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If you're looking for a tough speaker that can fall into the pool or be buried in snow and still sound pretty darn good, look no further than the Altec Lansing Baby Boom XL Portable Bluetooth Speaker. Not much bigger than a smartphone, it offers 6 hours of playback on a charge, a functional design and decent, if not great, sound.
Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ ran the Baby Boom XL through its paces and finds it's a very good choice for a travel / hotel room / backpack speaker. But there are some limitations to know about before you buy one...
Check it on BestBuy: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/altec-lansing-baby-boom-xl-imw270-portable-bluetooth-speaker-royal-blue/6348356.p
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Is this the perfect travel speaker? Let's find out
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Dave Taylor here, and this time I'm looking at this. This is, and it's a great name
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the All-Tech Lansing Baby Boom XL. If you want the technical name, it's the IMW-270
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but I'm sure no one in the world calls it that. This is the Baby Boom Extra Large
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which makes you wonder how small is the actual Baby Boom not extra large, but
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whatever it's a dual speaker portable IP 67 water resistant little tiny speaker
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for you for your travel it comes with even a carabiner which I'll get to in a
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second and that's it so let's start with sound so let's just play some music and
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it's Bluetooth and I'll give it some volume and with a lot of these sort of
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speakers you get more base when it's on a surface than when it you're holding it
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but it's certainly it perfectly adequate as a tiny little travel speaker now the controls on top they've doubled so I'll pause it so there's three controls on top there's a Bluetooth there's a minus for volume down and a plus for volume up but everything has multiple functions so the Bluetooth pairing button is also pause play or if you want to get a phone call it is take the call or hang up on the call the minus is volume down
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or hold it and wait a couple of seconds in previous track and the plus no huge surprise makes the volume louder and if you hold it for a couple of seconds it jumps to the next track now when you first getting used to this thing it a little confusing that the button labels don reflect what the button going to do But honestly that like five seconds and you got it figured out So otherwise it cute comes in a bunch of different colors and it comes with an intelligence test
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This box is not very easy to open. Turns out that you need to cut the plastic on both ends, and then there are buttons you push in
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and those actually let you take the top off. I did not realize that when I first started, so I was a little more aggressive
2:07
in my opening, but fortunately there's no damage. And then in here you have the micro-usb charging cable
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Those are a dime a dozen. You probably already have 20 of them. That's fine. And you have the little
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tiny carabiner, which I like these things. You can put it on the hook. Probably I would use a slightly
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bigger carabiner, but this is perfectly fine for hanging it on your backpack and in the wilderness
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listening to music and annoying all those animals. So perfect for that, right? Or you can just
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have it and actually carry it and then you can use it more modestly in different places. So, and some instructions. That's about it. So that's the packaging. You know how, like
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Amazon has their frustration-free packaging? It's not frustration-free. This is, like, frustration bonus. But once you get it open, you're good, right? So the unit itself, what else
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can I tell you about it? So the outside is sort of a rubberized plastic. It has a nice feel to
3:02
it. It's light. It's really light. I mean, this is a travel speaker. And let's see
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You can pair two of these together and get stereo, which is pretty cool, and they're very
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inexpensive so you can afford to get two if you wanted. Takes about two hours for a full charge and then that gives you six hours of playback
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So that charge to play ratio is not great but it not horrible either You know six hours of playback you probably not going to listen straight for six hours When you are ready to charge there is a little thing on the bottom that pops off
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and you can see it gives you, there's a reset button and the micro USB plug
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and then you obviously want to make sure you put it back in well so that you make sure that it stays that water-resistant
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Now, water-resistant means that if you have this on like your kayak, and it gets spliced
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and even falls in and you grab it real quick, you're fine. If it gets snowed on or rained on or something, it's going to be fine
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Probably wouldn't use this for scuba diving. Not sure that'd work well anyway, so it goes
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There's also an app you can get that gives you some little bits of control
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something called Just Listen. Not really something I'm going to be looking at because this is just a little tiny speaker
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to pull out of your suitcase and just get rolling with. So, you know, as far as I'm concerned, this is perfectly functional as is
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want to experiment, the Just Listen app is free and it pairs with this and it knows what this is
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And yes, in the background, you can hear that we have a Hitchcock film being, you know, worked on
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and these birds are probably getting closer. So if we suddenly go black, you'll understand why
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Anyway, so the only thing really left to talk about is the sound and the price
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And the sound, it's a little tiny speaker. You're not going to be getting really earth-shattering bass out of it
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It's not, there's no rich sound field, you know, the spatial imaging is pretty minimal
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These speakers are mighty close together. But for when you're sitting in a hotel room or something and you want to listen to an audio
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book or you want to just listen to your favorite music while you I don know getting ready for the big meeting all of that totally fine And this will work great In fact this will work really well for voice and for phone calls and stuff because it is really pitch to those sort of volumes and those sort of
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perspectives. And yes, there are dogs everywhere. And this is by far the most chaotic
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filming environment behind the camera you can imagine. And I don't know why these dogs are actually
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in my area, but that's a whole other story. Anyway, so it comes in
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black, royal blue, this is royal blue, mint, and torch red. And I won't get to the price yet because
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I'm going to ask if you can subscribe to my channel. Really appreciate when you do that. And I get
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tons of gear, so it's really handy for you to be able to keep up on what's coming out. So
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with that, this is the Altec Lansing, Baby Boom, XL, and it comes in black, royal blue
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mint, which is sort of this, I'm not very happy with, very pale green, and torch red, which
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actually is a really cool color and it's 2999 at best buy.com. Now don't get this expecting that this is
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going to be earth-shattering fantastic music that's going to let you hear every nuance of every
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instrument in the orchestra. It's not really what the speaker is. But if you're looking for something
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really small and light that you can travel with and throw in your backpack and use at school or something
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this is your perfect match. So I say check it out. And with that, I'll catch you in my next video
#Audio Equipment
#Gadgets & Portable Electronics