With the death of physical music formats all but complete it would be fair to say the last days of stereos with CD players is almost upon us, too. Just go into your local electric retailer and you’d be hard pressed to find anything that looks like mini stereo, let alone something that plays CDs.
With that the stereo market has morphed into the speaker market, and in turn brought with it a myriad of portable speakers, multi-room audio systems and wireless solutions that have almost nothing in common with what we used to buy 10 years ago.
The new Spaced360 wireless speaker falls very much into the latter category; there’s no CD player, no screen, hell, it doesn’t even look like a speaker at first glance. Looks-wise it falls somewhere between a metallic UFO and a 23rd century boomerang of sorts.
Made up of three 2-inch drivers and three bass grills, the new speaker connects to any device that can handle Bluetooth. Simply press the button on the top, activate Bluetooth on your phone, tablet or computer and you’re done – it’s really is that easy.
What makes this solution so good is the you don’t have to use one of those annoying separate apps to access your music (yes, were talking about you Sonos). This means no service is off limits. In fact when we used the speaker for a week we were pleasantly surprise to hear the taps of a text message coming out of the speakers from our iPhone. Basically the Spaced360 outputs all sounds from said connected device, no matter what source; whether its iTunes, Soundcloud, apps, basically everything.
Retailing for £250, it’s clear Spaced360 is aimed at the higher end of the portable speaker market, and is in direct competition with behemoths like Bose and to a lesser extent Sonos.
Every speaker lives and dies by it’s sound quality and on the whole we were impressed with what the Spaced360 could achieve. The highs are clear without being too piercing, mids are warm and punchy, and the three bass grills offer a decent amount of low-end without muddying the overall sound quality too much.
Where the Spaced360 starts to make real sense is its portability. The speaker comes equipped with a lithium-ion battery that will keep the music playing for 9 hours, and can be fully recharged in just 2 hours. Elsewhere you’ll find a clever charging disc that the speaker simply sits upon to recharge, it’s not wireless but it is a nice touch . There’s also NFC pairing if your device supports it and there’s also a AUX input in case you don’t have Bluetooth.
Overall the Spaced360 gets a lot right for a first attempt; setup is a breeze, build quality is really good, and the sound quality is more than admirable considering its portability and size.
HBF Rating 4/5
