Author: am
Rating: 5
Review: Got on Black Friday deal so was an excellent price but things cost what they Cost and value is relative but even full price I'd be happy not as happy but happy OK so it's quite small not tiny and belts out good amount of sound Not sure it's party loud but definitely at home or bbq loud and a good clear sound Bough because my daughter had one so new I'd be happy. Arrived, opened and connected to my phone in seconds and started playing So from doorstep to listening under 5 mins so even for a luddite like me so easy. Not had mine long but from experience the battery life is pretty Good will easily out last an evenings listening but you can listen while charging So no real drama there and will charge or at least get enough power From a car charger to play so would dofor long journeys if you can't connect Your phone to the radio and want your music. It's light and portable and from i wouldnt make a habit of it but from my daughters experience it will Withstand the odd drop. Def recomend
Author: Lardy707
Rating: 1
Review: It baffles me how the Flip 5 has gained so many glowing reviews. Firstly, beware of the false statement: "Experience impressive STEREO sound with your all-weather companion" – on receiving my Flip 5, I found that the unit has a single driver & is MONO. Nothing wrong with mono (older music from the Beatles to Miles Davis can sound fantastic in their original mono format). However, some very popular genres of more modern music which may be densely layered with hard L-R panning, double tracked guitars etc. will nearly always sound awful and muddy when summed to one speaker. With stereo panning in particular, the whole mix of an album is often out-of-whack when squeezed into mono as the central audio (vocals, snare, bass) can overwhelm any instruments that are panned left & right (central audio gets raised by a few db – more than enough to ruin a mix!). Sometimes, vital things that are heard perfectly in stereo will totally disappear with just one speaker, resulting in some major albums that will just sound either weird or unlistenable. Despite many producers’ best efforts to avoid this, you will always at some point hear “phasing” issues when listening to stereo albums in mono too. How so many consumers have regressed to accepting such low audio quality over the past few years (mp3, 99% of streaming, bluetooth headphones etc.) is very sad. Having said that, there are some very nice stereo portable speakers on the market for a similar price. Despite my mono issue, this isn’t one of them though. The speaker uses a kind of noise gate where you can hear a funny clicking/static sound when moving from track to track, or pressing play or pause (from reading info on forums online, this issue wasn’t apparent in earlier firmware versions). Effectively, this is an auto audio on/off switch. I think this has been included as the unit is noisy. There is a background noise floor which is very distinct during quieter passages of music (listening to dynamic classical music on this speaker would be a total no-no). You can put your ear to the speaker and clearly hear how the noise gate kicks in when you pause a track – a split second of hiss before it kicks into silence, along with a static click. Any album where tracks blend into each other; classic Pink Floyd for example, live albums, classical concertos etc. would be extremely distracting where each track is met with a bit of a click when the music is playing. I haven’t found this issue when sampling any other bluetooth speaker on the market. An inexcusable design flaw. Unlike JBL’s main competitors, not including an AUX input as an option for consumers is another negative as bluetooth cannot stream the bitrate of HI-RES or high CD-quality audio files like FLAC or WAV to this unit. Similar to the mp3 format setting quality back by years, general bluetooth at this stage (barring Sony’s highly impressive LDAC) is purely a convenience (for those that consider wires/cables a major problem) and is detrimental to the final audio output. It’s estimated that this will only bother less than 10% of the music listening public but everybody, in my opinion, should be catered for by any brand that wants to be taken seriously. As somebody who works in the industry, I will be contacting JBL themselves with these issues in more detail as, being a big player in the market, I would love for them to eventually produce a speaker unit that delivers the audio quality that musicians and bands deserve for their audience. Like a certain infamous major brand of headphones that we all know, putting all effort into delivering as much faux bass as possible into a little unit does not equal nice audio “quality.” Very disappointed.
