Whether you’re sitting in the garden or going on vacation: a Bluetooth speaker is essential for any music lover who sometimes wants to play music outside the door. Don’t have such a wireless speaker yet, but are you considering buying one? Then it is useful to pay attention to a few points.
1. Specifications
The audio quality should be an important part in your search for a bluetooth speaker. In this light, you often come across the term frequency range. This says something about the bandwidth between the lowest and highest frequency that can be reproduced by a speaker. Usually this range is between 20Hz and 20,000Hz, these are tones that you can still hear with the ear. You can’t hear sounds below 20Hz so much, but you can feel them. This may be especially important if you value music with deep bass tones.
If you want music to sound crystal clear with a lot of detail, it is important that your speaker supports wireless audio coding such as aptX. With aptX you can stream music in high quality, without any delay in the sound. You can recognize this feature by the aptX lettering on the device. There are not yet many speakers that support aptX. A good alternative can be to choose a speaker with which you can listen to music via WiFi.
You may also want a bluetooth speaker that you can connect to other, similar speakers, so that you get stereo sound. Think of the well-known Sonos systems. This is especially important if you want to listen to music at home.
Also check whether the manufacturer of the bluetooth speaker has its own app. In such an app you can often make many adjustments to the sound.
2. Design
Many people will be looking for a bluetooth speaker for outdoor use. In this case, it is of course important that the speaker is robust. For example, does the speaker have rubber ends, so it won’t be damaged if you drop it once? And how heavy is the speaker? You don’t want your bag or suitcase to suddenly become very heavy when you go out.
Perhaps even more important is whether the speaker can withstand a little water. You can see this from the IP value. For example, the device may have IP20, which means that it is dustproof. IP68 is then not only dustproof, but also protects reasonably well against water. If you lie in the pool and drop your speaker in it, that’s not a disaster.
3. Battery
If you want your speaker to last for a long time, a good battery is important. Larger speakers often last a little longer, but nowadays you can go ahead with smaller models. Make sure that the battery lasts for at least ten hours and that the device supports USB-C so that you can charge quickly. You can even charge some speakers wirelessly.
The support for bluetooth 5 is also interesting, because there can be 120 meters between the connection with, for example, your phone and the speaker. With bluetooth 4.2, the maximum distance is only 30 meters.
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