With Bluetooth speakers (especially portable ones), battery life is an area that I don’t think gets enough attention.
Considering this a product you’ll be taking with you on your outdoor adventures, you will a) want to make sure it’s fully charged and b) that it lasts for as long as it says it does.
That’s not always the case.
What the brand says on its website and packaging is likely true, but there’s small print that buyers often overlook, resulting in performance that’s not always what you expect.
Is it the brand’s fault for not fully disclosing the details around battery life, or an issue that’s more complicated than just that?
Very hush hush
This has always been an issue for me, but in reviewing a number of Bluetooth speakers from JBL and Marshall, it highlighted the issue more.
Every reviewer has their approach to assessing battery life. Some will take the brand at its word and, in their review, declare the same figure. Others will use the speaker as their main one, and while they’re not totting up the exact hours, they’ll generally monitor how long (over several days) the battery life has lasted before the speaker needs a recharge.
Others will go into more depth but have different approaches. Speaking for myself, I use my own Spotify playlist, which is a library of all the tracks I’ve liked on the service since… forever. I’ll put it on shuffle so (in theory) it should never be the same tracks playing in the same order. There’s nothing scientific about it; I just prefer the variation that, in my head, mimics the different tastes of tracks that people might play on their speakers at any time. You might think that’s nonsense, but it’s my nonsense.
Most of the time I leave this playing at around 50% volume, and check in every hour to see how much battery has been depleted. I do not play the speaker until the battery dies. I’ll then take an average and calculate how much that would be and see if it adds up to the brand’s claimed battery life. Most of the time, it does not.
This is because when brands test battery life, they’re often testing at lower volume. The drivers inside a speaker generate magnetic fields that feed an electrical signal into the drivers, the push and pull motion of the drivers that’s converted into the sound energy that you hear. At higher volumes there’s obviously a greater sense of loudness, more energy being fed into the drivers and therefore more energy used – and vice versa for lower volumes.
So technically speaking, it’s not as if brands are telling a lie. But if you’re like me, you’re playing music at 50% volume, if not higher. When you first turn on a speaker, it’s often at its default level. Rarely have I ever thought of lowering the volume from that point.
So if the volume is set at 50% by default, why bother testing at lower volumes? That I’m not altogether sure of. I could be cynical and say it’s for the marketing, but I suspect the sound has been tuned at a certain volume and then scaled to make sure the drivers offer a similar response across a range of volumes – high and low.
But still, why not just make it clearer that the volume is taken from a specific level?
No universal method
This has become a problem recently has brands seem to have a different approach to calculating the battery life for speakers. They don’t necessarily use a universal method. What JBL does is probably different from Sony, from Marshall, from Sonos, from Bose.
The equipment used is likely different based on what they think their customer base is most likely to use. So what can we do about it?
I have no idea.
There’s no incentive for anything to change; there aren’t any repercussions because, technically, the speaker can achieve that battery life – just probably not at the volume you’d normally play it at. If you complain that the battery life is not that good, they’re likely to ask you what volume you’re playing music at.
I should be fair and say that there are times when I’ve used my approach and battery life has been right on the money. But, in general, I think that audio brands should be a little upfront about what their speakers are truly capable of. I want a speaker to last, but it needs to meet the target in the first place.
