JBL On Stage Micro Black Mac/Win

Drsnoopy

at 2:46 am

I have spent hours trawling the internet looking for the right speakers for my ipod. I have tried two other Logitech makes before this one and am pleased that I have finally found what I was looking for. I had problems with the sound quality on the logitech istation 7 and so tried the logitech istation 8 but I wasn’t happy with the useless remote, it took ages for the ipod to connect each time I docked it and didn’t recognise repeat/shuffle.

What has bugged me about speakers before is the poor remote. I was fed up of having to try and use the click wheel to find the songs I wanted while the ipod was balancing precariously in the dock. This speaker comes with a small, sleek remote which allows you not only to change volume and skip tracks, but to scroll through the various menus on the ipod so you can change between albums and artists without touching the ipod!

It has buttons for scrolling up and down the menus, an enter button (works like the middle button on the click wheel) and a menu button (works like menu button on ipod) (as well as the usual buttons).

The speaker itself is small and simple and doesn’t take up much room on my desk. The sound quality is excellent, it goes very loud and very quiet with no distortion.

Overall, I love this little speaker and was well worth the two hours I spent searching the internet for one with a remote that is of any use! Price wise it is the same as the other two I have tried and is definately the best.
Rating: 5 / 5

T. Gore

at 7:03 am

I’m not as impressed with the JBL Micro as much as I wanted to be. As with many things, your view on this will depend on how it ranks against your expectations. I wasn’t expecting it to pump out sound like a good hi-fi – it’s only small and, depending where and when you buy it, it’s only £50. But, that’s still £50 and therefore you are expecting something.

There are some real plus points – it looks great, is very neat and feels well-built and substantial without being unduly heavy. The remote also works very well with an ipod and it can sound pretty good (Joss Stone’s ‘The Soul Sessions’ sounds great for example). The volume of sound easily fills an average room. Added to that it comes with a range of inserts for cradling different ipods, runs on AC or batteries and has a good soft case supplied.

This all sounds good but the downsides for me were that there’s little bass – though that can be improved by 1.) placing it on a solid/dense base, rather than for example a coffee table and 2.) using the bass boost EQ setting. A bigger downside was that even some non-bassy tracks sounded ‘mushy’ at normal volumes when referenced against headphones or a normal hi-fi set up. This was a problem as although the JBL Micro is only ever intended to be used for a kitchen, study bedroom or hotel room, for me it still needs to sound okay. I can forgive it not being able to blare out at high volume; can probably forgive the lack of bass, but even for occassional use at normal volume I’d want it to sound okay otherwise I’d just end up avoiding using it – which means even £50 is too much.

My girlfriend though thinks it’s great . . . which is why she is now the proud owner of it and I’ve gone for the Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere as a portable ipod speaker system!

Rating: 3 / 5