Lodge Solar Speaker 4 Series 2 Speaker Review

The Lodge Solar Speaker 4 Series 2 resembles a traditional bookshelf speaker since it's a rectangular box with a front-facing design. It has a soft rubberized base to cushion it and a handle on the back that also serves as a bass port. On the bottom of the speaker, you can find screw threads to attach the included base plate. Black solar panels cover the body on all sides except the front, which has a detachable black metal grille. The speaker's frame is made from a pale turquoise plastic. Although it's marketed as a premium product, some unrefined workmanship (such as leftover glue on the metal grille covering the drivers) makes the speaker feel a bit unrefined. We discuss this further in the Build Quality section.

The Lodge Solar Speaker is impressively portable, thanks to its relatively compact size and built-in battery that lets you listen without needing to plug it in. Its built-in handle also makes it easy to carry with one hand.

The Lodge Solar Speaker has decent build quality. The design is well thought out, but the finish lacks polish and makes us question the overall quality of the workmanship. The speaker body is primarily made of solid-feeling plastic that seems suitable for outdoor use. This aligns with its IP66 rating, meaning it's fully protected against dust and can withstand strong water jets from any direction. The USB-C charging port is advertised to be waterproof and comes with a silicone cover to protect it from water and dust, but the cover isn't attached to the speaker, so it's easy to lose.

Solar power is arguably this speaker's most interesting feature. Four sides of it are covered in solar panels, which feel firm to the touch and are advertised to be shatterproof and chip-resistant. However, we noticed some leftover glue on the corners of these panels as well as on the metal grille that covers the drivers. The grille is attached to the body by strong magnets, so you can remove it for cleaning, which is a nice touch. The controls are placed on an easily accessible rubber strip on top of the speaker, but the strip isn't straight.

This speaker has disappointing controls, but that's mostly because it lacks a couple of important features. First, there's no button to skip tracks. Second, the speaker only plays a chime when you reach the maximum or minimum volume setting, which means it's not easy to tell if it registered your volume change commands.

On the plus side, the speaker has physical buttons for Play/Pause, along with a physical Power button, a Bluetooth button, and a LodgeLink button to pair it with other units. View the full list of controls. The controls are simple to remember and well-spaced, making it easy to press the right button without accidentally hitting another. The buttons are located on a rubberized strip at the top of the speaker and are easy to operate even when wet. They all offer audible and tactile clicks when pressed.

The speaker also provides clear voice prompts for welcome, power-off, and Bluetooth connection, along with feedback when entering LodgeLink mode. The speaker's battery status is displayed with four LED indicators.

• Lodge Solar Speaker 4 Series 2
• Metal base plate
• Plastic stand
• Plastic stake
• 6x screws
• 1x thumb screw
• USB-C to USB-A charging cable (2 m/6.56 ft)
• A 'Thank You' card with a QR code that links to "Set-up, Use & Care Guidelines"

The Lodge Solar Speaker 4 Series 2 has a passable frequency response accuracy. It's not a tiny speaker, so fans of EDM and hip-hop will likely be disappointed that kick drums lack thump and punch. There's enough high-bass to keep basslines audible, but they don't feel very immersive. The mid-range is okay. It's fairly well-balanced if uncontrolled, so voices are fairly life-like but can also sound thin or honky depending on the pitch of the singer. The treble range is similarly unruly, with a big dip in the low-treble followed by a relative peak in the mid-treble that renders the upper harmonics of electric guitars veiled or piercing depending on their pitch. In general, sounds like voices in podcasts come across accurately, but this speaker lacks the controlled mid and treble ranges of even smaller speakers like the Bose SoundLink Flex (2nd Gen). There's also no way for you to adjust its sound via EQ.

This speaker has a poor soundstage. Its front-facing design causes the audio to change depending on your listening angle, and it downmixes stereo content to mono, so details like guitars panned hard left and right sound quieter in the mix.

This speaker has good dynamic range performance. It gets loud enough to soundtrack modest outdoor events like garden BBQs or park hangs. And at max volume, it doesn't compress your audio much at all, so basslines still sound warm and full.

This speaker has impressive battery life. It can charge via solar power or its USB-C port. Although advertised to last between 15 and 30 hours, depending on usage, we measured a little over 80 hours in our tests. The downside of that long running time is that the speaker takes almost 16 hours to charge fully via USB-C. The supporting documentation doesn't mention a power-saving feature, but we noticed that the speaker turned off after about two hours of inactivity.

The manufacturer claims that, "Once fully charged, as long as the speaker is outside and capturing energy from the sun, it will stay charged. For every hour of sunlight the speaker is exposed to, it can accumulate charge to provide two to three hours of average play time." We're currently draining the speaker battery in order to fully charge it again using only solar power and will update these results once that's complete.

This speaker doesn't offer voice assistant support.

This speaker comes with an extremely basic app. Its sole purpose is to update the speaker's firmware. It doesn't offer any additional functionality like an EQ or party mode. And even if you've paired two units together for stereo playback, you have to update each speaker's firmware separately.

This speaker doesn't support wired audio playback; its USB-C port is only for charging.

This speaker has decent Bluetooth performance. It has a pretty long range, so you'll be able to wander away from your picnic in the park without worrying about the tunes dropping out. It also supports multi-device pairing with up to two devices, but you have to pause audio on one device before hitting play on the other. The Bluetooth latency is also high, but that doesn't matter too much for a speaker meant for outdoor use. If you do watch videos, you might experience some lip-sync issues, although different apps and devices compensate for latency in different ways.

This speaker doesn't support Wi-Fi.