The Libratone iOS app lets you access the FullRoom Optimization feature to adjust the Zipp’s sound for placement on a table, on a shelf, outdoors, etc., and also provides access to various EQ (or voicing) presets.
Behind the grillework you can see the Zipp’s dual ribbon tweeters, mounted at a 90° angle, and its upward-firing 4-inch woofer.
I can’t recall when a product I was reviewing got me smiling so fast as the Zipp did. Something about the sound simply caught my ear and my soul. It reminded me of the way a great guitar amplifier just sounds right and all the other ones in the shop don’t.
Seconds into The Cult’s “Love Removal Machine” (from Electric), I had the Zipp cranked all the way up. OK, maybe that was pushing the tweeters just a tad, so I backed the volume down one notch on my iPod and never lowered it after that. The Zipp’s sound was so addictive I wanted it loud all the time, even when I was playing mellow stuff like James Taylor.
A lot of the Zipp’s appeal lies in its amazingly full sound. The bass plays amazingly deep for something not much bigger than a Quaker Oats can. Even one of my bass torture test cuts, the pipe-organ-heavy Michael Murray/San Francisco Orchestra recording of Joseph Jongen’s “Symphony Concertante,” sounded satisfyingly dynamic and full through the Zipp. I was happy to hear that Libratone didn’t design the Zipp the way many compact systems are designed, with a booming, high-Q bass bump that delivers strong bass only in a narrow band. The bass response sounded natural and even, the way it would with a well-designed bookshelf speaker.
Only the powerful, deep bass notes that lead off Holly Cole’s recording of “Train Song” (from Temptation) fazed the Zipp. It didn’t distort, but it compressed pretty heavily, and it just couldn’t provide enough output at such low frequencies to energize the room.
The Zipp also sounded big. While its driver layout prevents it from delivering any kind of separation, the omnidirectional array really fills a room. True to Libratone’s promise, the sound barely changes as you walk around the Zipp. You don’t even have to bother pointing it in any particular direction.
Was it perfect? No. Speakers with lots of little plastic bits in front of the drivers rarely, if ever, deliver smooth vocal reproduction. I heard a little extra mid-treble zip and a few subtle frequency response errors in some of Cole’s notes, as well as in the quasi-tribal wails of The Cult’s Ian Astbury and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. Sometimes voices just sounded a little coarse, probably because I was pushing the Zipp’s tweeters up against their limits, causing them to distort slightly. In some complex arrangements, such as “Will O’ the Wisp” from Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, the Zipp just couldn’t flesh out the acoustics of the instruments the way a decent conventional speaker could.
Yet the Zipp’s occasional lack of refinement didn’t diminish my overall enjoyment of its sound, because all of the errors were limited to narrow frequency bands and didn’t shift the overall tonal balance. Even some fiendishly difficult-to-reproduce singers, such as jazz vocalist Susie Arioli and singer/songwriter Ron Sexsmith, sounded quite smooth through the Zipp.
thanks brent for this great review again! i was already considering the zipp as a possible and probably better sounding alternative to my bose soundlink.
what i am missing though are precise statements about battery life. you said you were listening to it near full volume most of the time. how long would the battery last at such settings? 4 hours playing wirelessly is a bit weak IMO.
Hi, oluv. I had to kind of rush this review in because of some technical issues with the product I'd planned to review for last Wednesday, so I didn't have a chance to do any formal battery testing, but I got somewhere around 3.5 to 4 hours of use in wireless mode with the unit cranked pretty loud most of the time. I'd guess you might get another hour of it at moderate level. I didn't use it in wired mode except when I measured it.
ok thanks, but i have another question i forgot to ask, namely about the "directplay" mode.
what's that special about this mode, as all airplay-enabled speakers i have at home do allow direct streaming during their configuration mode, where they also build up an own ad-hoc network. i don't understand what's the deal with libratone's way?
i also read about your reconnection issues, where you had to turn off the speakers. did you forward these issues to libratone?
i also wanted to ask if during "directplay" mode several devices can connect simultanously or only one? of course only one can playback at once, but it would be cool, if let's say during some beach party three iphones could be connected at the same time, and when one stops playback, another one can stream to the speaker, withouth having to reconnect or setup etc.
meanwhile even the logitech UE boombox allows 3 bluetooth devices to stay connected simultanously. as soon as the playback stops from one, the other one can continue playing. there is only one issue with the boombox: after powering up it automatically only connects to one of the three known devices. you have to force the connection on the other two manually.
What I want to know is what effect does that heavy cloth, or whatever it is, cover have on the sound.
Hi Brent. thanks for your review on the zipp. I'd like to hear your comment on the stereo imaging of this speaker. How good is zipp's stereo imaging comparing with Big Jambox's LiveAudio? And comparing with two Nokia play 360 working in pairing mode(one for left channel, one for right channel)? .
Second question is regarding apple store sales. When can I find it on store.apple.com? It's not there now.
Thanks!
@oluv: I have tested only a couple of AirPlay products, and don't have any on hand to check that. I also don't have the Zipp - review sample has gone back - so I can't check the simultaneous connection. I didn't have any problem switching instantly between AirPlay from my computer and from my iPod touch.
@al: The cover was on when I took the measurements. I can't say what the acoustic effects are because I didn't measure it without the cover (no one would use it like that), but there's no treble roll-off, so it seems likely they figured in the acoustic effects when they voiced it.
@Iwyjames: There is no stereo imaging with the Zipp. Indoors, it delivers what some in audio circles refer to as "fat mono" - i.e., essentially monophonic sound that has some sense of spaciousness to it because of the dispersion and the room acoustics. Outdoors, it is essentially a mono product. More or less the same statement applies to the Big Jambox. Its speakers are so close together that you can't get a stereo image, but they're far enough apart to deliver a slight sense of spaciousness. The Big Jambox has the LiveAudio feature for more spaciousness, but it seems to sound good only with binaural recordings.
The Nokia Play 360 I haven't heard, but if you can send L and R separately to two of the speakers, the stereo imaging will be far, far better than the Zipp or the Big Jambox. However, I can't vouch for the sound quality. That would depend on whether the engineer who did the voicing knew what he/she was doing. We see some compact/BT products these days that had the potential to sound good but don't because they weren't voiced or whoever voiced them had the wrong priorities.
If I recall correctly, the Zipp hits Apple stores next month.
Just heard from the PR guy that the Zipp is now available at Apple stores:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H9737VC/A/libratone-zipp-portable-airp...