There are many Bluetooth speakers to choose from. They are available in all shapes, sizes and acros price ranges. In the competitive segment, Sony has now introduced the SRS-X2. It’s a fairly compact yet decent looking Bluetooth speaker that sells at roughly Rs, 6,500*. It might appear a bit pricey for a portable speaker, but compared to other premium brand it competes with, the SRS-X2 is very aggressively priced. A quick look at the product will tell us if it’s worth the price.
Design and Build
The Sony SRS-X2 makes a pretty good travel speaker. It’s compact and is sturdy all around. It resembles an oversized pill. Except for the grill at the front, the whole body has a rubber coating around it. The rubber coating makes the SRS-X2 sustainable to bumps and shocks. You also get a very good grip on the speaker, not that you need it. The speaker weighs a mere 500g and fits easily into a small compartment in your bag. You also get a soft carry pouch in the package.
All the buttons are embedded into the rubber coating, at the top. They run a little deep into the body, so pressing them requires a little more force than you would think. There are LEDs present next to the buttons, indicating Bluetooth, power and virtual surround, a feature we’ll be talking about a little later. At the back, you have a microUSB port, a 3.5mm jack and a reset button placed next to each other.
The speaker has four legs at the bottom to help reduce vibration, when kept on the table. They do a reasonable job. To give a better positioning to the speaker, Sony has made the front two feet a bit taller than the ones at the rear, giving the speaker an upward facing angle. However, it’s not much and it makes little to almost no difference to the output when you place it on a table.
The SRS-X2 is not the fanciest looking Bluetooth speaker you can find. The design is rather minimalistic. We reviewed the black variant, which looks a little boring. We reckon other colours might be better looking, especially the red variant.
Features
The Sony SRS-X2 has a total power output of 20W. The power is equally distributed between two 45mm speakers that are housed under the metal grill. The speaker also uses two-channel bass reflex setup, which should give it a good performance, especially in the lows despite the compact side. Besides that, the speaker supports a virtual surround sound mode that can be activated by pressing the ‘Sound’ button at the top. It basically widens the sound staging of the speaker.
The speaker comes with Bluetooth 3.0 for streaming music from a smartphone or tablet. It also supports NFC for one-touch pairing, so connecting to other NFC-enabled devices takes only a few seconds. When connected to a smartphone using Bluetooth, the SRS-X2 can also be used as a speaker phone. It comes with a built-in microphone and a call button at the top that lets you answer incoming calls. There is also a 3.5mm jack that can be used to play music from devices that do not support Bluetooth.
The speaker comes with a power adaptor in the box. The speaker is charged using a microUSB port, so any smartphone charger can be used to charge it. Sony claims a battery life of 5 hours with the Bluetooth connection turned on, which is good for a speakers of this size.
Performance
The best experience you can get from the SRS-X2 is when you sit as close as 3 feet from it. Placing it at the right height is also very important. It’s only then that can you hear the details in songs. No doubt, the X2 is loud and it can be cranked all the way up, but a lot of depth is lost. The only good thing is that there isn’t much distortion at high volumes.
No matter what genre we played on the SRS-X2, it sounded flat. The speaker is fairly balanced. While playing dubstep songs, the heavy bass thumps felt missing. There is hardly any bass. Beats are audible, but the song still sounds dull and in some cases, even different than what it’s supposed to. The mids sound flat. While playing instrumental songs like ‘Grace Descending’ from God is an Astronaut, we could hardly hear any cymbals. They got overpowered by other instruments. Melodic songs still sounded good, but vocals sounded a bit off. We were listening to Coldplay’s ‘Fix you’ and we felt that there was no gravity in Chris Martin’s vocals, which took the essence out of the song. Switching to the virtual surround mode somehow made the output even worse. It took the little bass that was present out and added distortion to the highs. The speaker can play music seamlessly from a distance of 20 feet over Bluetooth. Beyond that, the music starts to stutter. The calling feature didn’t work that well for us. There was a little disturbance. However, this could be a problem with the unit we had.
Verdict
