Creative Sound Blaster Roar Pro BT Speaker

Update #2, 8/21/14: Is this not social engineering? Received from Soundblaster, via email: "Like the Sound Blaster Roar? Leave us a review! Help us to spread the word by writing a review! If you enjoy the Sound Blaster Roar, we would love to have you leave a review on Amazon to help other customers like yourself make an informed decision on their next speaker purchase. By doing so, you'll receive a free bespoke Sound Blaster Roar Carry Bag worth $14.99 in appreciation for your review submission! After your review has been published, copy the URL of your review and send it to us at reviews@ctl.creative.com. In order to enjoy this offer, the last day to submit your review is 31 August 2014. Please allow us up to 14 working days to process the shipping of your carry bag; as the Sound Blaster Roar is only shipped to US addresses, the Carry Bag will only be shipped to US shipping addresses. Best Regards, The Sound Blaster Team" And, the Amazon rating system fails. D'oh. :( -------------------------------------------- After this surge of "not helpful" votes I decided to double down on my rating. I played three of my favorite tracks on lower and higher volume, with the Soundblaster Roar, the Bose Soundlink Mini, and even made a special trip back to Target to test out all of the available units there. I spent quite some time at it, playing the same tracks. After experimenting thus, I would rank the available units as follows: #1: Sony SRS-X5 ($199, ordering one immediately) #2: Bose Soundlink III ($299) #3: Bose Soundlink Mini ($199) #4: Jawbone Big Jambox ($249) #5: Sony SRS-X3 ($149) #6+: everything else, including this unit, the Creative Soundblaster Roar - nothing special, inadequate sound performance I also discovered another sound quality discrepancy: sound imaging, or, the range of angle from straight-on-center from the speaker's face, in which you can still hear good, clear sound. This one is extremely poor, not even reaching a 45-degree angle in which you can still hear the treble. Further than that from straight-on, it's just some washed-out midrange noise, with no bass or treble to speak of. This is a massive challenge for this speaker, which is not shared by any of the products named above other than, to a far lesser extent, the Jawbone. I strongly encourage you to spend some time experimenting with your music on these units at Target or Walmart prior to following the subsidized praise that this unit has received here on Amazon. Also, read some professional reviews for far more objective feedback (which, incidentally, also does not agree with the glowing praise on Amazon). On the basis of sound quality alone, this speaker is in no way competitive with any of those named above. Enjoy your Sony or Bose! :) --------------------------------------------- I must admit, I'm pretty surprised by the hype. The huge 5-star rating really put me on to this one. Even though I've spent some time in electronics stores trying out all of the aisles of options for bluetooth portable speakers, I never tried this one - I followed the stars and bought it. It MUST be good - more stars than even my Bose SoundLink Mini! I've heard some that are very good (Sony SRS X5, Bose Soundlink III and Sounlink Mini) and some that are really, really not good (just about everything else - Dre Beats, smaller Sony units, everything from Sonos, Philips, so on). I'm a bit of a sound nut, I own a great many headphones in different form factors, decent speakers, subwoofers, have just about every room in the house wired up for good sound. I do enjoy my music and I enjoy listening to it on a good device, so although I am a layperson, I'm not coming at this from the perspective of ignorance. Here's what it IS: 1) Loud enough to fill a yard, patio, large room, driveway, for good background music for a party. 2) Packed with more features than any other comparable Bluetooth speaker. (Whether these features are useful is a different issue.) 3) Decent bass (~80Hz+)-mid-treble sound from within a 2-foot range and within a relatively enclosed space. 4) Battery lasts several hours at full listening volume. What it most emphatically is NOT, which you will not get from the glowing reviews: 1) Capable of producing full-range sound, including both highest, crisp treble, and deep bass; 2) Capable of producing balanced sound, including bass response, from more than 2 feet away; I honestly can't fathom where all the enthusiasm for this unit comes from, unless it's "paid enthusiasm", which I suspect it is, at least in some cases.. I find pretty much all of the professional reviews (PCMag, TechRadar) to be more objective than the reviews on Amazon. There simply is no bass worth mentioning. Under 100Hz or so, forget it, you need to be within a foot of it to hear tones down to 50-60Hz and it simply has nothing below that. The mids and trebles are alright, but certainly nowhere near as sparkling as the SoundLink Mini. I would even venture that the Mini bests this unit in bass response; although it may not get quite as loud, the bass in the SoundBlaster Roar simply doesn't project. Even on very bass or mid-bass forward electronic or rock music, once you step a yard away (or further), even in an enclosed, relatively well sound-insulated space, the unit simply does not produce enough sound pressure to make the bass notes audible. So, from half way across a small room, the sound performance has degraded into a blaring tweeter. Think, the cheap set of computer speakers you used in 1998, when having external speakers connected to the computer was first a "thing". My overall impression, after a few hours of listening and hitting most of my favorites in my library, is that this unit sounds about as big as it is: small. There's no magic here. It's a small speaker with a big battery. The form factor is nice, to be certain, and it may have a bit more low-end range than an old-style computer speaker, but that doesn't matter much if you can't hear it when you're not standing right next to the unit, even in ideal listening conditions. My benchmark for this criticism is twofold: 1) other BT speakers, large and small, of which I own a few and have tested many/most of the big-name offerings at least once; and 2) a decent, but low-end set of stereo/sub multimedia speakers. In the first case, you don't really care how big the thing is. They're all small relative to a full-size set of speakers or "boom box". I reckon that few users will really try to fit a portable bluetooth speaker in their purse. If you want it for a party, who cares? Put it in a bag. Perhaps, for few and far between, this could be taken camping... in which case, you could annoy the stuffing out of your neighbors on other campisites, or if braving the wild, the bears and raccoons, with some Miley Cyrus or whatever the latest movie is. In the second case, portability suffers, but it is certainly possible to get a pretty decent-sounding set of 2 speakers and a subwoofer from any number of reputable brands, in the <$50 range. Buy one for the patio, one for the garage, one for the kitchen, and one for... the bathroom?... and you've pretty well covered all the parts of your house where you might enjoy good stereo sound on occasion. To justify the cost, I both expect good construction, battery life, so on, AND good sound - sound bigger than the box it's coming from. Otherwise, it's not doing anything special. It's just a small speaker making small-speaker noise. That, unfortunately, is what we have here. I have (and have owned) several sets of low and mid-range multimedia speakers. Some were pretty poor. But these days, in general, a pair of $30-40 computer speakers with, say, a 15-watt, 3.5" subwoofer, will produce more bass, more range, and far better projection, than this speaker. Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but I do in fact have a system like that sitting outside, on a shelf, on the porch, and we use it whenever having a party, working in the yard, eating outside, what have you, and want to play some music. It works great. In that same environment, this unit pales by comparison. It sound quality and bass projection is so poor, it's simply not worth listening to. The 3-year-old, $35 powered computer speakers that have spent their entire useful life outside, win that battle. As regards BT speakers only, SoundLink Mini is smaller and sounds better. More expensive, certainly, but if it comes down to dollars and cents, I'm not sure you should be worrying too much about a $100+ itty-bitty portable speaker anyway. And simply dominant sound comes from SoundLink III and SRS-X5. Still certainly not the equivalent bass of a 10" subwoofer, but the bass is there, and you can hear it. It's loud, it's well-balanced, minimal or no distortion even at relatively high volumes. That, unfortunately, is where the good money is spent on a device like this. So, given the preponderance of love for this unit, you may take my dissenting opinion with a grain of salt. Perhaps my expectations are unreasonable. Maybe for $150, this is a good deal, but for $200, it's not... I don't know. I do know that personally, I'd rather either give up the portability, spend $50, and get FAR superior sound out of an otherwise relatively ordinary set of multimedia speakers, or spend what it costs to get proper sound from Bose or Sony. Happy listening!