Bluetooth interference or wireless

[woodchucker]

I bought a JBL flip 6 about a month ago. The first went back because it was crackling like crazy. The seconds been good up until this past week. I can't tell if it's solar activity or the speaker is going bad. I like being able to take it from shop to shop..

The amount of solar activity is really high...

Anyone else out there experiencing problems?

 

[francist]

My iPad has been acting squirrelly all week but I can’t say as I’d know to attribute it to solar flaring. I’m curious about the JBL though, is it just a stand-alone speaker that you run your phone through or something to play music or other audio?

 

[woodchucker]

yes it is. I run both my computer and phone through it.
I am not sure I would recommend it.
My biggest complaint is the battery indicator... it does not communicate back to either the phone or computer the battery state.
Even my bluetooth for my headset (add on) does that. This just has a light indicator and it's not very good.
I liked that I could hook up multiple speakers (even knowing I may never do that).

Sound quality is good.. battery life is good to bizarre bad.

I'll let you know more later.

 

[rabler]

Since bluetooth is digital, any reasonable design (even by cheap chinese standards) should be able to detect and eliminated bad packets and substitute silence for lost packets when there is interference. So you could get garbled audio and dropout just like when your phone gets too far away from the speaker, but actual "crackling" is more likely an internal problem in the speaker, such as a poor solder joint aggravated by sound vibration.

 

[Eddyde]

I have a several years old JBL Flip, I never experienced any static and it still works fine. I agree with Randal, the problem is likely internal, not caused by outside interference.

 

[WobblyHand]

Some of the internal soldering I've seen has been appalling. If long past warranty might consider opening it up and retouching the solder joints. Haven't noticed any BT issues lately, although wasn't using audio. It also might be failing capacitors, a lot of these consumer grade units use parts that are marginal.

Voltage rating comes to mind. I was taught to use at least 2x the voltage rating for caps for reliability. These units use 1x if you are lucky. I was designing mil-spec systems, we didn't want in field failures and were required to have long service life.