Marshall - Emberton III

Just wanted to set the record straight here and say that the above is objectively not true. The Emberton 2 and 3 are extremely similar BUT that is not true for the Willen 1 and 2. The Willen 2 is actually quite a bit larger than 1 and has vast improvements in sound quality and low end register. The difference is quite significant. 

Marshall Emberton III or the new Sony ULT Field 3. The Sony has good bass and sounds great. It's light and would be easy to carry. It's also waterproof. It sounds almost as good as my Sony XG300 in a much smaller and lighter package. The Marshall is smaller and has great sound and very good bass as well. Under 2lbs.

The III series is really good in sound quality.

I have a Marshall Emberton that sounds great and goes for a while without needing a charge.

I bought Marshall, may be i’m old school but, i like the sound of marshall emberton better than bose, bose sound great in all genres no doubt. Also, i can’t live with 12 hours battery, cause eventually all battery degrades overtime with extensive usage. No use being portable if you have to keep charging all the time. That’s my intake.

I use the Marshall Emberton. I can take calls with it and if I need to use maps for deliveries, I can actually hear the directions. I am in my probationary period but I figured if I were assigned a Metris I would be doing the same things.

big fan of the marshall emberton

Good bass and muffled treble is basically Marshalls trademark sound. It is the guitar amp feeling why you buy them. We have the Tufton at work, the biggest of them all with supposedly a front facing dome tweeter but it still sounds muffled with a hugely overemphasized bass unless you EQ it down. Guitar amps usually have super large fullrange speakers in an open baffle enclosure. The don't deliver treble above 5 or 8Khz and also not so deep base, but good kockbase between 70 and 300hz. People like that sound and marshall has made it its standard EQ preset. The emberton has 2inch woofers with two large PRs. It is obviously tuned for midbass. But the speakers being 2inchers, they should be pretty usable in the treble too. Just EQ the heck outa it! Another point might be directivity. Since these are not dome tweeters, they beam like crazy. So you have to place them on ear level with the axis facing you directly to get any high frequencies. To get any meaningful stereo, you need to place it a few centimeters in front of a wall, cause the second channel is designed with a delay for a larger sound stage and to reflect the second channel off a wall.

You can't get the same SPL, but there are much smaller speakers with the same bass extension. I don't like the boomy overemphasis of bass of the boombox2 too much, but i understand it sounds fun for a lot of music. But if Bass is what you are looking for i'd suggest to have a look at the Marshall lineup. They have a preference for bassy sound and have a few models that are considerably smaller than the Boombox2. They have better bass in every segment, but as bass uses more power than mids and treble, most marshall speakers have worse battery life than corresponding JBLs. For example the Middleton has about the same bass extension as the JBL boombox2, but is just a third of the size. Of course you trade in Max SPL for that nice range, as there ain't no free lunch. The problem with smaller drivers is that they are less efficient, so they need more power for the same SPL or just deliver considerably less SPL. Both is the case with the Middleton. So you trade in less SPL and less battery life, but you get a similar sound quality in about one third the size. Plus arguably the Middleton looks nicer and more mature even though both are ofc mostly plastic and rubber. And as with all Marshalls, the stereo soundstage is fantastic, better than any of the JBLs. I also like the even smaller emberton, but once you go smaller the bass extension is a lot lesser with just 68hz instead of the 49hz that the middleton and boombox2 are achieving.