Wintal has launched a new active outdoor Bluetooth speaker, the CLB6AB. Stephen Dawson plugs them in, listens and looks at how they stack up.

Like just about anything else in both consumer and commercial audio, you can spend as much as you want for outdoor – and related – powered speakers. But at the lower-priced end, the choices are relatively limited.

If you keep an eye out when you’re at your favourite coffee shop, there’s a good chance you’ll see up near the ceiling, amongst the Devil’s Ivy fronds, a couple of compact speakers from a twenty-year-old CD mini system. Or perhaps a couple of Sonos One speakers. In my case, it’s just one of those compact barrel-shaped Bluetooth speakers.

They do the basic job well enough, but things come apart if a bit of volume is needed.

That’s certainly one apt application for the Wintal CLB6AB active outdoor Bluetooth speakers. Another might be for a home patio. So…

What are they?

To the eye, the Wintal CLB6AB active outdoor Bluetooth speakers follow the familiar plan of such speakers over several decades: a two-way speaker design, powered, in a sturdy ABS case. The electronics are in one of the enclosures, while the other is passive, powered by the other via wire.

As the name of these Wintal speakers suggests, to that basic functionality is added Bluetooth connectivity.

Let’s dig in a little, shall we?

Their enclosures are quite substantial in terms of both weight and front-panel dimensions. Not that they’d be any more difficult to place in most circumstances. As I write on this Windows notebook computer, I have them sitting atop my Dynaudio Contour 20i speakers, pumping out a Marillion album being fed to them via Bluetooth by Spotify running on the computer. The speakers are pretty much the same width as the Dynaudio speakers: 210mm wide. But they’re shorter at 290mm and much shallower at only 190mm. They each weigh a little over 3kg.

The right-hand speaker houses the electronics and thus weighs more than the left-hand one. But only 200g more, which is surprising since those electronics include an amplifier rated at 60W per channel.

At the front of each, behind a fixed hard grille – it looked and felt like metal to me – were two drivers: a 165mm bass driver and a 25mm tweeter. From the front, the tweeter of each was above the woofer and slightly to its left. To the right of the tweeter on each was what appeared to be a small bass reflex port.

The back of the left speaker was adorned by only a pair of spring-clip speaker inputs which are connected using the included 3.6m cable to the spring-clip outputs on the right speaker. The right speaker also has a power input and switch, RCA inputs and bass, treble and volume control knobs. All three of those are infinitely rotatable with no clear centre position.

A bracket connected to the top and bottom of each speaker is included. This can be loosened by hand and set to any angle, although the right speaker in the centre position is right over the RCA connections. A packet containing a 2m RCA interconnect cable, with right-angle plugs on one end, is included. That avoids problems with using that input.

Setting up

In many cases, there is little required in the way of setting up these speakers. They should be affixed to a wall or under an eave with appropriate fixings. While the speakers are suitable for outdoors, they aren’t suitable for wet environments so they should be placed in a position where they will not be affected by rain. Under eaves, they should be tucked in as close to the rear wall as possible to extend and enhance bass. The angle at which the speaker’s “fire” is easily adjustable on one dimension.

The only other setup step most will require is Bluetooth pairing. This is done in the usual way – when first switched on the speakers announce that Bluetooth is switched on. It isn’t obvious when they’re in pairing mode because, while there’s a blue LED on the active speaker, it acts as a power indicator, not a Bluetooth indicator. The only time it flashes is very briefly when the speaker receives an IR command from the remote.

Obviously, it was in pairing mode when first switched on… or after a factory reset – and it showed up readily on the lists of available Bluetooth devices on my phone, tablets and computers. Somewhat unusually it asks for a PIN when being paired – it’s 1234. I was able to pair it to at least three devices. The Wintal system seemed to be in pairing mode whenever it wasn’t actively connected to any device, so the trick was simply to switch off Bluetooth on any paired devices for a moment while pairing to the new device. You might need to do that if, for example, you have a visitor and wish to give their phone access for music playback.

One unusual feature is the ability to rename the speakers. That is, you can give them a more user-friendly name, perhaps for their location. That would be especially useful if you have several sets scattered around the house. Many other Bluetooth speakers get around this by having the name of the device with some kind of random-ish number tacked on the end, but I find it hard to remember which number belongs to which physical location. To change the name – or to factory reset the unit – you need to install the FeasyBlue app (Android and iOS both supported) which, with the modification password included in the downloadable instructions, will allow you to connect to an unpaired set of Wintal speakers and change certain parameters. Those include the name and the PIN. The system seemed to work well – I made several changes and factory resets while testing various things – even though the app and process has a somewhat under-the-hood feel. Shouldn’t be a problem: it’s the sort of thing you only need to do once.

In use

So, how about the sound quality? I listened to quite a range of music, fed via both Bluetooth and the WiiM streamer. The sound was quite respectable for the money you’re paying here. There’s a little dynamic range compression and nothing much in the way of deep bass, but neither was there any irritating treble harshness or undue emphasis.

The speakers could drive quite hard in my in-room listening, and the sheer fact of real stereo (and decent-enough imaging) allowed them to kill any of the single-box network stereo units for music quality.

I played a little with the volume control. Upping the bass a little made for a generally more satisfying experience.

The remote control was quite effective. Obviously, the volume, mute, bass and treble controls could all be managed from some distance. But also, useful – when in Bluetooth mode, at least when using Spotify on an iPad or on my Android phone – the play/pause and forwards and reverse track skip keys worked.

While I did most of my listening indoors, I naturally took the Wintal speakers outside as well. I didn’t install them in the ideal place – that would have involved temporary bolts – but placed them on my front patio wall, pointing out into the field opposite, to try to assess how they’d work in their more natural environment. The positioning wasn’t ideal, offering little in the way of bass reinforcement.

The results were interesting in two ways. First, the sound quality was more or less maintained, although it was actually better to bring the bass back to a more neutral level and even add a click or two of treble boost. And the volume was decent. I only used Bluetooth in that setting, and the output level was limited by the gain of the system, not be excessive distortion or other audible problems. At a range of about 10m at maximum volume, the sound was enjoyably loud, although perhaps not what would be sought for a loud party.

The other interesting finding was that my Pixel 6 phone retained somewhat of a connection out to an extraordinary range of more than 50m. By “somewhat”, I mean that there were dropouts if I held the phone in the wrong position or interposed my body between the phone and speakers (Bluetooth can’t really penetrate the water content of a human body). That should make for a reliable connection for any reasonable distance.

Again, switching between already paired devices was simple enough: just switch off Bluetooth on the currently connected device. Then other paired devices can connect. After that, switch Bluetooth back on for the originally connected device.

One drawback compared to, say, a set of Sonos (or similar) speakers is that network audio, such as Spotify or TIDAL, is only supported via Bluetooth streaming from a phone, tablet or computer, not natively. I found it convenient to fix that by using the RCA inputs to connect a WiiM Mini network streamer, one of the families of reasonably priced streamers we looked at a couple of issues ago ($139 as I write). That turned the Wintal speakers into highly capable networked units, able to stream both Spotify Connect and TIDAL Connect, as well as support Apple AirPlay and DLNA/UPnP. Obviously, using Spotify and TIDAL that way, rather than streaming from a phone, is considerably more practical. With Bluetooth, if you get out of range the music stops.

I’d been using WiiM Mini with an amplifier/loudspeaker combination before attaching it to the Wintal speakers. So, I’d had it set to fixed (that is, maximum) output to allow control of the level with the amp. In general, the higher the source level, within input overload limits, the better. But this was not a good idea with the Wintal speakers. Music streamed through the WiiM Mini to the RCA inputs was much, much louder than the same music streamed via Bluetooth directly to the speakers.

Also, the volume control on the RCA input became quite coarse, presumably because it was near the maximum attenuation available in its range. Each tap down on the volume control pulled down the level by, I’d guess, about six decibels.

Both these things were easily fixed by switching the WiiM Mini to a variable output level and setting its output to around 45%. That brought the volume level close enough to the Bluetooth level and allowed for smooth volume control using the Wintal speakers’ remote control or the rear volume knob.

Incidentally, in Bluetooth mode, the speakers’ volume control is independent of the level of the source device’s level (with some Bluetooth audio devices, changing their volume just feeds back to the phone or whatever and changes its level). So, typically, you’ll want to have your phone set to maximum volume when you’re listening through these speakers.

Conclusion

The Wintal CLB6AB speakers are a price-effective way to provide practical music in a range of locations, with moderately decent sound quality and the ability to run fairly loud if required.