JBL Pulse 4 Portable Bluetooth Speaker with JBL PartyBoost and 360 LED Light Show (English-Tagalog) | QUICK LOOK | GADGET WINDOW SHOPPING
DON'T forget to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE. ALSO Please leave a COMMENT.
JBL's Pulse Bluetooth speaker line has always felt a little gimmicky, but the latest Pulse 4 is genuinely impressive. Sure, its Php 11,999 price seems somewhat inflated, but it delivers powerful audio performance for its size, along with an improved LED light show that borders on hypnotic. Throw in a waterproof build, and there's plenty to like here, even if we'd like to see an aux input and speakerphone functionality.
Design
The Pulse 4 has a rounded cylindrical build, measuring 8.2 inches tall by 3.8 inches around. At 2.8 pounds, it's heavier than your typical portable speaker. It's available in black or white models, but of course, the real star of the show is the interior LED panel that wraps around the midsection of the speaker enclosure.
Audio from a single 2.25-inch, 20-watt driver is projected out of the top grille, and the lower panel (that the speaker stands upright on) houses a passive radiator and is elevated slightly off the surface it sits on. The entire build has an impressive IPX7 rating, meaning we can submerge it in water up to a meter, so you can use it outside and/or by the pool.
There are various controls arranged around the top ring of the speaker, including buttons for power, Bluetooth pairing, volume up/down, and play/pause. There is also a button that controls the LED lights, and a PartyBoost button that links the speaker with other Pulse 4s to form either a stereo pair or a multi-room system (with up to 100 speakers). A USB-C port near the base is for charging only; a cable is included.
UpStream Charlie is a YouTube channel that produces useful and very informative videos related to technology and social media.
Aside from doing product features videos, we also tackle about technologies that are affecting their market space and our society.
We also provide tips and tricks and how-to's about Social Media.
We also help people level up their skills and knowledge for those who plan to be or want to be a YouTuber or plan to have exposure in different social media platforms.
The Pulse 4 offers no speakerphone functionality, which is a surprise for its size and portable build—you'll handle incoming calls on your mobile device itself. There's also no aux input—you can only stream audio to it. Surely, this exclusion aids in the IPX7 build, but it's an omission that will annoy some users.
The JBL Connect app allows you to control the LED lights, switch the speaker to PartyBoost mode, or set it to Stereo mode (where it syncs with one other Pulse 4 and they become left/right speakers). These are useful, but there's no EQ in the app, which seems like a missed opportunity.
JBL estimates battery life to be roughly 12 hours, but your results will vary with volume levels, and use of the LEDs.
Even for a gimmick, the light show offered by the Pulse 4 is impressive. Colors blend and bleed into each other in a fluid manner. Even if the audio doesn't always sync with what you're seeing, it's still entertaining—vapor-like. The colors themselves are a mix of neons and pastels, glowing and constantly changing.
Various patterns are available. The easiest on the eyes feel like some sort of mash-up of bold Nike colors and the edge of a Rothko painting, animated. Other patterns feature tiny dancing dots exploding, rejoining, and changing direction, or what looks like a color-coded graphic EQ dancing to the rhythm, and blurred for effect.
In short, it's the first time I actually found myself staring at the LED light show for quite a while, impressed with the work that must have gone into it. It looks cool and even sophisticated. Shaking the speaker makes it switch color palettes (it also syncs the lights with other nearby Pulse 4 speakers), and pressing the Light button switches between the various patterns. The Pulse 4 makes me actually wonder if people will buy this thing for the lights first and the audio second.
Speaking of which, for a mono speaker, the audio quality here is solid. The bass depth is no joke—the passive radiator built into the Pulse 4 will vibrate tables and clearly plays a role in creating the sense of perfect sync with the lights. Even when things are slightly off, the lights change patterns rapidly enough that inevitably something lines up with the beat, and you feel it.
On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," the speaker reproduces some convincing low-frequency depth. The passive radiator clearly helps, but this is a powerful, bass-forward sound for a speaker this size.
No Copyright Music from Ofshane (Road Tripzzz and Back to the Future)
#upstreamcharlie #jblpulse4 #jblpulse
