Hi, I’d like to lament a little bit here and see if you all would like to make some suggestions for me too. I’ve have consistently encountered different issues through 3 different speakers that I’ve tried using with my laptop
The first one is a JBL flip 6. When I have it connected to my laptop it makes consistent audio glitches/stuttering (so much so to the point where I consider it unusable). This is really disappointing because I have been really happy with this speaker, it otherwise strikes an excellent balance of battery life, portability, sound quality/volume, and versatility. I don’t know what causes this problem (which seems to be exclusive to being connected to my laptop) and otherwise have zero complaints about it.
The next speaker I tried is a Marshall Kilburn II. I really enjoyed the sound quality of this speaker, looks, portability, the controls were all pretty good, and it had a 3.5mm audio input jack as well, so this was going to (hopefully) alleviate any potential bluetooth woes. Well, Marshall did a stupid design choice and implemented an automatic standby mode. This mode was so persistent that I would have to use the button repeatedly in order to get sound to come out of it. In-between watching videos, or playing games, having to repeatedly press the function button on the speaker to get the audio source to switch back to the aux input was a real annoyance and immersion breaker…
The third, and current speaker to have become a failure for me is the razer leviathan v2x. This one is a usb-c powered speaker, with bluetooth as well. It is not being recognized as an audio device by my laptop when I plug it in. It seems to have pretty excellent bluetooth connection, which would be fine except for the RGB lighting is reactive by default to whatever audio is being played. It’s setup in a visualizer kind of way, which in my opinion is way too distracting. I don’t want this thing erratically flashing quickly and with many different colors when I’m trying to watch something, or listen to something. It’s extremely distracting and immersion-breaking. I would be ok with it if there was a way to turn this off, or make it less erratic, but because the speaker isn’t being recognized by my laptop, there’s no way to control the speaker’s lighting using razer’s software which also doesn’t recognize the speaker (bluetooth or usb-c connected). I called Razer support to troubleshoot, and was recommended to take it back to the store for a replacement. If it so happens that this was a factory defect, and the replacement operated correctly, I’d probably be happy with a new one.
Thanks for reading all of that, if you managed to get that far.
I’ve been using the Creative Stage Air for a couple years now and overall pretty satisfied, especially for its price. Similar in design to the Razer without RGB shenanigans (it does have an on light that shines through the front speaker grill but I don’t really notice it). Has 3.5mm in which I use pretty much exclusively. Sound quality is about as good as can be expected for the size and form factor.
Only major annoyance I’ve run into is that due to its design for portability it does have an auto off after some hours, so I have to turn it on each day when I want to use it. That said, I’ve never had issues with it going to sleep while in use or anything like that.
Worth noting there’s an updated v2 model that’s only about $5 more iirc, not really sure what differences there are (if any) between the models.
Those look decent and seem to have good reviews all around. I’ll keep that one in mind, thanks for the recommendation.