Every now and then in the midst of products that are intended to make your system more powerful or impress your friends we get to play with products that are fun. We found this in a pair of external speakers from a company called Accessory Power. The speakers are designed to look like the heads of animals (in a cute way) and can work with PCs, phones, tablets and pretty much anything with a 1/8-inch speaker jack. In addition to their function as a speaker set they are also intended to bring awareness to endangered species. We were lucky enough to receive two different models for our testing and enjoyment. So let’s take you along as we see if the Accessory Power Gogroove Speaker Pals Panda and Koala sets are worth your time and money.
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. As an added item I also ask for a single word to describe the audio quality. I then follow up with my personal feelings and observations.
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 Mass Effect 3 for the audio comparison. Of course as the Speaker Pals are meant more for portable devices we wanted to add some of those games in too.
The numbers are shown below, while the words used to describe the gaming quality were;
Better than expected
Great for the size
Good
Impressive
Good
Both the Panda and Koala Pal speakers are pretty clean and deceptively powerful. As we said they are not intended to light up a room, but they can put out some good sound at short range that will surprise you. We even decided to give them a try with some PC gaming and while we would never recommend them for extended use we were more than a little surprised.
Movies/Video
Movies was an easy one also, I have several Bluray titles that are great for this including Pirates of the Caribbean. So I loaded up this title and then dropped in a couple of other movies that have good surround effects. The response was not as good as the gaming, but still the surround piece did seem to impress. The numbers and words are shown below.
Again for their size the Speaker Pals were quite nice. They are not capable of the same range that most movies will try to push and their low-end was not everything it could be, but still we were more than a little impressed with their quality for the size. As speakers for an iPhone/Pad or another tablet or phone they would be great for watching movies.
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.
Here the Speaker Pals seemed to be most at home. The quality of the audio they showed was very good when played from our ZuneHD or even the Samsung Nexus Phone we have. From our iPhone 4s it was still pretty good, but lacked a little of the range we saw with the other two. Overall the sound quality was outstanding for such a small package.
