Problem #1 – You want to fill several rooms in your home with crisp, rich music and/or ultraconservative talk radio programming, but you don’t have a built-in multi-speaker system.
Problem #2 – You want to crank out some tunes to liven up your beach/patio/campsite party, but there’s no power outlet in site.
Problem #3 – You have to get across a river using only one boat, and must transport a bag of grain, a hungry duck, and a basket filled with electric eels.
The solution to all three problems, except for the third? The VIZIO Crave Go Multi-Room Wireless Speaker, of course!
But seriously, the Crave Go speaker is about the size of an average hard-cover novel and weighs in at 3.2 pounds. That’s more weight than you’ll want to bring on an overland backpacking trip, but it’s perfect for use in the backyard, at a picnic, by the pool, or at the beach. The speaker has a six hour battery life even when it’s cranking out music at high volume, something it certainly does well. Even when being really quite loud, the Crave Go maintains sonic fidelity that audiophiles will appreciate.
Your Crave Go is easily controlled by an app you can download to your smartphone or tablet that lets you pair the speaker with various content platforms, like Pandora or Spotify. You can use your phone to control settings such as bass, treble, and the volume, though the speaker also has physical buttons that control volume and that can pause the media; a savvy function for those times when Mambo #5 comes on at the exact moment you drop your phone into the gutter. (Good for movie montages, but not for real life.)
One complaint I have to register: the claim of this being a “multi-room” speaker is misleading at best. Yes, you can pair multiple Crave Go units together and control them using one phone, but that’s not a multi-room speaker, that’s speakers, plural. And if you plan to buy, say, three Crave Go speakers, you’re going to spend six hundred bucks before tax. At that cost, just get a built-in hard-wired sound system with even more speakers. That would lack the portability, for sure, but still. And also, to be fair, the Crave Go produces enough amplitude to easily fill at least two large rooms with sound, so long as you place it wisely.
Quick side note: the maximum volume the Crave Go produces is rated at 88 decibels. That’s too much noise for when you’re trying to hold a casual conversation or sleep, but it’s only a fraction above the generally accepted threshold for safe levels of volume. According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), sounds up to 85 decibels are unlikely to cause hearing damage (or Noise Induced Hearing Loss, to be precise). So set your Crave Go a bit below its top volume setting and you can safely enjoy crisp, potent sound without concern about damage to your ears. And you can explain that to the neighbors and/or police when they bring up a noise nuisance abatement grievance. Actually, don’t do that.
