Performance -
With audio gear it is hard to be objective. After all different people like different music and even people that like the same music might like to listen to it in different ways. To make sure that I cover the audio products that we get here at DecryptedTech I like to have more than one opinion. Usually I gather 5 other people to listen to different audio types (gaming, movies, MP3 and CD-Audio). I then ask for a rating of one to five with one being the worst and 5 being the best for each category. I then follow up with my personal feelings and observations.

With the GroovyW we had other items that we needed to take a look at during our performance testing. These were portability, power usage, charging times and ease of use.

Gaming -
Gaming was the easiest one test and also the easiest one to observe. When the audio quality is good you can see people register it in the way they react to what is happening in the game. We used Modern Warfare 3 and also Bioshock Infinite for the audio comparison. Of course as the GroovyW is aimed at portable devices we wanted to add some of those games in too. For this test we connected our Android Note III and also our Samsung Series 7 Chronos Laptop to the GroovyW just to make sure we were getting as many audio types as possible.

Gaming on a mobile device is not a great test of audio. Most of the sounds are fairly simple in nature. However this does not mean that the GroovyW was not more than up to the task. We had very good audio performance for the sounds that were present in our mobile games.

Using the Aux-in port and our laptop we found the gaming audio to be pretty solid. Again there was some expected mud in the mid-range frequencies, but not enough to make it a bad experience.

Movies/Video -
For movies we followed a similar pattern as how we tested gaming performance except this time there were three mobile devices and then we finished things off with our laptop. For conformity we tried to use the same app on each device, but as the ZuneHD we use for testing does not have Netflix support, we simply bought the same movie for that device. So let’s take a look at each of these devices in turn.

Samsung Galaxy Note III -
Once again the audio quality coming from this phone was very good even without the assistance of the Equalizer that you get in the Audio App. One thing that we have always found annoying with mobile speakers is an inability to project all of the sounds coming from a movie. You end only hearing sounds that are loud. With the GroovyW we found that you do get a full range of audio and that it is capable of push sound around a room. This makes it a good choice for watching a movie when you might not have “normal” TV options.

iPhone 5 -
Oddly enough the iPhone 5 did much better when using Netflix than it did listening to audio. The sounds were much cleaner and defined in our movie choice. As with the Note III the GroovyW was had enough volume and separation to reproduce movie audio properly over Bluetooth.

ZuneHD –
Our trusty old ZuneHD actually has some of the best audio reproduction we have heard in a mobile device. With the GroovyW this level of performance was still present, but due to the high quality audio we started to note some items that we missed in our gaming tests. Although the range is excellent, we found that some sounds were reedy with a tinny edge to them. We heard this most often when reproducing female voices. Even with this issue the GroovyW performance was great.

The Series 7 Chronos -
As with the ZuneHD we connected our laptop to the GroovyW using the aux-in port and checked to see how well it handled the playing a movie back on a larger device. As with all of the other we had a very good experience with very little mud or audio anomalies.

Music (MP3 and CD-Audio) -
For Music I have a few favorite tracks that I like to use. These are not always other people’s favorites but they serve as a baseline and have some impressive audio features to them that can distinguish between good audio and bad. One of them is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing. It is an amazing track. Other are A Day in the Life by the Beetles, Are you Experienced by Jimi Hendrix, and Cage the Elephant’s Ain’t no Rest for the Wicked. The numbers for this along with their corresponding one word comments are below.

Ok, so there are certainly some differences in the audio from different products. When we tested from the Note III we had very full sounding audio with only a small amount of tin (to be expected from the smaller enclosure and speakers), but none the less the audio was clean and had a wide range even without the use of an equalizer profile. When we dropped one in we were able to pull the tin out and increase the vibrance of the audio playing through the app.

When attached to the iPhone, the audio was very different. The audio was tinny and had considerably more mud in the mid-range. It was interesting to see this difference between two major phone brands over a set of speakers.

Our testing with the Aux-in port using our old ZuneHD showed that the GroovyW can handle audio reproduction even from a high quality audio source. As with movies, we did here some tin in certain voices.

On the laptop we had a similar experience to what we saw with the ZuneHD and Note III. Very solid audio performance.

Power -
The GroovyW has a listed charge time of 4.5 hours. In our lab this actually took a little over 5 hours to charge. This is still not bad considering how long it can take to charge a few other devices and the operational time that you get with the GroovyW. We found that we could play audio for a little more than 10 hours with a single charge. This is a tad short of the listed 15 hours, but we were also listening at a higher volume.

The wireless charging pad can go from drained to full in around 6 hours (listed time is 5.5 hours). Once charged it allowed us to recharge our Note III and iPhone 5 three times each (from around 10% to full) when using the USB port. When using the wireless charging feature the number of recharges for the Note III dropped to around 2.5. This is due to some inefficiencies in the way power is pushed over wireless and also due to the fact that we had an Otterbox protective case on the phone. The separation of the tow contact points lowered the efficiency even more.

Portability and Ease of Use –
The GroovyW weighs in at 596g while the charging station is 192g. This makes a combined weight of 788 grams. This means that the two weigh less than two pounds. This is a great carry weight and something that is not going to drag you down if you need to toss the pair into your bag.

As we mentioned in the video setting up the GroovyW is very simple and straight forward. There is not much to get you messed up.