We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. Libratone's new line of Zipp wireless speakers look familiar, but include smart features like Amazon Alexa and Spotify Connect compatibility. While it's only a mono speaker, the $299 Zipp 2 still delivers a powerful sonic experience—it can get quite loud while delivering rich bass depth and solid overall clarity. Is it worth the extra $50 over the Zipp Mini 2? That depends on what you're looking for. The Zipp Mini 2 offers better balance between the lows and highs, while the Zipp 2 offers a bigger bass sound and is definitely more powerful. Design The cylindrical Zipp 2 measures 10.3 by 4.8 inches (HW) and weighs in at 3.3 pounds. It has a sturdy leather strap built into the top, while the vast majority of its surface area is covered in cloth grille, which comes in black, gray, green, or red, with a zipper at the bottom of the panel. The rest of the Zipp 2's contour is a matte white plastic. Behind the grille, a reflector helps spread audio around the room, but the Zipp 2 is mono, which might feel a little out of sync with its price. You can achieve stereo audio with two Zipp 2 units, assigning one to be the left and the other to be the right channel. A 4-inch neodymium woofer and a 1-inch soft dome neodymium tweeter are complemented by dual 4-inch low-frequency passive radiators. The active drivers are powered by a class-D amplifier, and the speaker's frequency range is 50Hz to 20kHz. The top panel houses a touch-sensitive surface with the Libratone bird logo on it—touching it reveals a circle of icons that can be tapped to connect via Wi-Fi, measure the room's acoustics, "love" a song, activate SoundSpace Link (this is Libratone's multi-room, multi-speaker setup), or update firmware, and a mic icon for muting or unmuting the Alexa mic array. When not using Alexa, a male voice guides you through the speaker's menu (these prompts can be disabled in the app). Basic operations are handled by tapping the bird logo. A single tap is for play or pause, double tap is for the next track, triple tap is for the previous track, and tracing your finger around the circular button clockwise or counterclockwise adjusts the volume levels. Holding your hand over the button "hushes" the speaker, lowering the volume dramatically until you lift your hand—a classic, and useful, Libratone feature. Along the bottom of the back of the speaker, there's a connection for the included power adapter, a 3.5 aux input (no cable is included, though), and a USB connection for audio playback (there's no cable for this, either). In the free Libratone App for Android or iOS, you can connect the speaker over Wi-Fi, as well as update firmware (which happens automatically when you connect the speaker to the app if there's an update available). Within the app, you can adjust the speaker's sonics with various EQ presets (including Neutral, Easy Listening, Rock the House, and so on), but there's no actual user-adjustable EQ to fiddle with. There's also a sleep timer you can set, and you can adjust the LED brightness, or control basic playback functions and volume. The included power adapter is rather large, and it juts out from the wall at an angle, and far enough that it could block other plugs from using the same outlet, so its placement can be tricky in some rooms. A US plug adapter ships with the unit, and snaps onto the wall adapter. The upside of the power adapter is that it has a very long cable (with a cable cinch to manage the slack neatly), and it looks cool—the smooth, glossy white design of the adapter itself and the attractive clothbound cable look about as good as the speaker tiself. The six far-field mics do a decent job of picking up your voice for Alexa commands, but just as with the Zipp Mini 2, at times we had to speak louder than we typically do in order for our commands to register. Most of the time, the mics responded without issue, but there were occasions, usually when music was playing (though not necessarily loudly) that the mics would miss the "Alexa Pause" command, for instance, and we'd have to repeat it more loudly. The Zipp 2, like many smart speakers, can also be used as a Bluetooth speaker (or an AirPlay 2 speaker), but there is no speakerphone functionality. Libratone estimates battery life to be up to 12 hours, but your results will vary with your volume levels. Performance On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," the Zipp 2 delivers powerful bass depth, and at top volumes, doesn't distort. The truly deep sub-bass frequencies, however, are not quite as powerful as the lows and low-mids. There's still plenty of deep bass presence here, but the subwoofer-like content gets less of a forward push than audio that can be output by a woofer—which makes sense given the speaker's driver and radiator array. At top volumes, you can hear the digital signal processing (DSP) kick in, but it's not overwhelming, at least not in the sense that it blatantly squashes or eliminates bass in order to avoid distortion—there's still plenty of low-end at top volume. See How We Test Speakers Bill Callahan's "Drover," a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the Zipp 2's general sound signature. The drums on this track get some extra thunder, and Callahan's baritone vocals also get some notable added richness and depth. This is a bass-forward speaker, but it seems to focus on the lows and low-mids more than the sub-bass realm. Thankfully, the high-mids and highs are also dutifully represented, so that the acoustic guitar strums and higher-register percussive hits have a clean, clear, relatively bright presence in the mix. On Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild," the kick drum loop receives enough high-mid presence to retain some of its punchiness, but the high-mids aren't quite as strong through the Zipp 2 as we are used to hearing—instead, we get more of the drum loop's heavy, exaggerated low-end heft. The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat are delivered with understated power here as well—the Zipp 2 can't quite go down that low, so the focus is mainly on the lows and low-mids, hence the boosted drum loop presence. Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene from John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary, similarly, seem a bit overly boosted in the low-mids, bringing the lower register instrumentation a little too far forward in the mix while the higher register brass, strings, and vocals don't quite get the spotlight they typically have. Messing around with various EQ settings in the app can help—there's actually a Classical mode that improves things in this instance. Conclusions So, the Zipp Mini 2 is the more balanced speaker of the two Zipps, but if that matters less to you than a big bass sound, the Zipp 2 is the better option. While it has a powerful output, it lacks truly deep, subwoofer-style bass. This leads us another question: What smart speakers in the $300 range might should you consider over the Zipp 2? The Google Home Max, the Sonos Beam soundbar, and the Marshall Stanmore Voice are all winners, but they're all more expensive, and none are portable. That makes the Zipp 2 an attractive option, and its room-filling drivers will be enough to justify its price for plenty of listeners. Bottom Line: The powerful Libratone Zipp 2 speaker packs a bass-forward sound signature and Alexa voice control in a stylish design.

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