Sounds great: Marshall’s Stanmore Bluetooth speaker reviewed

Bluetooth speakers tend to have a very same-same look, what with all the small cylindrical or rectangular boxes out there, but Marshall’s Stanmore is something different, very different, focusing on the brand’s heritage and delivering a speaker for musos.

Features

Retro looks seem to be a thing modern designers are embracing, but the Marshall Stanmore looks to take that to the next level, borrowing from the style used in Marshall’s amplifiers and speakers used by professional musicians, and applying that to a Bluetooth speaker with support for other sources.

The design is pure Marshall amp, too, possibly 70s to 80s, with a vinyl covering around what appears to be a wooden box, similar to the speakers the company normally produces.

There’s a fabric cover for the grill, and the typical Marshall script logo, with the top of the speaker decked in brushed metal with knobs, buttons, and switches designed in the same vein, all of which looks like the Stanmore is a piece out of Marshall’s long musical history.

Built in the same vein is one thing, but Marshall wants you to enjoy the sound, too, and has employed two 1.9cm dome tweeters and a 13cm subwoofer to make this happen, working with a Class D amplifier delivering 80 watts of power across these inclusions (40W sub, 20W tweeters).

This technology doesn’t come light, though, with the Stanmore tipping the scales at 5.1 kilograms.

While only one sound device can be used at once, owners will have four ways of transmitting sound to the Marshall Stanmore speaker, with Bluetooth, 3.5mm stereo jack, RCA (red-white), or optical.

A button for source will let you change sources quickly, one by one, with the other button — pair — helping you to initiate the Bluetooth pairing process with a phone, tablet, or laptop computer.

No battery is found here, though, a change from other speakers, and you’ll need to keep the Stanmore plugged into the wall to use it.

Performance

Marshall calls the Stanmore a compact product, but in terms of compact Bluetooth speakers, we can already tell you that you’ve likely seen much smaller.

Rather, the Stanmore sits on the larger side of compact speaker world, appearing as a mid-sized speaker and weighing just over five kilograms, well over what most “compact” Bluetooth speakers come in at.

That’s not compact, not by any stretch of the imagination, though it’s definitely compact compared to some of the other speaker boxes Marshall makes, and that’s what the Stanmore has been designed to look like.

In fact, the design is one area we love.

Love with a capital “L,” because it’s pure heritage and rock god style, letting you relive the emotion from when you turned up to your first real rock gig and had your ears blown out by the massive quad-box you for some reason parked yourself in front of, or the amplifier you always wanted to plug that electric bass or guitar into to jam and scream and wail with.

This is a speaker that looks like music, that looks like rock and roll and soul, and while other speakers aim for simplicity with brushed or gun-metal surfaces, and others again look at the perfection that is polycarbonate, Marshall’s Stanmore looks like something a musician would use on stage, with a classic soft fabric grill, black vinyl around the edges, gold metal operation panel, and that original Marshall script logo that has been in use for so long, we’ve lost count.

Marshall’s Stanmore evokes rock and roll in such a way that even before you switch it on and see the red light glow from the power section, even before you feel the amp-inspired knobs and switch, even before you do all of that, it looks like business.

It’s so nice to know that it’s not just a look, either, because in action, this is a speaker that shines, calling out for you to pump it up.

We’ll do our GadgetGuy sound test as per usual, which starts with electronic music.

Starting it off is the “Introduction” from Solar Field off the “Mirror’s Edge” soundtrack, with delicate high notes playing in and out and off each other while a warm backing track is brought in from behind. In this piece, the treble and highs played softly over the top, while a warm bass sailed in, reminding us of a recreation on a larger speaker.

Indeed, when the music starts to glitch out and pop — intentionally, that’s a track thing — the speaker still held its own, soft and vibrant all at once.

On the other side of the spectrum and away from the light and playful stuff is harder music, so we pumped up the bass and brough in Mooro’s “M66R6” and The Glitch Mob’s “Skullclub,” both of which had strong bass with plenty of oomph, while keeping the mids and highs balanced and levelled off.

Over to rock and we start lightly, coming in from electronic with something similar, such as Radiohead’s “Idioteque,” with an electronic feel segmented by solid beats which call out on this speaker, all the while Thom Yorke’s vocals are soft over the top of it all.

Pushing to something a little harder in Muse’s “Supremacy” and Closure In Moscow’s “A Night At The Spleen,” it’s clear that rock is one area this speaker loves, with detail across all the sections, the bass particularly vibrant when it needs to be pushed by the track’s use of bas and drums, and the highs of the guitar and vocals screamed out loud with little to no distortion, and plenty of room to move on that volume knob.