Customer Reviews

Altec Lansing inMotion SoundBlade Bluetooth A2DP Speaker/Speakerphone (Black)

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

What I was after:

- Amplified Loudspeaker
- Highly Compact & Portable
- Dual powered (battery & mains)
- Wired & Wireless connectivity

To sum it up: The whole point of a product like this is to get the best possible sound in the least possible space with the highest degree of flexibility.

The Altec Lansing SoundBlade was the best fit.

This speaker gets about as loud as the speaker gets on a typical television, so it can actually fill a room. Unfortunately, you cannot adjust the tone, as it tends to be a little too bass heavy. When you max out the volume of your source and on the speaker, distortion is quite noticeable. For the most part, listening to audio at reasonable levels actually produces a very clear and rich sound that suggests a sophisticated piece of hardware.

The Bluetooth connectivity may be tricky for people new to the technology, but once you understand the process of pairing it with your unit, it's a snap. With a clear line of site I've managed to move it a full twenty feet from my laptop before I experienced any dropouts with the device.

It's not just for iPods or Zunes. It's agnostic towards the brand of audio player you are using, so it can easily be used with any standard 1/8" audio output jack. Once the wired connection is made, the wireless functionality is automatically disabled. Your favorite MP3 player is going to sound great.


The estimated 24 hours of use for 6AA batteries seems about right. Having a built in charger might have made it seem more convenient, but when you value portability, replaceable batteries actually make more sense in the long run. Having the option to plug in the speaker to standard AC power makes for a nice backup plan too, and there's nothing that says you can't use your own rechargeables.

The thin, sleek design is a major plus. It's a flat, smooth rectangular unit. The glossy black finish allows the SoundBlade to easily slide into your laptop carrier, briefcase, or backpack. The built in kickstand latches securely in place during travel and provides exceptionally stable support on any flat surface when you take it out for use.

The price is a bit fierce, but I have yet to find anything else that meets or exceeds all of the above criteria

Bottom Line
-----------
Pros:
Good sound
Excellent portability

Cons:
Unable to adjust tone
Expensive

Over the past month I have owned/compared the Yamaha NX-B02, Parrot Party, and Altec Lansing Soundblade (Amazon's return policy makes it easy). The Soundblade is very good, but I thought the Parrot was the best (and kept it while returning the other 2). You can read my reviews for the other 2. For the Soundblade, it certainly was put together well with excellent features (speakerphone and can control the music player somewhat) and design. It played the loudest, but had the least impressive bass of the 3 and had the most distortion of the 3 in the upper frequencies. I realize that no speaker system this size will sound great, but the Parrot (using bluetooth) and the Yamaha (using line-in) sounded better. For moderate listening volumes, it certainly was adequate. I also felt like the Parrot was a little more portable for what I'm using it for (back deck and pool), although the Soundblade would probably be the best for travel (thin).

The SoundBlade looks pretty small but it sounds amazingly good. It folds flat so it's easy to tuck into a laptop bag. Connects wirelessly via stereo Bluetooth to your mobile phone or even to your laptop (with a dongle, if you don't have stereo Bluetooth built into your PC). Or you can just use a regular 3.5mm connector to connect to your laptop and forget the whole Bluetooth thing. Basically, it's a very good portable speaker.

In addition to being a music speaker, the SoundBlade also works as a speakerphone so you can link it to your mobile phone and take your calls out loud.

All in all, a very handy little piece of technology for the road.

I purchased the Altec Lansing inMotion SoundBlade Bluetooth A2DP speakers from Amazon. I own other products by this company. But I must say I was very displeased with the sound quality of these speakers, both as Bluetooth and hard wired. I bought some JBL small travel speakers that don't pump as much volume as these do, and the JBLs are 1/3 the price of the Altec Lansing speakers. The JBL speakers have better high end and cleaner sounding bass. I gave the small JBL speakers to my Wife because I was looking for a bluetooth system I could use with my phone. I do like the ability to take calls and listen to music on my cell phone, and the Altec Lansing inMotion SoundBlade Bluetooth A2DP speakers work well as a speaker phone. I would suggest that if you buy them, don't expect great audio quality. I know that these speakers are small, but I've seen smaller, less costly speakers produce cleaner sound than the mud produced by this product.

This speaker turned out to be a good purchase. I was looking for a speaker that would transport easily. Since it's so flat, I can add it to the laptop bag without creating much bulk. The sound it produces is pretty good for a speaker that size. The reason I rated it as 4 stars is that I had a bit of a problem at first, since my computer operating system is Windows XP. My laptop has internal bluetooth capabilities, so I thought I could connect the speaker as easily as I connected my bluetooth mouse.

NOT SO! It seems that Windows XP (and maybe Vista too, based on other reviews), doesn't have the A2DP drivers necessary to connect a bluetooth speaker (or headset). They say that Microsoft removed them from the operating system due to problems with hacking. Other reviews said that all I needed to do was download the WidComm drivers and everything would be fine. My experience wasn't so easy. WidComm was purchased by BroadComm, and I don't think BroadComm allows the drivers to be downloaded for free. BroadComm has a website where the drivers are offered, but it kept wanting to upgrade my computer for a fee.

I ended up purchasing a bluetooth adapter for $20 (even though I already had built-in bluetooth capabilities), and everything worked after installing it. The adapter installation installed the WidComm drivers fine, and it doesn't interfere with my built-in bluetooth system, so I'm happy.

Oh, and Altec Lansing wasn't helpful at all. Other reviews for headsets (which use the same A2DP drivers) indicated that their products came with a CD containing the A2DP drivers necessary for the product to work with XP. But this speaker doesn't come with any CD, and when I called Altec Lansing, their customer service department was very abrupt, informing me that the speaker will only work if my computer has the A2DP drivers installed. Hello! I already knew that! How difficult would it be for them to package their product with the necessary drivers?

I bought this product to use with my iPod Touch 2G with 3.0.

I can now start a playlist, put the iPod down in the house, and place the speaker anywhere, with the outside table on the porch being where I wanted to use it the most working just great.

Sound is great, the range is also great, I can use anywhere in my house, and it will reach into most of my yard with the iPod in the house.

Once I recieved it I found out quickly how well it can be used with a phone, it works great with my wifes iPhone, and my blackberry.

As someone that works in a IT related field, the uses for this would be great in a conference room, a home office, or on the road in a hotel room.

Construction quality is first class, as is the sound quality.

I would highly recommend this product to anyone, with ether wanting to use as a portable sound speacker for music, or as a speaker phone.

Couldn't be happier. Very good sound quality and bass response. I bought re-chargable AA batteries (it takes 6) to make this unit truly portable. Bluetooth paring worked effortlessly with my iPad and iphone. Buy this unit; you will not be sorry it is well worth $50 in my estimation. So much better than having wired speakers.

Up until just recently, the iphone would not function stereo BlueTooth. But with the software update, I took the leap and purchase the inMotion SoundBlade. Generally works well, sounds good and battery support frees the power wire issue.

I like it.

I'm looking for a simple speaker to use as my main bedroom speaker. It should work primarily with my mac computer, but also occasionally with my iPhone.

I bought the Altec/Lansing Soundblade as well as the Sony SRS-BT100 and compared them to see if either could become my primary home speaker system.

Overall, I found the Soundblade's audio to severely underperform my expectations. And like other bluetooth speakers, it suffered from a few bluetooth-related "quirks" that made it annoying to use, although the bluetooth connection was generally more reliable than I expected. Its form-factor and battery capability was quite nice, but I wouldn't consider using it as a primary speaker in the home. I ended up returning it and keeping the Sony.

Below are my notes:

Unlike the Sony, the Soundblade has a convenient re-connect feature: when you power it on, it will automatically attempt to reconnect with previously paired devices, meaning that listening to music through the speaker is a simple one-button operation with many devices. Push power and you're done. However, it doesn't behave well when trying to use with both a laptop and an iphone in that it seems to only re-connect to the most recently paired device. If you want to switch, you have to shut off or disable bluetooth on the recently paired device and then try to reconnect from the other device.

Unlike other bluetooth speakers, the Soundblade emits an annoying "radar ping" continuously for about 10 seconds every time it powers up as it looks for things to connect to. Even after the connection is made and sound start coming out, it continues to "ping" for awhile.

Despite the complaints, bluetooth reliability was higher than I expected. Unlike other users I'm not trying to push the distance between devices -- they're line of sight and within the same room, but i only occasionally had a problem while simultaneously using my apple bluetooth keyboard and bluetooth magic mouse and simultaneously backing up over my 802.11g wireless network in SF, where there tends to be a lot of wireless interference. Usually it was fine, but once or twice I had a problem. Note that this is going to be a problem regardless of whether you use this BT speaker or a different one.

I also noticed an occasional degradation in my wifi performance while streaming music. If you're serious about bluetooth music, you might want to consider switching your network over to 802.11n-only (and dropping your 802.11g devices like the iphone) so you can operate on a different frequency. The latest airport extreme is a great choice for this as it can operate on both frequencies simultaneously. I expect that this will fix all my performance problems.

Sound quality is lower than I expected. It's significantly better than my laptop speakers, but it's fairly tinny. This is a portable speaker you'd take on a picnic to listen to your ipod, but maybe not one I'd listen to my music every day in my office. And that picnic probably shouldn't have more than 5 friends or so because I'm not sure the SoundBlade could keep up with a large party. If I had to peg it to a number, I'd say the sound I got out of this thing is roughly what I'd expect from a $20-$30 wired speaker. The drivers are only about 1.5x2.0 inches despite the size of the enclosure, which is too thin to develop much bass or fill a room.

The Soundblade has a feature that lets it act as a bluetooth headset. If you're specifically buying the speaker for that purpose, then I imagine it could be pretty cool (although I didn't try it). However, as a music speaker, this feature was really annoying. I'd be listening to music from my iPhone, then pick up my phone to answer a call from my friend only to find that I couldn't talk to them through the phone because the Soundblade was acting as the headset. There doesn't seem to be a way to turn this off, as far as I could tell.

If you're wondering, the volume control on this speaker is independent of the mac volume control.

Form factor is great for taking places. Very thin, and then base folds up into the device with no detachable parts.

No auto-power-on. No auto-power-off either as far as i can tell. I would have liked it if the speaker would turn off after 20 mins of inactivity or something, but no such luck.

No delay between audio and video when watching movies. I'd heard reports about delays with some bluetooth speakers, but I encountered nothing noticeable here.

Speakers sound great, bluetooth setup is easy, and it's very thin. My ONLY gripe is that rather than use AA batteries, why not have put in re-chargeable ones? Seems like it shouldn't be so hard for the expense.