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The Crave Audio CURVE Portable Bluetooth Speaker looks great with its aluminum finish and button design, but what about the sound quality? Tech expert Dave Taylor offers up demos of both the speaker and mic pickup capability and a subsequent review of the CURVE speaker.
Check it out at: https://amzn.to/3ra90ZD
Visit Dave's Q&A Web site at: https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/
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0:00
This is a pretty cool looking speaker, but how does it sound? Let's find out
0:11
Dave Taylor here and I'm checking out this. This is the Crave Curve portable Bluetooth speaker
0:17
As you can see, it is curved and it's actually a really, really nice design
0:23
It's also made out of aluminum, so it has a really nice feel to it with solid buttons
0:28
There's a lot to like on the physical characteristics here, but of course with any of
0:33
these devices it's all about the sound. But before we get to the sound, let me tell you some of the
0:38
specs. So it has dual drivers, it's 20 watts, 10 times 2, and it puts out 90 to 20,000 hertz
0:46
frequencies. So it's not a ton down at the bottom level, but mostly we can't hear anything below
0:53
about 50 or 60 hertz anyway. So often you'll see 20 to 20,000 hertz. This is 90 to 20,000 hertz
1:01
so there's a little bit less of the super low bass, but we'll get back to that when we actually
1:07
audition it. Now one thing you might not realize when you look at it is it has built-in microphones
1:12
so you can use it as a speakerphone. We'll test that too in just a minute. Battery wise, it's a
1:17
2000 milliamp hour battery which gives you 10 hours of playback. Just as important is it has auto
1:24
shut off, so I have to get back to music pretty quickly or it's going to turn off and I'll have
1:28
to turn it on and pair it again, which is not a huge hassle, but I like that it has the auto shut
1:34
off so you don't have to remember, oh did I turn off the speaker or is it going to be dead? They got
1:38
you covered with that. Aluminum construction, it's kind of ancient with Bluetooth 4.2 and the
1:45
charging is even more ancient. On the back there is a charging port for a micro USB. This is the
1:52
first micro USB device I've seen in a while. USB-C is far more common. I assume the next gen will
1:58
have that. It does have 3.5 millimeter AUX in which is great. You can plug this in right underneath
2:06
your computer monitor for example and you've got a nice little sort of like micro sound bar for
2:11
music or videos or TV that you might want to stream or something. So that's nice. On the top
2:17
there are four buttons. There's power, pause, play and then volume down and volume up and they of
2:24
course have multiple functions. That's how they work. So let's get some music going. So I'm going
2:29
to start with this. I'm going to point it at me so you can get a little bit more hearing and
2:35
I'm going to turn the volume up. And it's decent enough. I mean there's not a lot of depth to the music reproduction but it's
2:45
entirely functional. I put this on and was jamming some old 80s rock and just walking around the
2:53
house and it was plenty loud enough. You know there's not a lot of treble. Their bass is sort
3:00
of a thumpy bass. Let me pause this. But I will say it's very reactive to the EQ settings on your
3:09
phone or your audio source. I'm using an iPhone 14 pro so I just went into music EQ and made some
3:16
adjustments and it was pretty startling how much difference it made. I would recommend you use this
3:22
in flat or EQ off mode which to me gives you the best overall response across the frequencies
3:30
But you might like a lot more bass so put on loudness and then turn the volume up one notch
3:35
Easy enough. So there's that and the music is good but now let's go to voice. Let me see if I can get
3:42
this to work. So I can go to voice. We're going to turn on screen recording so you can see what I see
3:49
and I haven't tested this so we'll just see how this works. Now you're hearing my voice as picked up by this gray curved portable Bluetooth speaker and you can
4:00
see I'm a pretty typical system product but if I get a box closer it's going to get louder and if I
4:06
get a lot further away then it's going to sound a lot softer. So probably the sweet spot is somewhere
4:13
around it. But what's different with the audio box? It's not actually that bad for voice pickup as a
4:22
sort of secondary capability of the speaker. Now let me pause the audio
4:29
And so that's pretty much all the functionality. Obviously you want to know things like the
4:36
dimensions so I'll tell you it's 7.9 inches by 2.4 inches by 2.4 inches and it's a little heavy at
4:45
two pounds or thereabouts. But that's also a lot because of the battery and because speakers have
4:51
weight because you need to have magnets in them to help reproduce that sound. Now one thing that
4:58
they don't include which I wish they did is an IP rating. So I have no idea if this is water
5:05
resistant or waterproof or whatever. So lacking that information I think the safe assumption is
5:11
that you really need to baby this thing and make sure it never gets wet. If you're going to use it
5:16
outside totally fine. It's a Bluetooth portable wireless speaker but if it starts to rain or
5:22
something cover this thing up because we just don't know. And finally in the box, very nicely
5:28
designed box, it also includes a micro USB to USB-A charging cable. Pretty important. And a little
5:35
teeny tiny user guide which is plenty enough to get you started. So that's really everything. I
5:41
think that for its price point this is actually a pretty nice speaker. It's a very elegant looking
5:47
speaker that's going to be really attractive on any desk or any table or stuck in a corner in the
5:53
kitchen or something. So lots to like here. You know the sound reproduction is okay but at its
6:00
price point it's actually pretty typical. So if you get this and if you want to get the best
6:06
possible sound reproduction what I would recommend is play around with your EQ settings to get the
6:11
best possible results. So hope that was helpful. Now let's talk about the price. But before we get
6:17
to the price I'm going to ask if you could subscribe to my channel. Go ahead and click on subscribe
6:22
and give me a like or a thumbs up if you found this helpful, useful, interesting, whatevs. I really
6:28
appreciate that. Cool. This is the Crave Curve portable Bluetooth speaker and it's $59.99 at
6:37
amazon.com. So for about 60 bucks this is a nice speaker. I would say they put just as much effort
6:45
into the design which is nice because a lot of speakers on the lower end kind of look junky
6:51
But this one's very elegant. They could easily have an Apple logo on it and you would think this
6:56
was an Apple product. It's that level of quality and engineering and the sound is okay. So that's
7:02
all I got. I'm going to go back to my music so I'll have to catch you in my next video
7:26
Bye
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