Tivoli Audio Songbook Max

Verdict

This wireless speaker and DAB radio has unconventional skills to match its unconventional looks, including an input fit for a mic or guitar. But it’s priced a little too high to prove all that appealing a buy considering its features and sound quality .

Introduction

The Tivoli Audio Songbook Max is a giant wireless speaker with DAB and FM tuners built in. 

It’s a retro-style unit, like most of Tivoli’s products. But this isn’t a classic Pure Evoke or Ruark Audio R1 that will fit into just about about room in which you choose to place it. It’s more distinctive and odd than that. 

You can’t connect the Tivoli Audio Songbook Max to Wi-Fi, but you can plug in a guitar and use it as a basic practice amp. It’s an oddball, and a good fit for those who don’t want a connected speaker with a digital assistant inside. However, it’s ultimately a slightly tough sell thanks to its high price at £699. 

Design

• 5.2kg
• 10-hour battery
• 38.1 x 28 x 15.2 cm

The Tivoli Audio Songbook Max is a more imposing speaker than you might assume from a glance at its official photos. It stands 28cm tall, 38cm wide, making it much larger than a Sonos Five front-on. 

It’s particularly eye-catching in the green version I have. A two-tone cream/brown is also an option, a style more likely to be able to fit in with the decor of the average room. 

I have used the Tivoli Audio Songbook Max for a couple of months now, but still haven’t quite got my head around how much this is meant to be a home speaker, or a portable speaker. 

Why? It has a battery, which is great. However, the bundled cable is likely way too short to let you place the Songbook Max where you want with it plugged in. Sure, it just uses a USB-C cable to charge (no adapter included) but this is not what you expect of a £700 unit. 

The Tivoli Audio Songbook Max also doesn’t seem made to be ferried around long distances either. It weighs a solid 5.2kg, and the handle is not at all padded or built-up. This fits the style, but impacts carrying comfort. 

The messaging on what this speaker is about just isn’t as clear as I’d expect from some of the big brands in audio. For an outdoor unit its water resistance is just OK too. IPX4 resistance means it should be able to handle light rain, largely thanks to a rubbery bung that fits over the rear ports.

Tivoli makes its retro styling intentions clear, though. First up, the front power controls are clonky metal switches. The central dial controls an outer ring that moves half speed, like the dial of an ancient radio receiver. 

Is glossy plastic also a retro finish? Not necessarily, but there’s enough going on here to make the Tivoli Audio Songbook Max clearly and deliberately out of step with its contemporaries, and in a very different fashion to its nearest Ruark rival, the Ruark R3S. 

Features

• DAB and FM tuners
• No Wi-Fi support
• 6.3mm input

Unfortunately its set of features is odd too. The Tivoli Audio Songbook Max has DAB and FM tuners, Bluetooth and an unusual 6.3mm front input, which lets you plug in a microphone or guitar easily. This input has its own pre-amp, should you plug in something that needs a signal boost, like a turntable. 

You can play, or sing, along to songs with a Songbook Max. But, once again, this seems a bit of a strange idea in a high-price wireless speaker, particularly when it’s never going to be a replacement for an actual guitar amp. And it also doesn’t work well if you directly plug in a guitar (rather than using a digital amp, for example), as the songs end up much, much louder than the guitar and there’s no separate input volume. 

The Tivoli Audio Songbook Max also lacks Wi-Fi, which is typically at the heart of these large wireless speakers. This means no multi-room, no direct streaming without a phone, and that streamed quality is limited to that of the supported Bluetooth codecs. 

More bad news here: the Songbook Max only supports the AAC and SBC codecs, which isn’t ideal for Android phone users keen on having aptX variants. 

Of course, for plenty of people this won’t matter much. There’s a certain pleasing simplicity to a relatively disconnected speaker not obsessed with digital assistants and streaming service integration. 

There are other problems, though. My clearest first impression on using the Tivoli Audio Songbook Max was it’s damn slow. When you select a radio station, it takes a small age to switch over. While there are handy preset buttons up top, little rubber things (five of them), this doesn’t change matters. 

Most of the DAB radios I reviewed a decade or more ago when new DAB radios were more common felt more responsive than the Tivoli Audio Songbook Max. 

There are some odd bugs in the software too. For example, whenever I search for DAB stations, the Songbook reports having found 11 of them, despite it clearly having found many, many more. The Tivoli Audio Songbook Max does not match the expectations of polish that come with a £700 price. 

Sound Quality

• Mono sound with separate mid and bass drivers
• High maximum volume
• Sound width, scale and dynamics could be better

The Tivoli Audio Songbook Max has three drivers, and a bass port to enhance the low-end. While the arrangement looks pretty conventional, it actually is not. 

You might guess the two big “rings” here are left and right stereo drivers. They are actually bass and mid-range units, and this Max speaker gets an additional tweeter missing from the standard Songbook. The larger drivers are 4-inch units, the tweeter has a 0.75-inch diameter. 

What does this tell us? There’s no stereo sound here, not that putting a couple of speaker drivers 15cm apart gets you much of a stereo effect anyway. I thought I’d also have to report the Songbook Max would also have zero sub-bass, but that’s not actually the case. 

While sub-bass is less powerful than that of plenty of smaller wireless speakers with passive radiators, the driver and bass port system seems pretty well designed here. There’s modest output right down to around 30Hz, and the bass is noticeably less lumpy than in some rivals. 

What does that mean? Bass enhancement tools like ports and radiators are tuned to augment generally quite narrow frequency ranges, meaning the perceived volume of bass can go up and down as you reach down into the lowest, rumbliest range. 

The Songbook Max is a nicely tuned speaker, and it has three EQ sliders right on its front to tweak the sound a bit. 

These are made to look like analogue controls, but are not. Instead, the sliders move the bass, mids and treble between -6, -4, -2, 0, +2, +4 and +6 settings. 

The form doesn’t really match the function. And I’m generally not a fan of these physical controls that make it quite easy to lose track of what your “standard” setting is. 

However, being able to turn down the bass for late-night listening is handy, and I find the Tivoli Audio Songbook Max benefits from a mid-range boost of up to +4. Vocals can otherwise often sound a bit recessed, pushed into the foreground. 

Here’s where we come to the bad bits. I had a chance to do some direct comparisons with the JBL Boombox 3, a speaker significantly cheaper in its non-Wi-Fi iteration and a bit cheaper in the full fat Wi-Fi version. 

It’s a significantly more dynamic-sounding speaker than the Tivoli Audio Songbook Max. There’s greater bass impact and treble sparkle, far better separation and projection of the elements of a mix. 

While the Soungbook Max can go loud, it doesn’t have much scale to the sound and does not fling out music very widely. Some single-box speakers are justifiably called “room fillers” but the Max’s audio always too clearly emanates from a single point in the room, even if it does have party-ready volume. 

It’s not the kind of volume I appreciate the most either. The best sounding speakers and headphones are so effortless you can end up cranking the volume without even realising it because there’s so little distortion in the sound. 

That’s not really the case here, and one of my main usability issues with the Tivoli Audio Songbook Max is in many situations it skips straight from slightly too quiet to too loud with one press of your phone volume controls. Sure, you can use the on-speaker volume knob for much finer-grain control, but I don’t want to have to do that the whole time. 

The Tivoli Audio Songbook Max is a fine-sounding speaker. It responds well to the mid-range EQ boost I mentioned earlier, and delivers good mid detail after doing so. Treble is pleasant if not crystalline or all that sparky, and while the sub-bass is light and polite, at least it exists to some extent. 

However, I just don’t think the audio matches the price, particularly when we’re dealing with a stripped-back feature set here. 

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