Monster ClarityHD Micro Bluetooth Speaker
- A pretty good mobile Bluetooth speaker for the price of a generic one
- The play time for each full charge of the battery is at least six hours, reviewers say,
- Sounds loud and full and so on and so forth
- Also handles conference calls like that Intercom thing on Charlie’s Angels
- Model: MBL CLY MICRO WH WW (oh, come on - with a model number like that, just use full words! people can remember words)
Commoditize me.
The “little Bluetooth stereo speaker with surprisingly good sound” has become such a standard category, we’ve lost our capacity for surprise.
Back in 2010, when the Jambox became the first to pull off the “I can’t believe it can fill a room!” trick, it was genuinely startling to hear such booming sound from something that looked like an overgrown Lego brick. Naturally, everybody wanted a piece of that magic. The Jambox was followed by all manner of Bluetooth speakers small enough to fit in your hand. Some tried novel shapes, some tried even more garish color schemes, some played it cool and nondescript. But they all promised to - in a word - “surprise” your ears with bigger sound than you were expecting.
Gradually, in the eyes of consumers, these different Bluetooth speakers blurred into one mass of more or less interchangeable widgets. The surest sign that this innovation has been commoditized came when Amazon Basics released their own no-frills versions, neatly organized in a hierarchy of standard shapes and sizes, with no overlaps or gaps or, Heaven forfend, surprises:
So the portable Bluetooth speaker is now in the same unglamorous league as an HDMI cable or a USB mouse. Pick your form factor and off you go. (The one we’re selling is equivalent to what Amazon calls the “Portable”.) This stereo type is now a stereotype.
Which is great. “Generic” isn’t an insult. A commoditized market sets a nice baseline for what you should expect to pay for the basic version of that thing. If your time and budget are limited and you don’t want to screw with shopping around, just grab the generic one. If you’re looking for a really good deal, now you’ll know it when you see it: a more higher-end speaker for the same price as the comparable generic - the noncommoditized experience at commoditized prices.
Or even a little cheaper than that. The Monster Micro Clarity Speaker packs all the usual portable Bluetooth speaker features, plus a gratuitous voice-control system that you’ll never use, into a casing smaller than a brick and much lighter. If you know what to expect from speakers of its type, you’ll be happy with how it sounds. You just won’t be surprised.
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Monster ClarityHD Micro Bluetooth Speaker 72
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