Those speakers are now fixed in place with wiring through the walls and ceiling, and I can’t move them without remodeling the room. ![]() This issue is compounded by the fact that the locations where I had installed speakers when I built the home theater (before immersive audio was a concern I gave any thought to) were less than ideal for Atmos. That, combined with a low ceiling, makes it difficult for just four speakers (two in the front of the room and two in the back) to image a sound above my head convincingly. My own home theater is a long room with a lot of space behind my seats. It’s good looking, it’s extremely portable, it also serves as a dock and you can even sync your iPod to your computer with it via USB, and the sound – while low end – is pretty good.Nonetheless, for some of us, a limit of four height channels isn’t enough to fill the top of the room with sound. In the sub $100 speaker category, there aren’t a lot of devices worth writing home about, but the JBL On Stage Micro stands out for a variety of reasons. ![]() You have two color options, white and black, and both look pretty slick – again adding to the value of the device on a desk or in the kitchen. Navigating through your song library on the iPod is easy enough, but – of course – since the screen is very small, you can’t really flip through songs from the other side of the room so, while the feature is implemented well, it’s not terribly useful in most cases.įrom a design standpoint, the JBL Micro is a good looking little device. Now, that’s certainly not a big deal, but something that I wanted to point out as a dislike. She wanted to give this a shot too, but since the icons on the remote aren’t standard play/pause and so forth, she was confused, and unable to operate the Micro without help. As a personal complaint, I don’t care very much for the stylized icons on the remote, mainly because they confused my 3 year old, who had just learned how to operate the AppleTV. The remote is nice and sturdy, with a variety of navigation buttons on it. You can crank the volume up pretty loud before you start to notice any serious audio quality loss, but as soon as you pass the threshold, it become immediately obvious that you’re pushing the speakers to their limit. You’re not going to be blowing the roof off of your house with this thing, but I have found that it works perfectly as a speaker system for your desk, or even in the kitchen. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of sound coming out of this little device, and it sounds excellent…up to a point. Keeping the device at the compact, highly portable size, does come at a cost though, as the sound quality – while very good – is not great. It is also the first of the On Stage offerings to run on batteries (or the included power supply), making it one of the most portable iPod speaker systems on the market. The Micro is a very compact devic, not too much bigger than a standard dock. The On Stage Micro is the latest addition to the JBL On Stage line of speaker systems for iPods. So, when I got a chance to take a look at the latest edition to their family of On Stage products, I lept at the opportunity. ![]() I don’t think you’ll find too many people that would argue against the fact that JBL is one of the most consistently impressive designers of speaker systems for the iPod on the market.
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