House of Marley Bag of Riddim 2: Portable Speaker with Wireless Bluetooth, Sustainable Materials

This speaker has the best sound for a bluetooth speaker its size and price range that I could find. I looked for two years, and tested JBL, HJ, Marshall, Bose, etc. And yet, I want to smash it to bits, because THE “VOICE” IS SO ANNOYING and LOUD and frequent and pervasive. I wish I had returned it when I could. Also, the bass is actually too strong, in contrast to most small speakers that don’t have nearly enough. I live in an apartment, so this is a concern, but if you live in a house, it might be fine. If I turn the volume up enough to appreciate the mids and highs, my neighbors are also going to be enjoying the bass.It has a female robot voice that tells you EXTREMELY LOUDLY every time it POWERS ON-PAIRING, POWERING OFF, BATTERY IS NEARLY EMPTY- TIME TO RE-CHARGE, and CHARGING that it makes me want to throw it across the room!!! It interrupts whatever you’re listening to to tell you EXTREMELY LOUDLY that BATTERY IS NEARLY EMPTY- TIME TO RE-CHARGE, and when you plug it in while listening, there’s a very long silent pause, and then CHARGING, and then a long silent pause again before your music or whatever comes back on.Also, it automatically POWERS OFF after only a couple of minutes if you pause your music, etc., and then you have to manually turn it back on again and listen to it POWER ON-PAIRING again. The other day, I happened to doze off on my couch listening to it (which is an extremely rare and wonderful thing for me) and it POWERED OFF, as always, within a couple of minutes of the music ending and it was SO LOUD that it woke me up so jolted my heart was racing. I live in the city and sleep with my windows open a lot, and am used to getting woken up by super loud motorcycles and other super loud city sounds that don’t happen that often, but occasionally, and I just roll over and go back to sleep, but this was so GD LOUD that it actually scared me very unpleasantly wide awake, and left my heart racing.This is a HUGE design screw up. I saw other reviews that warned of how annoying this feature is, but I decided to take a chance because it’s been so hard to find a speaker I like, and I figured it couldn’t be that bad.. but I was wrong!! I want to smash it to bits!!I also like to listen to certain music or podcasts while I fall asleep, and with this speaker, that is absolutely not a possibility!! I only use it to listen to music when I’m very wide awake and up and around doing stuff!!The main thing I’ve been looking for is quality sound, and it does have rich, warm, full sound, with plenty of mid-range as well as bass, and the highs aren’t tinny and hollow, like all of the other speakers I’ve tried. The bass is more distinct: you can hear the individual notes, all of them. With others I’ve had that were more powerful and supposed to be high quality, the bass was loud and you could feel it in your body, but the sound was indistinct and muddy as far as the actual tones, which to me, means you miss half the joy of the music.That’s not the case with this speaker. It’s clear and rich, across the spectrum. Now, the bass IS loud. I like bass, and most small bluetooths don’t have nearly enough of it. So, lots of bass is great, but it’s a little imbalanced, IMO. With the kinds of music that I listen to most, it’s not generally a problem: jazz, Afro-beat, funk, soul, classical, etc. Those sound beautiful, rich and clear. I would still equalize the bass down a touch sometimes if I could, but it’s ok. When I do play house or electronic music, the bass is a bit of a problem. Proportionally to the rest of the music, it’s too loud. If I turn it up enough so that I can hear the mids and highs better, then the bass is a nuisance to my neighbors, and I’m not gonna be that person, so I listen at a volume where I don’t really hear the music… This can happen a little bit with funk music, also, but not too bad. I Iove music, and sometimes like to do nothing but sit and listen to it, but if you have quality sound, you don’t need to do that at high volume.Now, if you live in your own home, you may not care about this. I live in a very charming 130 year old apartment, and the sound insulation is not awesome. I’ve been trying to replace portable speakers that were perfect for me, but that finally quit charging, and are no longer available. They were small, easy to carry around from the kitchen to the balcony to the bedroom, pretty bamboo speakers that sounded beautiful. All of the other smaller bluetooths I’ve found sound like garbage in comparison. Of the larger ones, the HK had impressive sound if you turned it up loud enough to hear the mids and highs over the bass, but it was imbalanced to the extent that it was totally inappropriate in my apartment. My neighbors would have murdered me for the bass, and again, I don’t need sound that loud anyway. I tried two different Marshalls, and they were pretty good, but overall the sound on both was kind of flat and hollow.One other thing to be aware of is that if you pick the speaker up by the shoulder strap of the bag, as shown in the pictures, it will fall right out of the bag. The bag fits snugly around three sides of the speaker, but there’s no way to secure it in there. I assumed that there would be some way to secure it in. But there’s not. So if you pick it up by the shoulder strap, and try to carry it that way, expect the speaker to fall out onto the floor. This happened immediately the first time I tried it. Thankfully, it only fell a few inches onto the couch. I will only pick it up using the small handles across the face of the speaker, and I suggest you do the same. It’s nice to have the carrying case and some sort of handles with a speaker this size, but I wish there was a way to secure it.Again, this thing does sound great for a portable speaker; the best I’ve found in its price range in a couple of years of searching.