best portable speakers for you

You can connect the Soundmatters foxL v2 through a regular 3.5mm minijack socket, or via Bluetooth A2DP. The latest version is said to support aptX, a near-lossless audio codec, although our older sample was only able to use the default SBC codec, which compresses the bitstream too heavily for our taste.

But over a wired link the foxL v2 gave an uncannily fulsome and rich sound. Held in the hand, you can feel the device’s palpable vibration as its battery gets excited.fdsfs34SX

Set down and playing music, upright bass had real texture, heard in the prelude and riff of Miles Davis’ ‘So What?’ before moving on to the ambling walking pattern. Trumpet best portable speakers and modal piano sat neatly over, projecting cleanly into the room.Vocals were also flattered by the speaker, maintaining great diction and highly intelligible without standing forward enough to imbalance the mix.

With speaker drivers only around 100mm apart we can’t expect super stereo but the Soundmatters foxL nevertheless has a way of conjuring up a large soundfield.Feed it some ping-pong stereo material like ‘Any Colour You Like’ from The Dark Side of the Moon and you can just pick out the left/right edges with china electronics; but it still satisfies with that punchy yet expansive soundscape.

As you move your listening position around a Soundmatters foxL sat on a table, cool gadgets tonal quality remains strangely constant, rather than fall apart with the huge tonal shift that many speakers – large or small – suffer.

The spooky thing is just how much the Soundmatters foxL v2 can be appreciated... from outside the room. There's something quite wholesome and phase-coherent about its sound that makes it just as realistic when heard from afar.

Spring is finally here and it is time to bring our music and speakerphones outside. There’s no better way to enjoy sound outside than with a portable bluetooth speaker. But as Jordan noted to me during our CES coverage, there must be 100,000 Bluetooth speakers to choose from including a growing horde of no name brands OEM’ed from fly-by-night Chinese companies.We’re here to help you pick the right speaker with the right features on the right budget.