on the side of the speakers here.
Wow, there's a bunch of different settings for these.
Delightful, rave, chill.
What do you think?
Rave sounds kind of fun, hey.
We gotta play that Crab Rave.
Speakers come out this direction by the way.
It's facing away from me but it still sounds quite clear.
Just gonna point it over here.
(Crab Rave by Monstercat plays)
You know, for the first little bit,
that's actually sounding quite good.
I'm honestly very impressed.
You know, the reflex boobly bibs on the side
are bouncing a lot.
So it's obviously pushing some air.
It's rather directional, but not really.
I mean, even when it was pointing away from me,
I'm still getting some of the tweeter,
and the bass is really nice and punchy,
but it's not overpowering.
So this is on the default level.
And I think for this one,
I'm just gonna try and set the volume to maximum,
because this is supposed to be a loud speaker,
and I want it loud and I want it clear
if I'm on the beach having a good time.
So let's give that a listen to.
(Crab Rave by Monstercat plays)
Oh, it was so close, it was so close.
That's really nice and loud and it's really nice and crisp.
Unfortunately, I'm hearing a little bit
of crackle from this tweeter right over here.
So can't quite do that level of volume without distortion.
However, it's reproducing the song really, really nicely.
Let's try some of those other modes.
There's a giant mega bass button right on the front.
And I wanna push that.
(Crab Rave by Monstercat plays)
Hm, wow, that's loud.
It's not, I'm in pain, loud.
It's, "That's very loud, but I'm comfortable to listen
to that volume for probably a good while."
And I'm sitting like two feet from it.
The mega bass button though.
I'm not entirely sure if that's putting the bass
where I was expecting.
I was expecting it to be in the super low-end,
and making it sound bad.
That actually does improve a little bit
of the low-mids and some of the bass,
but in a pleasant way, which was extremely surprising.
You see mega bass plastered on the front
of a Bluetooth speaker and you expect it to just,
beats by Dr. Dre it and make it sound like (beep).
But this is good so far.
I would buy this unless it costs money.
It also has built in microphone,
and some echo cancellation stuff.
So I'm gonna give Bell a call,
and see if we can have the telephone.
Hello?
- [Bell] Hi, Dan.
Hi, Dan. - Oh, hey.
- [Bell] You sound pretty good.
You sound pretty good.
Like you're calling right through your phone
next to your head.
- I mean, I'm close to it.
You sound pretty fine too.
I'm getting some of my myself back through you now.
- [Bell] Classic.
Classic.
- But you're nice and loud.
- [Bell] Yeah, you sound all right.
Yeah, you sound all right. - Okay.
- [Bell] Bye, Dan.
Bye, Dan.
- I would never do this, goodbye.
Let's try out some of these other sound settings.
So we've tried the mega bass, which is slightly more bass.
I'm just gonna get a Sharpie and go like moderate bass.
It might be too many letters, but whatever.
Oh we've also got a Live Sound mode,
which is very, very weird because normally concerts
sound bad.
They're loud, but they're bad.
(Crab Rave by Monstercat plays)
Yeah, so that really boosted the bass a bit more,
and kind of scooped out some of the mids,
and boosted some of the highs.
So it was, yeah, much more like weird compressed sound.
I wanna hear how bad this Flanger is,
so I'm gonna just enable that.
DJ Effect, Flanger.
Give me a +20 Flanger.
Oh, hell yeah.
(distorted music plays)
Jesus (beep) Christ.
Okay, what the hell, man?
I guess a more moderate Flanger,
let's set that to two.
(Crab Rave by Monstercat plays)
There you go.
(speaker thuds)
Yeah, I want, I want.
That's two out of 20.
That's very, very ridiculous.
And then we have an Isolator,
which I assume is gonna be like a EQ filter sweep.
So if we set that to 40, I don't know.
What you guess?
High pass or band pass or low pass?
(Crab Rave by Monstercat plays)
High pass filter, okay.
Good choice.
10, so this is gonna what?
Suck all the bass out of it?
It seems to morph from a low pass filter
to a high pass filter.
So here's the high pass filter at low levels.
(Crab Rave by Monstercat plays)
Yeah, let's turn that isolator all the way back up
to like, we'll try 34 this time.
See what it does now.
(Crab Rave by Monstercat plays)
Yeah, there we go.
DJs use those effects and things
if they're bad at their job.
So this is fun and silly and I think
it's kind of cute to include.
I think it's ridiculous.
It's, you know, get drunk,
throw that on to all your friends suddenly
at the middle of the night and they'd be in stitches.
I think it's great.
I mean, for a hefty tube,
I'm actually quite impressed.
The audio quality that I'm getting out of this
is a lot better than, I think, some other Bluetooth speakers
that we've looked at, at the past and even some other ones
that we have here.
I think that's one of the reasons why we're using this
for doing our ANC testing.
It seems to have a really nice even production
of sound all the way through the spectrum,
and it can also get incredibly loud.
I still don't know how much it costs,
Bell won't tell me, but it's pretty nice.
I will tell you that.
Okay. (desk slapping)
Drum roll, here we go.
What's the price?
- [Bell] $350.
- US?
- [Bell] Yes.
- It is absolutely worth $350, US.
That's an excellent price for what this can produce.
The Sony LPX speaker where it sounded like absolute (beep).
That was also about 350 bucks.
This, 350 bucks, right in the market.
That's exactly the type of performance
that I would expect from 350 bucks.
Yeah, I think Sony hit the mark on their marketing
in a strange way by subversively saying that this was loud,
and for party goers.
The build quality feels really good,
the price seems right.
One thing that I would like is maybe a cover
for these reflex ports,
because I mean, even just seeing them makes me
just a little bit uncomfortable.
And it seems like you should subscribe to ShortCircuit.
If you wanna check out my other video
on the Sony LPX speaker,
which is about the same price of this,
and absolutely nowhere near the level of performance.
They're the same company, right?
Sony and Sony.
Then check that out.
Otherwise.
Yeah, we've got some other neat videos.