Creative SoundBlaster Free Bluetooth Speaker

Gone are the days when you used Bluetooth speaker for just music playback, now you need some extra functionality to make it stand out from the crowd and the Creative SoundBlaster Free does that job pretty well

Design

The speaker has elegant looks and sports a very nice grill all way around probably around almost half way. On the back you will find most of the controls. The rubber grip at the bottom does a good job of making speaker sturdy when placed vertically and avoids wobbling.

On the back you will be greeted with Creative SoundBlaster review Free logo. Under the small flap you will find Micro USB port, micro SD card slot to use the speaker as mp3 player and an Auxiliary input. Other buttons at the back include shuffle, play/pause, loud, skipping tracks etc. In the middle it is equipped with bass port. At the other end you will have controls for power on, call button with bluetooth pairing and volume up and down.

The speaker  can be placed both horizontally and vertically. For vertical position use it by facing creative rubber grip at the bottom. We personally liked the horizontal orientation  as it more sturdy than the upright position. The 360-degree sound in vertical position lets the user blast audio in every direction.

For connectivity over Bluetooth, just long press the Bluetooth button. The three LED's below the power button indicates how much battery is left.

Performance

We fed the speaker with various genres of music to test its sonic capability, and it did score well. On tracks with intense sub-bass content like Titanium by David Guetta which features dance club style beats, the speaker performed well pushing decent amount of bass. Sia's vocals were clearly audible in between the bass of this electric pop song. The bass delivered was good but lacked depth and the high oopmh, required to make this melody truly mesmerizing from start to end. The speaker sounded best at 70-80% volume, going a bit high there is no change in bass, however distortion kicks in.

We also placed the speaker at a distance of around 5 meter and activated the loud option. The volume kicks in and you can easily listen or hum to song at that distance. This also works good if you are outside and want to amplify the volume, just press the loud button and it will deliver more volume and more bass.

The speaker is also equipped with Clear Voice technology, so when you connect your mobile phone to speaker to answer calls which allows for better call reception and voice quality, thereby you can hear the person on the other side much better than other Bluetooth speakers we have reviewed.

Creative claims battery life of 10 hours. We were able to get a 7 hours of continuous music playback at 80% volume on a single charge. However it may vary depending on how you use the speaker and at what volume. Still on a normal usage you will be able to get out claimed battery life. The speaker turns itself off automatically if not in use for a while (after 15 minutes).