Urbanista Malibu Review: Superb Solar, Average Audio

Someplace in a quiet nook of Urbanista’s Stockholm HQ, there’s a list of emergency place-names. Since its inception in 2010, the company has been on a sort of digital world tour, naming each of its merchandise after a location of lesser or higher resonance.

Nonetheless there’s a finite guidelines of evocative toponyms on this planet, isn’t there? How prolonged sooner than we’re offered the Urbanista Chongqing? Or the Urbanista Slough?

Correct now, though, Urbanista is however to exhaust the world’s present of poignant place-names. And so proper right here’s the Malibu wi-fi speaker, on the market in a most un-Malibu-like number of black or gray finishes.

In some methods, the Malibu is a wi-fi speaker like all the others—nonetheless, as with the company’s Phoenix and Los Angeles wi-fi headphones, there’s some extent of distinction proper right here. The very best of the speaker is type of utterly made up of Exeger’s Powerfoyle photograph voltaic cell supplies, which suggests the Malibu, like its headphone siblings, can harvest the power of sunshine, whether or not or not pure or electrical, to contribute to the lifetime of its 3,600-mA battery.

It’s not pretty a USP—fringe producers Abfoce and Cyboris have solar-powered audio system of their lineups, too. Nonetheless these producers don’t have the hard-won credibility of Urbanista, and they also don’t boast the extraordinary effectivity of Powerfoyle each.

Left to its private devices, the Malibu’s battery is good for spherical 30 hours of playback. That’s as long as you’re listening at common amount, anyway. The kind of digital audio file dimension you’re streaming isn’t a component, as a result of the Urbanista is just appropriate with the bog-standard, low-energy SBC and AAC codecs.

Nonetheless with mild shining on its Powerfoyle flooring, the Malibu can delay its playtime handily. We’re not talking about an Urbanista Los Angeles–vogue state of affairs proper right here, you understand; these headphones can really purchase power, while they’re having fun with. Nonetheless Urbanista implies that even some moderately sunny days whereas the Malibu is doing its issue can delay that battery life from 30 hours to at least one factor nearer to 45 hours. And free energy is simply not one factor to be sniffed at.

Photograph voltaic Sounds

“Fairly sunny” is a relative time interval, in any case. All through the course of my time with the Urbanista, it was charged by a combination of inside mild and the pathetically watery glimmers of a moist British October that was even grayer than the Malibu’s Desert Gray finish. And even then, it was able to play for nearly 40 hours sooner than I had recourse to mains power.

I can solely take into consideration how prolonged it might go for all through a Malibu summer season—indefinitely, presumably. Each strategy, the speaker’s IP67 rating should suggest it’s able to stand up correctly to these extremes.

As is commonplace Urbanista observe, the Malibu is flawlessly constructed and accomplished from a group of provides that blend tactility with robustness. Other than the Powerfoyle, the Urbanista is created from a combination of sturdy plastic and a quantity of acoustic cloth.