The biggest surprise that Meizu brings to users this year will be it.

Originally planned to ship Gravity in December, this audio is almost the only product left outside the Meizu laboratory. How does this speaker achieve suspension, and what effect does the floating display have? Let's look at the following.

This is a digression, but it is related to the products we want to talk about today. Gravity is a wireless speaker launched by Meizu in the United States in mid-May this year. It started with crowdfunding and was priced at $169.

In this way, it seems to be floating in the air.

Because there was a transparent prism, Gravity was called the "suspended speaker" at the time, and the design in the rendering was amazing and impressive.

However, Gravity, which was originally planned to be shipped in December, has been sold. The one that Sina Digital has received is almost the only product left outside the Meizu Lab. So before the beginning of this article, we still need to emphasize that it is a beta version with a completion rate of 70-80%. This is called “evaluation” and it is slightly reluctant. It may not fully reflect the future appearance of Gravity after its official launch.

About suspension design and prism

From a distance, Gravity is a black cuboid. Above the speaker is an acrylic prism that runs through the speaker. The music information is reflected by the prism to the outer glass surface and then reaches the user's eyes. At the same time, this transparent acrylic glass runs through the black box to provide support, as if the sound is floating in the air.

Crystal clear and responsible for supporting

This design is the most beautiful place in Gravity itself. The designer from Japan, Tsutsui Hiroyuki, has built the oriental Zen aesthetics for it: the heavens and the earth itself are extremely beautiful, and there is no need to deliberately sculpt and modify them. Reflected on the product, it is "empty":

Removing the rustic look of all the modifications, a crystal prism is both static and the beginning of many changes. Unexpectedly, this is the beginning of the structural team's hardships.

You see, he is not only transparent, but also shows the color of the surrounding environment.

Previously, no one did a transparent speaker. Harman Kardon's SoundSTIcks is representative of it, but the traces and speakers in the transparent case are refined industrial style; and SoundSTIcks is just a speaker, it has to be considered without a screen part. It’s just a sense of transparency. The ethereal spirit that Pingjing wants is another style:

The implementation principle is like this

Gravity designers and product teams must refract images in transparent prisms and make them invisible to electronic products. This is a huge problem in industrial design. The reason why this machine is in beta is an important one. The reason is that if your eyes are close to the prism, you can still see a black line of about 2 mm in the part of the prism combined with the black box.

The internal staff of the Gravity R&D team told me that in order to make this black line disappear, they used almost all the ideas that could be thought of; but either they affected the transparency of the crystal, or it made the intensity smaller, there is always a little bit of design. The division or product team could not accept it. This is the main reason why the product has been postponed until now.

The final ideal display is like this

I haven't seen this black line disappear completely yet, but according to a teenager from the Gravity team, the official version will solve the black line problem.

Interaction is a learning

Gravity itself is a WiFi speaker. The well-known representative of this kind of product is SONOS. Gravity is based on this method, plus Bluetooth, DLNA (supporting Apple AirPlay), and 3.5mm wired direct connection. This is very Meizu, I will give you all that I can give. But when this machine arrived at Sina, it was still a very early ROM version. After several upgrades, we only understood the operation of this product.

Suspension effect

Before the upgrade, when playing the song, the prism shows a song title plus a thin line (progress bar), like the Sony X5 years ago, which is very suitable for Gravity's kind of cool temperament. I thought it was good enough, but after several upgrades, the album reflected on the transparent prism added the album cover, and the progress bar became color. When you use it to sing songs before going to bed, these pictures accompany the songs in the darkness, and the end of the song, the sound changes as the picture changes, and floats out in the darkness, which is the most embarrassing moment of Gravity.

This perspective will change as the angle changes.

The vision is extreme, but the operation is not entirely. There are only four buttons on the Gravity body, such as "Song switch and volume increase and decrease" (Pingjing is said to have been entangled for a long time because of the button font), but when you actually use it to play music, the most convenient is wireless control of the phone. . It can be said that these four buttons are hidden in the back of the fuselage, enough to create the overall beauty of Gravity, but the operation is a bit anti-human.

The position of the button is almost impossible to touch.

The WiFi connection is the most preferred for current Gravity, which is not only for button operations, but also for sound and UI displays. At present, only the songs are played through WiFi, and the album cover we mentioned above is only available on the prism, and only one monochrome symbol is displayed in the manner of DLNA or Bluetooth. In addition, the sound quality of the wired output is not perfect, and a line will also destroy the inspiration of Gravity. As for the specific sound quality, we put it in the next paragraph.

These thread heads appear in the fuselage and do affect the vision.

These thread heads appear in the fuselage and do affect the vision.

After all, I still have to talk about the sound quality.

Gravity was originally designed not for portable speakers. Its ideal use scene should be to quietly put music on a desk or bedside table, instead of carrying a rap song that was played twice, which is too inconsistent with Gravity's temperament. Ingenuity and sound, or ingenuity and function, sometimes contradictory; for example, there is no battery in Gravity, but a pair of 2*1.25 inch full-range speakers are placed. The next definition, the sound quality is good, we continue to say.

Sound unit structure

From the perspective of compatibility, Gravity is sensitive to the front-end equipment, and the data line is connected to the Mac. The intermediate frequency is too warm. On the Xplay6, the tri-band will become more balanced, and occasionally there will be noise. Because it has its own power amplifier, the cable is replaced by a WiFi wireless connection. In fact, the sound effect is the best; in this state, Gravity does not have the same medium frequency and high frequency, low frequency analysis and low frequency and quality.

Real shot

The Gravity tri-band balance of WiFi connection, the female voice is still a little sweet, in the original version of "if i ain't got you", the high frequency of Alicia Keys's smoke and instruments is clear and natural. Bright and unpretentious, not arrogant. The drum drum is accurate in recognition, and some rebounds are clean and neat, and some overtones are sufficient. To say insufficient, the low frequency dive and thickness are indeed limited by the volume. Overall, in this price range of equipment, the performance is amazing.

Listen to the combination with Mac

Let's talk about the wired mode. In this state, Gravity obviously does not belong to the full score. Based on the connection of the MacBook Pro, the middle frequency is really thick and sticky, and the drums are not clean and shrink, and even the high-frequency part is not so good.

Specifically, when you listen to Mariah Carey, it seems to be slightly separated. Listening to Li Zhisheng’s voice will be older than it is now; sometimes, the two sinking strings of the guitar will be mixed with the drums; they may be randomly cut to Lin Xiaopei’s "Annoying", the beginning of a drum and the front and rear stacking obvious scenes are a bit confusing. This state is quite good compared to the Bluetooth headset with a price of a thousand dollars, but there is a clear distance from the WiFi connection.

Written in the final summary:

Real shot

Wang Di:

"Good product" is always in the scope of a definition, such as Gravity is the price and the "sound of the best sound and shape" in this volume. But to put it another way, look at the price of 169 dollars, a few hundred you can buy a better sound quality, slightly larger, but another elegant aesthetic sound equipment.

Or to be more straightforward, people who have been exposed to Gravity around me will more or less say "may be bigger, more perfect."

Real shot

Guo Xiaoguang:

If Gravity is just a common bluetooth speaker (Meizu has done this kind of product before), perhaps Pingjing is willing to compromise. Now we should release an official version of the product that has been listed.

People who have not been to the factory will not understand how far the product is from the map to the hand. As we said earlier, the design of the prism doubles the difficulty of manufacturing Gravity, and its manufacturing team does not seem to think that a transparent structure that meets the desired results is so tortuous. This is the background of this crowdfunding ticket.

I think these tribulations are worthwhile. If the whole world is the kind of speaker with a small LED screen, it is much boring.

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