Sphere 4 Bluetooth speaker
£149.99 £69.99
tibo-electronics.com/products/sphere-4

The Sphere 4 from TIBO is a portable WiFi and Bluetooth speaker with a fun design and an impressive-feeling build. The Sphere 4 is currently on a summer sale, so if you’re tempted by it, you’re best to get there quick and grab yourself this radio in time to carry it with you on your sunny adventures - especially now that we’re allowed out and about again.

On first impressions, I thought this speaker looked like a very cool brick. We received it in green, and it is also available in black, white, red or orange. The design is both retro and current, with a blocky rectangular shape, clear corners and lines, and a minimalist yet chunky look that comes across as playful and interesting. I would have liked a slightly more vibrant green, but then I’m a bit of a sucker for neons, but it’s still a very cool look. It’s a bit like a Lego brick, and gives me the urge to stack a bunch of Sphere 4s together – image the amount of sound you’d get out of that!

As for the functionality of the product itself, this is both a Bluetooth and wireless radio, able to stream apps from your phone or access internet radio from the Sphere 4 itself. Using the internet radio, you can save five go-to stations to be easy to load up from the speaker. The product makes a few marketing shout-outs to Spotify, both on the packaging and manual and on the back of the product itself. This is because its accompanying app is compatible with Spotify Connect, as well as TIDAL, Napster, Tunein, iheartradio and several others.

Why would you need the TIBO app if you have your own streaming service, you ask? I wondered the same thing, and the answer is very clever. TIBO advertises that it’s extremely simple to use its wireless products to create a multiroom hi-fi set up, and the way you do this is through the app. You can own multiple TIBO speakers and connect them together through the app, grouping speakers together by room or set-up and allowing you to control the volume and output of these sorted groups. This allows you a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to having multiple speakers, letting you to really boost your turntable, TV or all sorts. The only stipulation, of course, is that the speakers need to be TIBO products.

Whilst it can be smoothly integrated into this sort of household set up, the look of this radio implies that it is intended to be carried around in a very retro manner. In my opinion, it’s a little too heavy to make that immediately desirable. It’s not insanely heavy, but in a world of tiny portable speakers, something of this size needs to think about how convenient and easy it is to carry around, even with its appealing elements. That said, it feels sturdy and hard to break, and the handle is comfortable and nicely designed.

The Sphere 4’s speakers kick out an impressive quality of sound. They come loaded with a 1 x 4” drive unit and rear tuned port for a controlled, tight bass and a 2 x 0.75” dome tweeter for natural high frequency response. The Sphere 4’s High-Resolution audio is delivered by 50W of RMS power supplied by a class D Amp 4 Ohms and 88 dB 50Hz-20KHz.

The unit have 8 hours of playback time, which is neither the best nor the worst in terms of battery life. It can be charged by USB, and is able to be connected to other devices with a line-in connection as well as a LAN connection instead of WiFi if you prefer. You can charge your mobile device from the speaker via USB, if it has the battery life to spare, and you can even connect external devices such as a turntable, CD, and game consoles etc. that don’t have Bluetooth.

All in all, this is an attractive speaker with a lot of features and versatility.

4/5

Pros
Bold design
Solid sound balance
Bluetooth and WiFi
LAN and Line-in connections
Can charge your phone
Internet radio
App integrates use with other TIBO speakers
App streams many major streaming services
Nice range of colours

Cons
A little heavy for carrying around