Brane X Review: Insane in the Brane

Design

• Weighs 3.5kg
• IP57 rating
• Carry handle

The Brane X is something of a brute, but a well-built one. It comes with a carry handle, which is a necessity as it weighs 3.5kg. That’s more than the Sony ULT Field 5 (3.3kg), the LG xboom XG8T (3kg) and the Devialet Mania (2.3kg). If those speakers are pushing against the notion of portable, the Brane X is banging its head against it.

But as I mentioned its well-built. It’s a curved, dense speaker, and it’s not actually that big for an outdoor speaker. The Marshall Kilburn III is about the same size, if not a bit bigger. There are a couple of LED lights on the front of the speaker to show battery life and the mode the speaker is in, but you’ll get a voice telling you all its vital statistics when the speaker wakes up anyway.

The density, solidity and heft of the Brane X make it a speaker to lug about. It only comes in a black finish which doesn’t exactly translate to a fun or colourful aesthetic for an outdoor speaker, but in a sense, the Brane X means business.

At IP57, it is fully water-resistant and can be dunked into water a metre deep for 30 minutes. Given the weight, though, I imagine it’ll go down like a ship’s anchor.

I don’t love the placement of the power button. It’s on the speaker’s rear side, which means having to shift the speaker about, and I’ve always been a bit confused about how long I need to touch it. It needs a nudge to turn off but a longer press to power up, and there’s a couple of seconds before it whirs into life where I think “have I actually pressed it?”.

There are little rubbery feet on the underside to prop the speaker up and offer some clearance to what I presume is the built-in subwoofer to do its thing. Around the back of the speaker are the auxiliary inputs, the aforementioned power button and DC power output.

On top are touch controls for Bluetooth, volume, playback and turning the mic on and off. All they need is a tap rather than a press to get going.

Features

• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
• Brane app
• Alexa support

With its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth streaming, the Brane X is an outdoor speaker that should offer more than just streaming tracks from a phone. Download the Brane app and that provides some means of customisation but not as much as I might have suspected for a speaker that costs this much.

There’s a five-band custom EQ option, you can change the LED brightness from Dim to High, and you can even edit the language for the voice announcements (sprechen sie Deutsch?) – though, strangely, you’ll get an announcement for successfully changing a setting when you’ve actually done nothing at all.

You can convert the Brane X into its Soundbar Mode via its AUX connection. It needs to be toggled on in the app. I didn’t use this feature mainly because I’m not sure of its worth.

It would add another string to the Brane’s bow but the size of the speaker is a genuine obstacle to putting it in front of a TV (unless it’s wall-mounted), and you’ll need an adapter to connect the AUX cable to your TV – so it doesn’t feel like it’s worth the added effort.

There’s voice assistant support through Alexa over Wi-Fi, which also makes this a smart speaker if you want. If you want to group multiple Brane speakers together, that’s also possible with up to eight speakers. You can sync them in stereo or go full party mode.

The Brane X supports Spotify Connect, Pandora, Prime Music, SiriusXM, Deezer and TuneIn music streaming services, though none of these are accessible through the app itself. Curiously, for a speaker that markets itself as a premium option, there’s no support for Tidal Connect or Qobuz Connect as far as I can tell. And the X does disappear from the list of options in Spotify Connect from time to time.

Exit the app and the speaker loses connection with it, which can get annoying after a while. That the app offers no playback controls feels like an odd omission for an app that is the centrepiece of the Brane X experience.

When you’re back in the app, you can customise the levels of bass from Low, Medium, and High. Low is more than good enough but if you want to bring the noise then the High setting will gladly accept your request.

It’s able to achieve this level of bass thanks to Brane’s Repel-Attract Driver, which it niftily calls RAD. It’s able (at least, Brane claims) to drop down to 27.1Hz.

Battery Life

• 12 hours of stamina
• Full recharge in three hours

A quick one on battery life. Brane says the X can reach up to 12 hours at a moderate volume, which, if it sounds vague, it’s probably because it is vague.

Over a Wi-Fi connection, I played it for an hour using my usual Spotify test playlist at 50% volume and it fell around 10%, which would suggest that you can get 10 hours from the speaker, and certainly more if you turned the volume down.

That said, 12 hours is still short of the Sonos Move 2 (24) or Marshall Kilburn III (30+).

If the speaker runs out of battery, which it’s likely to do as the battery depletes when it’s off, it can charge back to 100% in three hours flat.

Sound Quality

• Clear, spacious performance
• Big, controlled bass
• Lacks a little dynamism

What makes the Brane X so good as an outdoor speaker is that, despite having “all the bass”, it’s not all about the bass. The Brane X offers an accomplished sound.

Over a Wi-Fi connection, the Brane pipes through a lot of clarity, detail and just outright power, with bass so big I turned the volume down (it was already on the Low bass setting). It’s quite the thump produced from the speaker, but the strength and power of the lows are controlled – they never veer into the midrange and affect the clarity or tone of voices.

It might struggle to communicate sub-bass rumbles some of the time, but it’s quite comfortably the best bass performance I’ve heard from an outdoor speaker recently.

At first I thought that the soundstage wasn’t very wide with music congested in the middle, but it turns out that the Brane is just relaying tracks as they are. Play a track that is expansive and it and exists beyond the speaker’s width, which is not something that all speakers do. This isn’t a flat soundstage, as there’s depth to the sound, creating a layered effect with voices up front and instruments behind.

There’s a naturalistic tone to its performance, a neutrality that avoids sounding obviously warm or noticeably clinical. There’s dynamism but a slight, gentle uplift or downshift, with energy provided to tracks by the RAD configuration that emphasises the lows.

All these positives appear in Lake Street Drive’s Hypotheticals, where the speaker conveys good depth to the soundstage, a width that creates a spacious sound, with clear, weighty bass that’s controlled, and vocals that are clear and natural-sounding.

With GoGo Penguin’s Ascent, there’s clarity and detail with the highs, getting the right tone rather than sounding too smooth or crisp. With a more tricky track like Come Summer, it does a decent job of unearthing detail in what can come across as a rich but hazy-sounding recording. It’s a high-quality sound, but this is over Wi-Fi, where you’d expect that to be the case. What about its Bluetooth performance?

It’s very good. Even outdoors, free from the Wi-Fi, it delivers a punchy, spacious sound with good levels of detail and clarity. Pushing up through the levels of bass in an outdoor setting, it doesn’t overwhelm the midrange, providing a decent boost with each step up the bass ladder.

There are some tracks where there isn’t much difference in how the Brane X handles bass, so the High setting may not sound as powerful. With The Beatles’ Hey Jude, though, I hear the bass become more resonant and impactful at each level, though there are times when the Low setting is more than enough.

You don’t want to go full blast with this speaker, as at full volume it sounds compressed and lacking detail. But given at half volume it already sounds loud enough, I imagine you won’t need to go so loud.

Should you buy it?