UB + Eupho E3 transportable speaker: an amazing sound sphere

Ergonomics

With its speaker grille which seems to serve as an iris, it looks at you in the whites of your eyes this Eupho E3. Having no doubt the quality of the originality, this design can also leave certain personalities completely cold, while it will seduce others ...

Anyway, an enclosure also betting clearly on the look to stand out, we could have hoped for a little more careful manufacturing. However, we must be content with a shiny plastic that is not very luxurious, subject to fingerprints and scratches, and an assembly with very relative precision. The biggest surprise, however, comes from the weight of the speaker, surprisingly low in relation to its size. This is certainly beneficial for its portability, but still suggests a design for the economy.

Although equipped with a battery, the Eupho E3 is primarily designed for home use. It is for this reason that it is supplied with a tripod, on the base of which it attaches by magnetism. The idea seems excellent, its execution is however much less: the on-board magnets are both too weak to guarantee a perfectly stable attachment ... and too strong for the tripod to detach naturally from the speaker when raises it. Again, a few extra grams would have been necessary to clear the impression of cheapness from our minds.

The Eupho E3 has very complete connectivity. In addition to its Bluetooth receiver, it also has auxiliary inputs on mini-jack and optical S / PDIF, and a micro-USB port which can be used not only for charging, but also for connection to a computer such as external audio device. On the other hand, the enclosure unfortunately offers no means of "manually" selecting the entry to be broadcast. If a source is connected to the auxiliary input, it is automatically that which is broadcast; below that, priority is given first to the Bluetooth input, then to the USB, and finally to the optics. If you therefore wish to listen to an optical source while avoiding untimely cuts caused by the arrival of a signal on another input, you must take the trouble to disconnect everything beforehand. Annoying.

Delivered without remote control, the speaker concentrates all its control buttons on its upper panel. These unfortunately do not allow any control of the playback (pause, navigation between tracks), which must therefore only be done via the source device.

It is possible to pair two Eupho E3s in a stereo pair. If the intention is laudable, the procedure however makes it impossible to use any other input than Bluetooth. Its usefulness is therefore much more limited than what one could hope for - do not consider, for example, using your Eupho as speakers for television via the optical input. And don't even consider it via Bluetooth: the half-second broadcasting latency prohibits it.

Promised at 8 pm by the manufacturer, the autonomy of the enclosure was increased during our measurement to only 10 am

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Audio

In the field of audio reproduction, the Eupho E3 unfortunately still does not shine and delivers little more than mixed performance. It suffers from a single real problem, unfortunately very pronounced: its lack of precision.

However, it must be given some qualities, the foremost of which is a very good tonal balance - certainly far from absolute rigor, but all the same guaranteeing timbre on the whole very natural. Just should we note a sensitive resonance at 110 Hz, which can slightly tend the rendering towards a bass character. Paradoxically, this peak also tends to accentuate the impression of a very limited extension frequency response in the bass - consequence of the steep drop occurring from 100 Hz. Relative to the size of the speaker, it is a little disappointing.

But as we said, it is especially the precision that is sorely lacking in the Eupho E3. This problem first takes the form of far from being irreproachable distortion (the violent peak at 1 kHz is a source of clearly audible and irritating artifacts), but also and above all a big lack of responsiveness. The sound thus seems dull, even dreary, simply because of its poverty in details. The finest components of the sound message seem to get lost in the parasitic vibrations of the body of the speaker, which are also responsible for a slightly too pronounced box effect. The drawn sound scene is fuzzy, untouched by hairline and depth.

Obviously very pronounced when using a single speaker, this problem is absolutely not resolved with two speakers in stereo. The communication system between the two speakers unfortunately does not allow them to synchronize perfectly, resulting in phase problems making the spatialization very unconvincing.

We must also note the presence of a "3D" mode ... whose effect was incomprehensible to us. In mono, we simply do not notice any difference in rendering when activated. In stereo, we seem to guess that he is trying to apply phase processing aimed at virtually expanding the sound scene; but the thing is obviously perfectly ineffective, since the two speakers anyway fail to emit signals coherent with each other. To forget.

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Conclusion

Original but too unambitious, the main flaw of the UB + Eupho E3 is that it only offers nomadic speaker performance in the body of a transportable speaker for domestic use. The seat thus placed between two armchairs, it offers a user experience which is certainly not fundamentally bad, but which it is difficult to understand who it could well satisfy.

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