Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Initial Impressions: There is much to like about the Marley Get Together speaker. It feels solid, the bamboo half inch thick front baffle with laser etched logo screams class. The controls are minimalistic, four buttons and a light, yet they are intuitive. Push power, push pair button, connect on your device. While the 3.5" drivers are exposed, with the beveled opening the whole assembly looks like a piece of art. Possibly a 1" mesh black grid wire may have complemented the baffle and protected the drivers, but that is subjective. I like it the way it is. The controls are dependent on what device you hook it up to, with what version of bluetooth. With a LG phone and Ipad Air, both the device and the speaker volume controls work. With a 2nd gen Ipod Touch and a Sony Android media player only the volume controls on the speaker worked (hence a small remote control would be useful). Performance: The speaker has an internal battery, good for up to 8 hours when charged. It did not come charged, so the tests were done using the supplied power adapter. By the way the speaker has a USB port for charging the music device. As mentioned in the manual, it may not supply enough power to fully charge the device. The Ipod Touch was fully happy and showed charging, while the Ipad showed Not charging, but was, just very slowly. I did note some drop in volume when switching from power supply to the battery. When I initially played some music the first impression was wow, this is loud. The second impression was that while there was much apparent bass, it was somewhat boomy. The highs were brilliant, and the midrange somewhat restrained. This bothered me as this did not fit in with the overall quality of the speaker. I wound up experimenting with various placements of the speaker and with plugging the rear bass reflex port with poly fiber pillow stuffing (an old loudspeaker builders trick). I am enclosing a photo of what I did, and a test plot of why I did it. Basically if you place the speaker as supplied less than 12" from a wall, you get two strong frequency peaks, one at 130 Hz and one at 210 Hz, and so the speaker sounds boomy. When placed away from the wall, with the port "stuffed", the peaks are mostly tamed. You will not get deep bass, these are after all only 3.5" drivers, I would call it fairly decent response from 90Hz to 19,500Hz. I actually got the best sound when I used these speakers outdoors, where also I was surprised that the bluetooth range was out to 50ft. In summary: Great looking speaker, which when placed correctly and modified slightly, gives very creditable performance for its small size.