Nimzy Vibro Blaster flat speaker Can you really make beautiful music from a flat surface?

Reviewer: Davey Winder
Review Date: 16 June 2006
Manufacturer: Nimzy
Price as reviewed: £69.99
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Our score

9/10

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Full review

16 June 2006 - Now we didn’t exactly hold out a lot of hope for the ridiculously named Nimzy Vibro Blaster. Not least because the last such item (the Soundbug) like all gizmos that promise to turn any flat surface into a speaker, well, didn’t. Or rather it didn’t well: unless you like your music to sound like it’s being pumped out of a Pound Shop transistor radio that is.

The idea is great in principle but has always, in our experience, been let down by the reality, until now, that is.

This oversized bottle top with a name like a sexual toy is available in both black and silver. We’d recommend the former as it really does look like a giant bottle top in silver. Luckily it sounds anything but, whichever colour you choose.

Weighing just 445g, you stick it to any flat surface and the patented electro acoustic technology gets to work.

In non-geek speak that means the sonic signals are transferred into mechanical vibrations to produce 15 watts (RMS) of surprisingly rich sound. This is because it’s the only one of these speaker gizmos that we’ve listened to which comes with an integrated and dedicated amplifier.

For those who like to compare specifications, even when they mean Jack to most folk, the impedance is 6 ohms, frequency range of 220-10,000Hz and sensitivity a nice 82dB/m/W. Apparently. So we are told. For everyone else, while being a whole lot more portable and sexy than your PC speaker peripherals, the sound is arguably better than most of them until you get to sizes in excess of a shoebox.

But it’s the portability, the true in yer face portability, that you are paying for here: you can get much better sound from traditional fixed speakers at a lot less money. The difference being that you can’t produce a pair of them from your pocket, slap it onto a shop window, train table or a plastic tray in the cafe and create an instant disco.

As long as whatever you are connecting it to has a 3.5mm output, you are in business. We’ve used with a variety of MP3 players (it makes the perfect partner to the SanDisk e260, especially in black) as well as our laptops and it just works well whatever we throw at it.

Verdict

Just how good is it? Well when the review unit had to go back, the reviewer went and ordered one with his own money: and that, dear reader, doesn’t happen often...

The first of these portable flat surface speaker gadgets that we’ve listened to that, well, we can listen to. Say no more...

This product was kindly loaned to us by widget.co.uk