At first the Iloud speaker looks like most other bluetooth speakers. Its a Black rectangular box. The front of the unit is dominated by a large speaker grill that is used to protect the and is only broken up by the large volume dial that sits front and centre. The volume knob on the iLoud feels very nice indeed and has good tactile clicks for adjusting the volume in accurate increments. Speaking of the volume knob it lights up in a surrounding halo of light that changes colours to indicate battery and pairing status. Although the iLoud speaker is made of plastic we found it to be very high quality and very well put together. Sufficient dampening must have been used on the internals because when conduction the iLoud speaker review we were never met with a hint of resonance and considering the hefty amounts of bass it can put out we were even more impressed. Round the back of the iLoud you will find a tidy row of buttons and input options as follows:

3.5mm jack input

Guitar and Mic Input (using irig system)

Gain Switch

Bluetooth pairing button

Power and charge LED

On / Off Switch

DC Power Input

The bottom of the iLoud speaker has a couple of very thick rubber pads that perform a number of features from protecting the device as well as any surface you are using it on as well as adding further resonance dampning that can occur on using a speaker on a metal or glass hard surface.

Battery performance we found to be very good for a bluetooth speaker with such a loud volume output. The device took us on average 2 hours and 10 mins to achieve a full charge from empty with the speaker turned off. Playback when using the bluetooth and at moderately high volume consistently got us over 10 hours.

iLoud Speaker: Portable Guitar Amplifier Review

The iLoud speakers big feature that sets it apart from the competition is the ability to use it as a guitar amplifier (or microphone amp). To get down to this it wasn't as easy as we would have liked but after a bit of fiddling about it worked well in practice and sounded very good. What I had sort of expected was a simple plug and play whereby you just directly hook the iloud into the guitar and away you instead you are going to need a few extra pieces to get going but most importantly and idevice, ideally an ipad. You will need to download and app such as the Amplitude app (we recommend getting the full paid version) which has a pretty full range of amp features for you to play with. You then connect the TRRS cable into the iPad and then connect back into the iLoud speaker via the 3.5mm jack. After that you adjust the gain to account for any reverb you might be getting and you are away to twiddle knows and thrash away till your hearts content. So while it may not be as simple as plug and play once it is set up it is incredibly fully featured, sounds awesome and is a hell of a lot of fun

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iloud Bluetooth Speaker Review: Sound Quality?