Crystal Acoustics Cuby 7 WiSound review

Speakers project sound in one direction, meaning there’s always going to be a distinct ‘sweet spot’ directly in front of the drivers. You can imagine this being a cone coming out of the Bluetooth speaker – deviate away from this and you’ll find sound quality, tonality and volume both begin dropping off.

Crystal Acoustics aims to avoid this problem with WiSound, a technology which is uses drivers and tweeters that fire in different directions to more widely disperse sound around a room. Sound is then also able to reflect off walls and ceilings to further dissipate the sound. This is something we’ve seen before from the company’s Teevy 6 soundbar, but it makes more sense in the Cuby 7 wireless speaker.

Rather than use a front-dominant driver arrangement, the Cuby 7 now predominantly fires upwards, with side drivers providing support. The seven drivers inside are comprised of two 0.75in upward-firing tweeters, four 2in mid-range drivers split between the sides and top of the cabinet, and a 6.5in subwoofer.

The Cuby 7 does a good job in removing the narrow soundstage prevalent in many speakers. There was no noticeable drop-off in sound quality or presence as we walked around the speaker, with our tracks more clearly following us as we paced around the room. However, the volume and sound quality disparity we were used to on a horizontal plane was now evident on the vertical plane. Sitting down and standing up presented a shifting sound.

While WiSound isn’t perfect, the shift was at least reasonable and it does successfully increase the soundstage. The Cuby 7 sounds best when it’s placed around waist level or below so that your ears have greater appreciation of the upward-firing drivers and there’s less opportunity for you to be below the level of the upward firing drivers.

In terms of audio quality, we found the Cuby 7 presented quite a warm sound. It has a respectable 35Hz to 27,000Hz frequency range, but the bass began to dominate some of our electronic test tracks and distorted slightly at louder volumes. There was also a considerable amount of cabinet reverberation as we reached close to maximum volume, which proved distracting on certain tracks.

Mids and trebles tend to feel slightly lost and weren’t handled with the delicateness we would have liked. The Cuby 7 is by no means a bad sounding speaker, especially if you like your music with a strong bass presence, but it doesn’t stand up to critical listening for those favouring a neutral sound signature. There’s no lack of volume, however. The Cuby 7 won’t struggle to fill a large room, especially with sound bouncing off walls and ceilings.

The cube-shaped speaker has a slightly divisive design, bordering between stylish and something resembling a bread bin. It’s reasonably large too at 235mm cubed, so you’ll need a decent sized surface.

The row of controls for volume and playback on the top of the speaker look and feel a little cheap. A small remote control is also included but it’s rather flimsy; a stark contrast from the well-finished speaker cabinet, which is also reassuringly weighty.

You’re able to connect your music devices over Bluetooth and there’s support for the aptX less-lossy codec as well if your audio player supports it. A 3.5mm audio input, pair of RCA jacks and an optical in let you hook up wired devices too, while the powered USB port provides a convenient way to charge your devices. Unfortunately there’s no multiroom support, which is a shame considering the Cuby’s size.

WiSound does a good, albeit not perfect, job of filling a room more evenly with sound. However we weren’t entirely fond of the Cuby 7’s sound quality. It’s a very capable speaker but for one of this physical size and price we would have liked to have seen a little more versatility with (for example) multiroom support. As it stands we would rather spend slightly less on a more traditional Bluetooth speaker like the Audio Pro Addon T10, which sounds fantastic and also has a less divisive design.