Eggie, eggie. Today I've got something straight out of Aperture Science.
The loud-muse egg. These egg-shaped speakers are straight out of Austria,
and they just arrived in this really nice packaging.
Got a nice big old zipper.
Oh, look at that. May eggs. Look at this thing.
It's a giant egg. Oh, my God, it's big.
It's a big, heavy thing. Gently set that down here, I guess.
Comes with a European plug. They haven't quite made it over here to North America yet.
We've got the feets and our little bag of bolts.
Now, these have been opened before. Logistics checked them out, and we all made sure that they were okay.
So yours might appear a bit differently than this,
and it just kind of pulls away like this, and that's the whole amplifier unit here.
This is going to be our left speaker, so it just has the one Ethernet port.
The two speakers connect to each other with Ethernet.
Go ahead, eggy, eggy. Oh, I'm going to drop it.
There we go.
Heavy. And screws. So here's our other amplifier.
There's a little piece that you pull down here, maybe.
There we go. There's a little piece we pull right there, and then this amp should just pop out.
It's held on with these little strips of double-sided tape just to keep it from vibrating around, you know?
And here's our other amplifier. So we have Toslink Ethernet to connect to the other speaker,
and then we have Ethernet in if you want to do that. We also have an HDMI input for ARC or whatever,
and then this guy over here is actually a little mini XLR.
We've got a few interconnects here that connect into the back of the speaker right there.
I want to touch on the amps a bit later and some of the modularity, but let's get the feet on this first and get them standing up.
Okay, I found a screwdriver, unfortunately, due to short-circuit budget cuts, I only get a small one.
And people have been getting their grubby fingers all over this.
That feels nice and sturdy. They come in both white and also, apparently,
a really nice, what they're calling, anthracite. This one is also pretty matte, but it's also very white.
I can see cleaning this would be a bit of a problem. I appreciate that they're not using piano black.
That is the worst material on the planet. Now that we've got the legs on, there's a small extra little piece here
that kind of holds them together at the back, and that just keeps them aligned properly.
Egg-y. Now I understand why they have fingerprints all over them.
They're just like, they're so touchable. I don't know why that is.
They just want to be, like, looked at and played with. I guess everybody likes playing with their eggs.
Wonk. So up front here, we've got our three speakers.
In the middle here, we've got our tweeter. It's a one-inch with aluminum ceramic domed little guy.
We've got two mid-drivers outside of it. They're five inches, also ceramic aluminum.
And on the outside here, we have our low driver, which is about an 11 and a half inch paper cone type big driver.
I'm not entirely sure how we get this cover off, but probably got a speaker in it.
I'm sure it looks the same. And that's vented out of these two ports at the front.
So that's kind of cool. She stands about 45 inches high, which is pretty nice,
and a very spelt just 16 inches slim,
so these can tuck in, you know, behind a bookshelf or something.
And about 25 inches deep. So yeah, egg-shaped.
Although maybe if you sat on your egg a bit. I got to talk about the elephant in the room.
They're not egg-shaped. They're portal turrets. It's sick.
I mean, is it? I can't decide if that's awesome or not.
These things should get pretty loud as well. They're claiming a max output of 108 decibels,
which is like far and above reasonable listening volume.
So we'll see if we can destroy all of your eardrums a bit later.
And of course, we have this detachable amplifier
and connectivity board thing on the back.
This thing's capable of outputting about 350 watts,
which is pretty good. Again, you kind of got a variety of inputs,
but these are more like a Wi-Fi speaker or a Bluetooth speaker,
if you want to think about it that way. The problem with that that we've seen with other brands,
we get a new kind of Wi-Fi every year or two,
or a new HDMI standard. What would you have to do?
You'd have to throw these out and buy a whole new set of speakers.
What Loud is doing, which nobody else seems to be doing,
is these modular backplains.
So you get to keep the speaker and you send this back to them, and they send you a new one with all the updated specifications.
It's like less e-waste, it's pretty great. This whole speaker assembly is also pretty modular.
You can just take the speakers out, send them back the case,
get a new case, or you blow up a speaker. Your kid pulls off the front and stabs their finger in there,
or I do that, whoops, you just get a new speaker, right?
So there's this kind of air of sustainability and upgradeability
and modularity, and I think that's really awesome.
So this is going to be our right speaker.
So this is going to be our main amp, so we'll just clip that back in there,
and then we push. Yeah, done, easy.
Who got this all scratched up? What the hell?
Unfortunately, these are Europe only at the moment,
but they will be coming to America eventually.
The power supplies in them are automatic switching. And yeah, these are Ethernet connected, which I think is fine.
Are they Bluetooth speakers? Are they web speakers, or are they like audio file speakers?
I'm not entirely sure. I know that they can take pretty much insane, lossless kind of files,
but, you know, we'll have a listen. Okay, let's get them switched on, and I guess we'll see how they sound.
Unfortunately, it has an app. It's not too bad.
The problem is that it's probably kind of necessary,
because you're not necessarily always using this as a home theater.
You're going to be playing music from your phone, and it's going to, you know, hook into it and play the lossless stuff, right?
It finds them automatically over Bluetooth. It looks like Bell has called them the Craig Twins.
Sure. It comes with this mini DSP microphone.
We have a look at this, and it's USB-C.
So what we're supposed to do, and we've got a little cover here.
What we're supposed to do is plug this into the phone.
An engineer from their team will go through with you
and make sure that it's tuned to your room perfectly. They offer a service-level approach,
where they make sure that your room and the speakers are tuned perfectly,
and also tuned to your liking. All of those settings are kind of stored in the cloud on your loud account.
And if you're noticing there's issues with them, then you can talk to the engineers and make sure that they're retuned
or set up correctly for you. They'll also notify you if a new amp or other component is updated.
So in our audio settings for this app, we can do our own tunes ourselves, which is kind of neat.
We don't have any measurements. There's a whole setup process.
You've got to make sure you place them in the right place.
And where the microphone goes, it would go where I'm sitting here.
And then you can plug it into your phone with this little adapter board thing.
And then it'll guide you through and play tones and do all of the measurement.
And then you can see if you like it and adjust from there. It's really kind of cool.
Is there any way to adjust it without having to do a full tune?
Yeah, it looks like we've got audio settings, so we can adjust the bass and the treble.
I was not expecting kind of something to be this basic,
but I guess you kind of get the more advanced stuff
by actually having the reference microphone.
And then, as I said, you know, you'll have an engineer from the company
be able to set up a tune exactly how you want.
Hello! Future Dan here. How you been?
I know we said we weren't going to do this test, but we did end up scheduling one anyway.
Going through the remote fitting with the team did go well,
but I don't think we got the results we were expecting.
The team was great, and they did solve every little issue that we had.
Unfortunately, I don't think the software is quite ready as it stands right now.
Starting the first half of next year, the units are going to go out to the rest of Europe.
And I would expect things to be a little bit more together by then.
North America is slated for the second half, mid half of 2024.
But I'm still of the mind that this is just another product that's kind of hampered by software.
It seems to be a really big trend in current year anyway.
The remote fitting is going to be offered for free for about the first six months after release.
After that, it's going to be about $200, but that does include about two or three individual sessions.
The speakers still perform well even without room correction,
but I still feel that some more tuning would make them even better.
The sound of each speaker is still subjective though, and that's kind of why having these remote fittings is really nice,
because you can get them tuned exactly how you want for your own room and for your own sound profile.
Keep in mind though, even after the remote fitting, everything else I say in the video is still applicable.
Bye! It almost feels like a bit of a crime with these speakers,
but I am required by law to play Grab Brave now.
Jesus! F***ing Christ! I mean, they're like perfect.
There's nothing more to say. I can hear that there's some issues with the room.
There's some reflections that are not happening on this side,
and if I turn my head to face this speaker,
then I can hear them properly, because we've got all this stuff here,
and then there's not a lot of stuff there,
and just that's really interesting.
You know, that kind of thing can be kind of tuned because if I'm losing frequencies from this side,
then they can be boosted out of that side of the speaker.
The bass is so thumping, it's ridiculous,
and even, that wasn't even max volume,
I got a little bit more ways to go, but no distortion anywhere.
No rattling, no movement.
The cones in the front are like jumping. Wow, very, very impressive.
Did you feel that? It was amazing. The whole floor shook.
That was max volume, obviously. Incredibly, incredibly loud.
Yeah, they're moving so much air. If you stand in front of them,
you can feel it pushing out of here. I didn't know portal turrets could sing like that.
Because they're also Bluetooth speakers,
I've got Deezer on my phone here.
I just wanted to listen to a couple of my reference tracks. Unfortunately, this will have to be muted,
so I'm sorry, goodbye. How about Coldplay? You heard a Coldplay bell?
Yeah. The underground band. Belle, this is other band that this guy told me about.
They're called Radiohead. Have you heard about them? No.
They're pretty underground.
Sound impressions. I don't know if I can say anything.
There's nothing to attack.
These would actually warrant investment into like proper lossless inputs.
I think these also are the type of speaker
that are moving into that scary word territory audio file
where now you can't listen to all of the music
because some music sounds bad. I know that there are some people in that community
and they'll only listen to like one song on repeat
because that's how they use their benchmark to test things
and you kind of just stop listening to music and you become a kind of person that complains about stuff.
These are, I think, of that level of quality.
We don't often get to listen to speakers that sound like this
that I'm actually kind of into. They're self-contained and they're modular
and they're not super big and they're not super gaudy
and they're not piano black. Yeah, these aren't exactly cheap,
but they're kind of in a high-fi level price bracket.
For a pair, they're looking around 6,300 US dollars,
which is probably a little bit steep. You can get one, I don't know why you would,
but you can get one for 3,500 US dollars. They also offer a kind of trial.
As we'll probably get in North America here soon, what they'll do is they'll deliver the speakers.
Somebody will set them up, they'll go through the whole tuning for you
and they'll let you use them for like two weeks
to see if you like the sound of them, to see if they fit in your decor, in your house, anything like that.
I think that's kind of neat. Their approach has been more of service rather than selling
something that they'll make money on for a long time,
if you know what I mean. These are kind of designed to be more of an eternal product.
The entire system here is made out of recyclable materials.
The units themselves can be recycled after the fact.
They're focusing on sustainability from the modularity,
from the upgrade ability. You're not going to be throwing these out for a long time.
In my opinion, they perform at the price point,
which is a difficult thing to do at that price point.
They are in the upper echelon of speakers.
Considering I've listened to speakers and seen systems
that are on the order of like 50 to $100,000,
they're stacks up to the ceiling and they're just so demanding of a room.
You walk into a room and it is the speakers
and you also lived there. But these are not quite as assuming.
And they sound damn good and they're very loud.
And I think these are kind of in that weird hi-fi space of like,
I'd put these in my house, but I'm not like an aficionado.
I just kind of like the sound to sound good.
They're like art. Everybody who's walked past the set here has been like,
oh, what are those? And then they come up with their grubby little hands all over them.
Get the black ones. Yeah, the amps are quite powerful, 350 watt amps.
They run an ARM quad core in them, which is kind of interesting.
And the other interesting thing is that they actually list
the digital analog converter on the spec page.
I don't think I've seen that before, at least not in a long time. It runs an ESS Sabre DAC and they even give the exact model number.
You can look it up and get the exact data sheets and check all the specifications for yourself.
And that's just one daughter board. There's also an amplifier board and then also the control unit board
and they're all sort of just modular. They connect into each other.
What do I think? I don't exactly know. Speakers are kind of a hard thing to recommend,
especially when they have looks like this. I think there are a lot less unobtrusive than gigantic speakers,
but they are also a bit more of a statement.
I think the price is right for the performance. The loud is good.
I mean, that's probably why they named their company that.
I can't get around that they look like portal speakers.
Honestly, that's pretty f***ing sick. But they stick out.
They will be a focal point in your room.
At that kind of price point, it's really down to you.
The nice thing is that when they start moving into North America,
you'll probably be able to try them if you're in the market for them.
And if you're in Europe, then I think these are some of the guys to watch.
They're really neat. Eggie. Eggie.
Oh, look at that. May eggs.
Okay.