Over the past few days I’ve been given several Bluetooth speakers to test out in the wild, throw them against music, gaming, podcasts and the literal sounds of nature.
The Enermax EAS01 was made to be simple, easy to use and a tool of convenience, what it lacks it sound quality it makes up for in usefulness.
First Impressions
At first glance upon unboxing it, I really was excited to get into this product. A straight forward design, a smooth look and some expansion slots I wasn’t expecting, I was looking forward to seeing what this tool could do. It came in the all black variant, while also coming in red or blue as well for those looking for colour options. I wasn’t sure what to expect at first mostly because scouring the back design of the tool I saw all these open slots and buttons and went “Damn there’s lots going on”.
Design and features
The EAS01 is designed around making your listening experience easy, convenient, and personal. The pill design lets the speakers pop out on either end, while the center focuses on the features. You’ll find a micro SD card slot for music on the go, AUX for passing around that cord as well NFC Bluetooth pairing. It was super easy to connect to this device through manual mode, but NFC made that just that much more easy.
The bottom of the device has two expansion slots, like a tripod almost, with screw in attachments for either a window or a clip for the side of a bag or pants. It’s a cool concept and allows you to walk around with ease with your own personal soundtrack, so that’s a win in my books.
Another great feature of the tool was the pull down dock, it allows you to pull out a mini dock to mount a phone or various sizes of tablets to rest. This makes it again convenient for placing your device where your speakers are and keeping track of both items at the same time.
Sound
As I said earlier, this speaker does lack sound. On full tilt it didn’t meet my expectation for what an external speaker should be, it would be loud enough if placed in a bedroom on a nightstand and you were listening to some smooth jazz, a podcast or some other favorite tunes. But other than that this is not meant to be a party tool or something to rely on for a weekend away music source, you’ll have people constantly asking you to turn it up.
The test
When you have a speaker, a simple podcast or eBook won’t do for a test, you’ve got to throw everything you have at it. So for testing this speaker out I ran it through some songs, a Bass tester. I did this for several reasons, one to see how low it could go and two to see how it would do with different types of music and media, there’s genres dedicated to sick bass drops. Unfortunately there is seemingly little bass support for any heavy and deep bass songs, I was disappointed by this but then realized it’s because of the design of the speaker. It just can’t do heavy bass or deep songs with the way the speakers are, if they were both on the front, perhaps, but with the current design it can’t. I ran it through some soft Jazz, classical music and of course Frank Sinatra and this device handled well, it was perfect for the theme and held it well to these types of music.
Conclusion
So if you’re looking for an external speaker for listening to a lecture, using it for school or a personal speaker with the easy listening mindset this may be the product for you. However if you’re relying on it for a weekend away and placing this on a bench as your sole music source, or you’re a deep bass loving fan, I’d advise a different product that can hit those levels of sound. To me it’s just not loud enough.
Steve Noel is the deputy editor, his favorite Shrek movie is all of them
