KMC 3 Portable Bluetooth Speaker

I've been using this as my "outside speaker" for over a year. It has endured being left out in the rain, summer heat, winter cold. I don't leave it entirely exposed, but store it in a semi-finished "utility room" when not in use, and yes, I've forgotten to put it away a few times. After many hundreds of hours listening to it while working on the car, working in the yard, sitting on the patio, I am still gobsmacked by it. The unit is just ugly as sin, but the sound is brilliant. I love the "pound for pound" assessment and for tiny speakers, still have found nothing that comes close to the Bose Soundlink Mini. I have several in this same region - a Marshall Kilburn and a Bang & Olufsen Beolit 15. Both VERY good in their own right, portable, but the way this Klipsch can move air mass is simply not comparable from those guys. On a wide-open venue, covering a 1/3 acre lawn, I can't turn this up past 30% or 40% without being rude to my neighbors. And, all the while, the delivery of that luscious bass is hitched to (after sampling MANY bluetooth speakers, mostly medium or big ones) clean, crisp, distortion-free mids and highs. Honestly, I don't know what's behind the metal screen. But I'll say, it's shocking and disappointing that they discontinued this fella instead of making it less ugly; and, for my part, I'm buying another one to put on the shelf because it is so damned good. My B&O Beolit 15 and Marshall won't create the same joyous resonance as this thing in wide open spaces, and I won't be carrying the Aiwa Exos 9 or Polk Woodbourne out on the back patio. Klipsch - the KMC-3 is a superstar. I am seriously unable to critique the sound, for any type of music, at any volume, in any environment. If you can capture this brilliance in a less fugly cabinet, you'd be nipping at the heels of Bose. Make it so! Make us a KMC-3 II! The Polk Woodbourne, Cambridge Soundworks Air Minx 200, Beolit 15 and Woburn are all very, very good speakers. I've sent as many back as I've kept. But believe me - this one shines. Soundlink Mini is amazing for tiny. This is my undisputed "amazing for mid-size" speaker - and that beats speakers that cost $300-600. Whatever magic you put into this fellow, deserves to be elaborated upon. Call me and I'll design its successor myself! Meanwhile, I'm buying another one of these just in case your product mangers aren't paying enough attention to what I'm saying. ------------------------------ Although not a professional, I am an amateur audiophile. I'm fortunate to own a number of bluetooth speakers, headphones, earbuds, and speakers, and to be able to compare them with a somewhat eclectic variety of favorite music including rock from the 70s, 80s and 90s, alt rock, heavy metal, EDM, sadcore, classical music and contemporary jazz, among others. (No country, no rap, but just about everything else.) I have offered some glowing praise for two "ultra-portable" bluetooth speakers, the Bose Soundlink Mini and the Sony SRS-X5; I own both and enjoy listening to them greatly. My wife has also really grown fond of them, especially the Bose, being so easy to pick up and carry to any room for good quality sound. Other ultra-portable speakers I did not rate as highly are the Creative Sound Blaster Roar, or a whole swath of offerings from Beats, Sonos, the smaller Sony (SRS-X3), and others. Ultimately, I decided to broaden the search for truly great sound, since almost all of my applications are yard / driveway, where ultimate portability simply isn't necessary. After reading professional reviews as well as scanning the reviews on Amazon (searching, particularly, for legitimate, helpful input on the sound quality of the speaker and carefully avoiding anything that looks like "subsidized praise"). What I've found after exploring a variety of the larger, more powerful speakers, to include the Sony Portable Party System, NYNE Bass, the Wren V5, the Cambridge Audio Minx 200, Harmon Kardon Onyx, and this speaker, Klipsch KMC 3, is that the prices vary widely, as does the sound quality, but they do not COvary. What I mean by that is that in general, more expensive does not directly entail better sound. A primary consideration when assessing sound quality is portability. The "ultra-portable" speakers should fit in a bag or purse, run off a battery for a long time, and make enough sound to fill a small or mid-size room with relatively rich sound and at least provide good background music for a deck or yard party. The "portable" speakers, like this one, are larger and have a built-in handle of some sort, but they can (or, SHOULD) sit on a table and pump out enough bass to hear rich lower notes ten or twenty feet away in wide open spaces, and to knock your socks off in a small or medium sized room. The undisputed (to date) champion is the Cambridge Audio Minx 200. This is the first and only system I listened to that sounds every bit like it has an 8 or 10 inch subwoofer packed inside it somewhere. Admittedly I have not compared many speakers in the more expensive arena, such as Bose Accoustic Wave, Bowers & Wilkins A7, Harmon Kardon Go + Play, TDK Life on Record A73, and so on. However, the Cambridge Audio speaker is just truly stunning. If you love bass, this thing pumps it out in spades - you can feel it in your chest, it'll shake your floor, and it will crank it all out with no detectable distortion whatsoever, even at high volumes. It is also expensive - more than twice as much as the Klipsch. Therein lies the 5 stars. The Klipsch KMC-3 claims a frequency response down to 45Hz, and it delivers rich, full bass right down to that level, only perhaps tapering off slightly at very high volumes, in wide open spaces. None of the tracks I usually use to feel out the bottom end frequency response of a speaker (Bassnectar, Esthero, Bonobo, Koop, etc.) bested this speaker. It handled every bass-rich, low-frequency track with aplomb. It does not have the same projection, the same force at the very lowest ends that the Cambridge speaker has. It is a clear second. However, it is very, VERY good, I mean extraordinarily good, and in my short list of rankings, both the Cambridge and the Klipsch are just head and shoulders above competitive offerings (even more expensive ones, such as the Wren V5). I also have to admit, treble is very subdued in both the Klipsch and Cambridge speakers. Extremely, extremely clean, no amp noise even at high volumes, but I prefer a sort of "rounded checkmark" equalizer setting - high on the bass, lower on midranges, high on treble. I like a real "sparkle" when I listen to music. I could probably find some way to have my own equalizer settings with an app of some sort before the music gets beamed over bluetooth, but for pretty much every real-world bluetooth application, you don't have time for that. You want to just link it up and play something, and you want that something to sound good. So, the speakers sound however they sound out of the box. I did find the treble to be a bit more pronounced (and in a good way) on both the Wren V5 and NYNE Bass. As it stands, my list of "portable" speakers from best to worst, is: 1. Cambridge Audio Minx 200 2. Klipsch KMC 3 3. Wren V5 4. Tied - HK Onyx / NYNE Bass 5. Sony RDHGTK37IP Portable Party System If portability is less of a concern than fantastic sound, the Klipsch and Cambridge speakers are both indisputably good. They both earn 5 stars; the Klipsch because it offers spectacular, clear, distortion-free sound from the deepest bass to the highest treble, clearly an excellent high-quality amplifier, and does so at a price which, impressively, creates better bang for your buck than anything else I bought, including the similarly-priced Bose Soundlink Mini. The Cambridge Audio would get a sixth star if Amazon would let me, because the sound quality, volume and the absolute surgical control of big, reverberating bass gets that thing closer to a full home theater system than anything else I've heard so far. But, you have to pay to play, and at over twice the price of the Klipsch, you really have to be comfortable being parted with the extra money to get that kind of big-speaker performance out of something that has a handle and only weighs a few pounds. Obviously, you can spend a whole lot more than $500 for a bluetooth speaker, and a whole lot more than a whole lot more than that on a good set of home theater speakers, so there is at least some price sensitivity built in to my review; if you're looking for big, impressive sound out of a portable bluetooth speaker and the difference of a few hundred bucks matters to you, you absolutely can not and will not be disappointed with the Klipsch. If the difference doesn't matter, get the Cambridge - it'll blow your mind. Both are very, VERY good, and, much to the point, I will keep both of them because I just enjoy listening to each of them so much.