The Good: Nice design, practical in use, long battery life, charging and speakerphone facilities, water-resistant.
The Bad: Sound a bit treble-heavy and strident.
The Bottom Line: A very well made piece of tech, that is only let down somewhat by harsh sound.
Making a standout portable speaker is tough. Quite apart from the technical difficulties of fitting a voluminous sound into a compact space, the small boombox marketplace is all but saturated. My recent review of the Inateck BP2001 showed that great audio is possible from a small speaker, but many manufacturers choose to focus their efforts on eye-catching designs.
Utah-based Braven usually looks to another niche — audio for folks who love camping and the outdoors — but the company’s water-resistant 705 speaker (£89.99/$99.99) is part of the Design range, which is aimed more at the style-conscious urbanite. Claims of 12-hour battery life and mobile phone charging are certainly impressive; but can an open-air specialist make it in the crowded mainstream? I took the 705 for a test drive to find out…
Design
Braven has approached the creation of a speaker with mass appeal by employing subtlety in design, but boldness in colour. The vivid shades in which the 705 is available are certainly conspicuous. They also give the impression of cheap build quality, which is unfortunate, given that the 705 is actually very well built.
Top view of the Braven 705 speaker.
This is more evident when viewing my unassuming black review unit, which has a plastic shell that is thick, solid feeling, and near seamless. Both sides have a speaker mesh, and the base is almost totally covered with a non-slip foot. At one end, the controls are arranged like the quarter-sized segments of a Battenberg cake, with the power switch above the play button on the right, and the volume up button above the volume down on the left. At the other end of the speaker are the various inputs, hidden beneath a high-quality rubberised cover, which detaches completely when it is not needed for protection.
Controls found on the side of the Braven 705 speaker.
I wouldn’t call the overall design “pretty”, but it is certainly inoffensive, and mighty practical.
Out of the Box
The idea of a “portable speaker” is really a misnomer. In theory, any speaker with an internal battery falls into this class, but a four-foot-long beast isn’t very “portable” in a rucksack. The 705, in contrast, is truly compact. It weighs 12 ounces, and measures 6.25 x 2.6 x 1.8 inches — comparable with an external battery pack. This isn’t purely coincidence, given that the battery inside the Braven can act as a power source for any USB-chargeable device.
The 705’s various ports and battery LED indicators.
First, however, the speaker itself needs charging. Depending on the source of USB power you choose, the 1400mAh battery takes between two and three hours to charge fully via the supplied USB-to-miniUSB cable. Helpfully, there is an array of five lights which indicate how much juice has been soaked up, or when the battery check button is pressed, how much you have left. Once fully charged, the 705 can muster up to 12 hours of play time, which should be enough for even a weekend trip away.
In Use
There are two fundamental ways of supplying the Braven with music — via Bluetooth, or via the 3.5mm auxiliary input. In my testing, the former option was hitch-free and the latter was just the plug-in-and-play affair that you would expect. However, in the case of the wired connection, the 705 has a nifty trick up its sleeve: daisy-chaining. Two Bravens that are linked together act as the two halves of a stereo system, meaning a far louder, far more three-dimensional sound.
Sound
An individual 705 is fairly loud by itself, though. Not the kind of loud you’d expect from a sound system. But remarkably loud for such a small speaker.
To some degree, audio quality takes a mild blow as a result. There doesn’t seem to be much shielding going on between the bare face of the 705’s treble and your ear drum, making certain frequencies unpleasantly harsh. It is around the timbre of a high-hat cymbal, I would say.
Standing further back or at an angle — taking in the ambient sound, in other words — allows the rounded resonance coming out of the Braven to make itself greatly more apparent. The bass thumps the table on which the speaker is standing, and whilst the inevitable small-speaker sound is present, it is somewhat mitigated by good separation between the various parts of the sonic range. With some help from a digital equaliser, the sound improves further still.
Without doubt, audio nit-pickers would not approve of the 705’s overall output, but then no truly small speaker can please that demographic. For the more casual listeners among us, though, the playback from the Braven can be regarded as better than decent.
Bonus Feature — Speakerphone
The 705’s microphone resides at the top of the unit.
The only clue as to the Braven’s other main feature is a small hole on the top of the speaker, where the unit’s microphone resides. This allows the 705 to operate as a Bluetooth speakerphone, and a good one at that — even for the person at the other end, the sound quality is better than that offered by most phones.
Verdict
The Braven 705 feels like an antidote to the brash pretentiousness of its rivals. The colours are loud, but nothing else about this speaker suggests that it is showing off. The design is practical, the build quality is reassuring, and the features have real-world uses.
In spite of a respectable outing, the 705’s sound can’t be listed with those highlights. It fulfils the role of pocket-sized blaster perfectly well, but as soon as a bigger, better speaker is available, I find myself putting the Braven away. That is always the case with small speakers, to a lesser or greater degree, but I would say that the 705 reaches the upper-middle range of small speaker audio.
For bringing out-loud music along for the ride, the Braven represents good value at £89.99, and it is a very nice little speaker to have lying around, ready for your next music-filled adventure.
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