Bose - BOSEbuild Speaker Cube - Clear

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• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Wonderful kit for sound enthusiast

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  BOSEbuild is great gift for any person who is into sound - kid or adult. It all starts with the beginnings of the sound reproduction - magnet and coil - you'll get these in the kit. Then you launch a mobile app, connect it to the circuit board over bluetooth and start building your very first speaker. First exercise is to put a magnet on the table and put coil over it - then press the button on the screen and coil will launch into the air - that trick grabs kids attention immediately! Then you get a few demonstrations of frequency and end up with making a speaker out of the cardboard box which your kit came in. Following that - you kinda put together a small speaker made out of a paper (scissors required :)). At the end - you use a real Bose supplied acoustic driver and plastic enclosure to build yourself a little cube speaker with colored LEDs insight, and it actually does sound pretty good! I mean for something that you've just put together on the desk in 5-10 minutes and that something easily outperforms a LOT of factory bluetooth speakers! Overall - it's not just yet another boring bluetooth speaker, it's a whole acoustic science experiment kit with video tutorials and you get yourself a great speaker at the end as a reward. No tools required, just the scissors and tape. Assembly time if you carefully follow all experiments (you won't pass into another experiment until your previous one is verified) is about 30 minutes. This is the most fun experiment kit I had for a very long time, highly recommended!

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  Posted 8 years ago by xKing

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  I built my own tesseract!!

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  BOSEbuild Speaker Cube Quick Features on the Product Build and customize your own durable, high-performance Bluetooth speaker iOS app enabled leads you step-by-step through hours of exploration and fun Connect wirelessly to your mobile device Get hands-on with magnets and electromagnets Papercraft projects to make a working speaker out of paper and more Build your own durable Bluetooth speaker with Bose quality sound Customize your speaker with colored LED lighting and interchangeable silhouette covers System Requirements: Any iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad running iOS 8 or above (except the iPad 2) For a complete list of compatible devices, see build.bose.com/devices What's in the box? Magnet Wire coil Control panel Speaker panel Side panels (x4) 40 clips Power supply Papercraft speaker templates (x1) Silhouette covers (x8 designs) Quick start and informational guide Setup/Testing/Conclusion Got kids? This is probably one of the most fantastic and awesome projects that you and your little one can do together (8+ marketed on the box, 6 and above is possible IMO). To be completely honest, my wife and I even enjoyed it together; my son loved it! If you have someone in mind that is interested in getting a Bluetooth speaker and is into music and sound, get them one of these. The setup on this thing was not only simple; it was very enjoyable. Right off the bat when you open up the box, the quick start guides you to downloading the app on your iOS device. Sorry Android users, you won’t have the ability (currently as of 05/22/2017 and not sure if they’ll be compatible in the near future or not). The quick installation guide prompts you to download the app on the App store. Once you’ve downloaded the app; hold on tight cause it’s gonna be a fun and entertaining project. The tutorial/guide on the app is fantastic (good job BOSE!); it's simple to follow and it guides you through the entire process from A-Z. I don’t want to provide too much details because honestly it’s a fun experience and you’ll enjoy it; trust me! So to the pros and cons. You’re probably wondering… You’ve been raving about this thing, aren’t you giving it a 5 out of 5? Honestly, I would personally have to give a 4 out of 5; let me explain. The sound on this thing represents BOSE, the sound quality is great and is crisp. Setup was fun and intuitive so no points knocked off there. The build quality on this thing is pretty nice, not too heavy and not too light and no fingerprints! The other customizations that you can do to this thing (silhouette, different colors, dancing/breathing of the colors, equalizer) are awesome. Now here comes the cons… This is solely based on my opinion. The first thing that made me knock off some points is that you can’t set this up on Androids. Sure it connects to an Android device to play music once it’s all built and put together, but you can’t do the initial fun stuff and setup through an Android. The only other thing I didn’t personally like is that when you customize the equalizer on the app, you can only utilize that function on music that is on your iTunes. What this means is that if you’re playing music on Pandora or Spotify for example those equalizer customizations don’t stick. This also happens even when you’re customizing the colors. BOSE still has a great equalizer preset and on the control panel you can adjust the dancing/breathing of the colors, but it sort of defeats the purpose of being able to really customize the thing like you can on the app itself. The last thing I don’t 100% agree with is the inability for this device to be portable. The BOSEbuild Speaker Cube is stationary and you have to keep it plugged in the whole time you use it. I only mention this because in this day and age everyone wants something portable for the most part. Overall though, I would really recommend this product. As I mentioned initially, if you know someone that is interested in sound/music or you want to spend time with your kid(s); this thing is worth buying. It is honestly some good quality fun and the quality is not short at all in any way, shape, or form. BOSE has done an amazing job in creating this. Who wants just a simple nightlight for your children? Buy a BOSEbuild Speaker Cube so that they could use it as a night light, build it with you as a project, listen to music, and learn! This thing is an all in one. I hope after you read this review and you buy one; you’ll have as much fun as I did and enjoy it as much as I did.

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  Posted 8 years ago by MarkusKong

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Kids and dad had fun

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  Spent a few hours with my kids (7 and 9 ys/old girls) who enjoyed the physics/sounds experiments and completed it by promptly building the speaker. It's an interesting product. There are two parts to it: The first is a science project on how electro magnets and permanent magnets work together to generate sound. Note that it requires an iOS device (iPhone or iPad) to go though the educational steps - It doesn't work with Android, although the speaker should work fine as a standard Bluetooth. First, walks out kids and parent to plug into the wall adapter and pair the sound controller via Bluetooth to an iPhone or iPad. Then it goes through a series of fun experiments like a 'magnet launcher' until kids are able to generate sounds via a magnet and coil provided. Then it goes to explain how sound is generated, including a series of videos made by a pair of engineers at Bose, until kids are able to play a somewhat decent audio from their experiment, building a paper speaker. Finally, the app walks through putting together the real speaker, which is the second part of the project. The speaker itself sounds surprisingly well. It's a real Bose speaker, very capable with decent bass and overall very clear and loud sound. The cube is made of plastic translucent walls held together by clips. Then the kids finish the project by picking from a pack of paper covers with different patterns of their choice, or from a grid paper that's easy for kids to form into patterns of their choice. Some considerations: The plastic clips give away that is a science project. If they had a more seamless way of holding the cube together might look better. Also the thin plastic and paper covers while a nice touch might not be durable long term (Although it holds up just fine, we're planning on leaving the speaker on a shelf). The cube can change colors with a button and a slider, or can play a rainbow or colors or follow the music, with the lights off when there is no music, except for a white BT indicator on the rear. The BT pairing is simple, and through the app can control the lights as well, but there is no way of controlling the lights from the phone/tablet once the project app is complete, so it's done from the buttons on the back of the cube. It can remember several devices, and can pair to two BT devices at the same time. There is no battery, it has to remain plugged in. A battery option would've been nice. It feels that it was built by engineers who genuinely wanted to teach kids in a fan way, and it shows in every aspect of the speaker, from its looks, to the detailed and fun explanations and activity to the surprisingly good sound.

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  Posted 8 years ago by emiliosic