Perhaps one reason why I so enjoyed the Ecoxgear EcoEdge+ waterproof Bluetooth LED lit speaker was that it’s a flattish square. Review: Ecoxgear EcoEdge+ waterproof Bluetooth LED lit speaker : China About: Ecoxgear is an American company based in San Diego. Without taking formal measurements, I’m going to estimate that the Ecoboulder+ could handily accommodate about sixty Ecoxgear EcoEdge+ speakers.
Specifically, it has an IP67 rating, which means you can drop it in the drink for up to half an hour … so long as it doesn’t go more than a metre deep. Twenty hours of operation would suggest an average draw of a bit under 0.6 watts, which seems about right.
On one side are a bunch of buttons for on/off, volume, play/pause, track skipping, LED light control (more on that later) and even for combining with another speaker from the same stable to operate as a stereo pair. Ecoxgear sells some not unreasonably priced suction mounts, plus one for the handlebars of your pushbike! Underneath a waterproof silicone panel, alongside the Micro-B USB port for charging, is a 3.5mm analogue input.
As I’m sitting here in my office, I’m right in front of a pair of (presently silent) $2,000+ speakers, compact models driven by 125-watt per channel amplifier, with an $800 subwoofer under my desk to fill in the bass solidly down to 30 hertz. Over to the left at the front of my office is a $5,000 audiophile amplifier attached to a pair of 70Kg, 1.5-metre floorstanding loudspeakers which are perfectly happy delivering bass all the way down to 20 hertz. Over to the right is a 7 x 105 watts Denon home theatre receiver with, well, seven speakers attached, plus a 15-inch subwoofer with a response I’ve measured flat to 16 hertz.
For example, the brief bass solo towards the end of “I Am One” on Smashing Pumpkins’ album Gish was clean and suggested more than enough to allow one to hear/imagine the full performance. If a speaker is designed for outdoors, a bit more treble is usually a good thing. You can invoke your phone’s smart assistant by holding down one of the buttons for two seconds. It works perfectly well, but it turns out that two seconds it quite a long time to be holding down a stiffly sprung button.
Here’s the note I wrote about the female voice that announces status from the speaker: “8-bit ‘power on, connection successful’ voice, sounds like 11kHz sampling, too.” It would be silly to measure such a thing … but, well, the question nagged at me a little. After perhaps five hours or use, I finally discovered what the four green LEDs were on the top of the unit: battery level.
(Digression: DSE eventually decided to become just another consumer electronics retailer … and disappeared within a few years. The two main things in demand were strobe lights and Musicolor kits.
You’d plug a blue, red and yellow floodlight into those sockets, and you’d have a pulsing, colourful backlight keyed to the music.
Coming back to the Ecoxgear EcoEdge+ speaker, that “LED lit” thing in the product name is kind of like the Musicolor. Gadgetguy’s Take – the Ecoxgear EcoEdge+ is a fun, listenable and remarkably robust Bluetooth speaker
EcoEdge +
(Be careful, the charging caps and waterproof compartment must be closed properly to keep the EcoEdge+ watertight.) The IPX7 Waterproof Standard means that the product is protected against water immersion. This means that our products, including the EcoDrift can withstand use in the water. The connectivity for the EcoEdge is designed and tested to far exceed 30 feet (up to 100ft) from your Bluetooth device.
Walls, leaded glass windows and metal studs inside the drywall will affect the range operation. Try lowering the volume control of your connected device or musical instrument.
EcoXGear EcoDrift Review
Available in black, blue, gray, green, orange, and white models, the EcoDrift delivers audio via a single 15-watt driver that’s aided by a passive subwoofer. EcoXGear estimates the EcoDrift’s battery life to be roughly 15 hours, but your results will vary with your volume levels and your mix of wired and wireless playback. On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” the EcoDrift delivers a decent sense of bass depth for its size, but obviously you’re not going to be fooled into thinking there’s a subwoofer hidden nearby. On Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the kick drum loop receives the ideal amount of high-mid presence, allowing its attack to retain its sharpness and punch through the layers of the beat as one of the most prominent aspects of the mix. The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat are more implied than delivered—we get their raspy top notes but hear little of the bass depth that a system with actual woofers can project. While the vocals are delivered with solid high-mid clarity, at higher volumes, we can hear the digital signal processing (DSP) working overtime to tamp down the dynamics and prevent distortion. Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene in John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary, sound bright, keeping the spotlight firmly on the higher register brass, strings, and vocals. The lower register instrumentation on this track isn’t pushed forward in the mix like it is on bass-forward speakers, and the result is a thin sound that lacks much in the way of richness.
The Bottom Line The EcoXGear EcoDrift speaker delivers decent audio performance for its size, but its real strength is its rugged, waterproof design.
SoundStageXperience.com – Grace Digital EcoXGear EcoEdge Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker
In Grace’s ads, the EcoEdge’s main selling point is its claimed toughness, and it looks the part — like a bulldog pup. At $79.99 USD, it might well appeal to a user who wants a small, virtually indestructible Bluetooth speaker but isn’t picky about sound quality. In plastic baggies are a carabineer clip that can be screwed into the 1/4” universal mount on the bottom of the speaker, and a USB-to-Micro-USB charging cord.
Also included are a warranty card and a small, very useful User Guide printed on heavy paper. A green one above the on/off button indicates power on; the LED above the Bluetooth button flashes blue while connecting, then solid blue when connection is completed; and at bottom right is a row of four green LEDs indicating the level of battery charge. On the positive side, it paired quickly and easily with my Benji portable music player. There are many ways to pick up and carry the EcoEdge in one hand, including by its carbineer clip, but I never found one that felt entirely comfortable. The universal mount is a nice idea — I can imagine affixing an EcoEdge to a bike’s handlebars or the prow of a canoe, as pictured in EcoXGear ads. Along the way are a number of voice prompts, and the speakers revert to single-speaker mono play after they’ve been turned off and back on again. Grace promises a range of Bluetooth operation of 100’, but in my house I got only about 28’ — no doubt the results would have been better outdoors, where there’s less in the signal’s way.
The title track of the soundtrack of the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine (16-bit/44.1kHz ALAC, Apple) is very busy, with all sorts of percussion and sound effects. The EcoEdge got the basic thrust of the voices, but fine details went sadly missing, and the overall effect was a bit harsh.
The title track of Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball (16/44.1 ALAC, Warner Bros.) fared no better. The song is thickly arranged and mixed, with an incessant drumbeat and Harris’s voice front and center.
The EcoEdge’s reproduction of it reminded me of the roller-rink music of my long-ago youth: muddy and somewhat indistinct (except for that drumbeat), with Harris’s voice fairly strident. Harshness and a lack of transparency also plagued the EcoEdge’s reproduction of classical recordings, though the bravura final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4, with all its cymbal crashes and blazing brass, sounded better than I’d expected in the recording with Vladimir Jurowski conducting the London Philharmonic (16/44.1 ALAC, LPO).
It will be good enough for the casual listener who wants only background music loud enough to punch through ambient noise, but it will disappoint anyone else. If you’ve read my previous reviews of Grace Digital products, you know that I think they make wonderful-sounding Bluetooth speakers.
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