Marshall Emberton
A classy looking and a fairly practical speaker.
The Marshall Emberton Bluetooth speaker almost looks like a novelty gift you get for someone when you couldn’t afford the full and ‘real’ thing. It’s effectively a miniaturised version of a Marshall guitar amp, and that immediately makes it look stylish and cool.
Underneath that classy exterior is a competent portable speaker in its own right that might lack a bit of power and extra functionality for its price of $299, but it’s still appealing stuff thanks to being super portable and roadworthy.
While many Bluetooth speakers in this price range bundle in many features, the Marshall Emberton keeps things pretty simple. It’s a fairly rugged and immensely portable speaker that you can easily toss in your bag and take wherever you’re going. It only weighs 0.7kg and it’s small enough to hold in one hand. It also has IPX7 water resistance so you won’t have to worry about this waterproof speaker falling in the pool or getting wet.
However, while the Marshall
Emberton looks great and has the basics covered, it lacks some key features we’d normally expect to see. That includes a microphone for receiving calls through the speaker and – connected to that – a lack of voice assistant support, though the latter isn’t necessarily to be expected from a portable speaker. There’s no app support either so you can’t tweak the equaliser like you can with many other Bluetooth speakers. It doesn’t even have a 3.5mm AUX input.
Design-wise though, we can’t fault the Marshall Emberton’s looks. It genuinely does look like a mini version of a Marshall amp which means it looks great on a desk, living room side, or mostly anywhere else.
At the top of the speaker is a gold four-directional joystick of sorts that’s embedded in to look suitably stylish. Besides being a power button, it allows you to adjust volume as well as skip tracks. A glowing red light indicates remaining battery life to the side of it while there’s a subtly placed Bluetooth pairing button.
Perhaps understandably given the size of the Marshall Emberton, it sounds great up until a point. Keep the volume low-ish and you’ll be impressed by the bassy sounds that emanate as you listen to your favorite tracks.
That’s not to the detriment of the mids or lows either with a fairly balanced sound whether you’re relaxing with Childish Gambino’s bouncy ‘Feels Like Summer’, or switching it up to more aggressive music like a walk down memory lane with Linkin Park’s ‘Points of Authority’. It’s ideal for placing in a room where you’re taking some time out, or in need of quality background listening.