Looking to experience the sounds of the wickedness? Let
Stuff’s guide to audio soothe the soul, start the party or
itch the scratch to switch up your existing music system...
C
FANTASTIC
BEATS &
WHERE TO
GRIND THEM
[ Words Simon Lucas, Andrew Williams, James Day ]AUDIO GUIDE
MEETING OWL PRO
Key specs
O 3x 2in full-range drivers
O Wi-Fi, USB O Mains power
O 273x111x111mm, 1.2kgSTUFF SAYS A niche solution to a potentially widespread problem if ‘WFH’ is here to stay ++++,
£999 / stuff.tv/OwlProurious creatures,
owls. This one is a
smart speaker for
the working-from-home era,
but not in the way you might
think. You can’t summon Siri,
Alexa, Google Assistant or
any other artificial help. You
can’t stream wirelessly via
Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and you
must be plugged in to the
power at all times. All of which
begs the question, what does
it do... for a grand?
Well, the ‘smart’ part refers
to how it utilises a real owl’s
rotating powers to transformvideo calls. For a start it’s got
a Full HD 360° webcam that
we’ll hazard a guess is better
than the one on your laptop.
Also 360° is the array of mics
able to pick up your voice from
over five metres away. Then
there’s the ‘Owl Intelligence
System’ that uses vision and
voice detection to autoshift
the camera to wherever you
are (although, fortunately, the
Owl Pro has some sizeable
mute buttons in case you’re
popping to the lav mid-call).
It’s also fully compatible with
all of the major video chatplatforms, including Zoom,
Google Meet, Microsoft
Teams and Skype.
But hold on a sec – this
is supposed to be a feature
focused on audio prowess.
It’s just as well, then, that the
Owl Pro is absolutely colossal
when connected to your
computer by USB and put
in charge of its sound output.
A new tri-speaker setup
allows it to go twice as loud
as the standard Meeting Owl
but still remain totally poised
at top volume, whether you’re
blasting out some Cliff Richardor on an extremely important
call to his agent.
Is it worth the significant
investment? For most people,
probably not – but if you’re
looking to overcome your PC’s
crappy speakers, webcam and
mic in one fell swoop without
having to shell out for a whole
new one, it might actually end
up saving you money.