Testing and Usage

Before using the MCP50 I did the recommended task of charging the battery for 10 hours or more. It probably got nearly double that. The booklet suggests you give it this long charge at least the first 3 times. It also states that you should give it a full 24 hours charge when the battery is almost or completely depleted. This does seem to be a long time for a battery charge. Finally still on the battery subject, it suggests to recharge once every 3 months if it’s sitting dormant to avoid battery failure.

The power buttons seem to be more complicated than they need to be. I’m used to just turning something on or off, I don’t normally need to tell it to use battery or mains but I’ll get used to it although found myself explaining it to other members of the family multiple times. If the DC power is selected, the power remains on, even when the AC power switch is set to off. To charge you set it to neither on or off. A bit confusing at first.

 

Setting up the Bluetooth connection to my Samsung S4 took just a few seconds. A press of the Input Switching button and a scan on the phone found the device and pairing was done.

 

I had family connect on various devices none of which presented any issues. If you don’t want to connect using BT, you have the other inputs of course. I’ll rarely use the SD or USB connections, but the AUX is useful to hook up to the laptop. I did need to find a cable for this, most households will probably have one lying in a drawer somewhere.

Inside the box you’ve got two speakers, an 8” woofer and a 3” tweeter. Power output is 30W (450W PMPO). With a fully charged battery and a paired BT connection to my S4, I started to play some music via YouTube. At first I was a little disappointed with the sound coming out of the unit. My wife thought the same. Whilst I didn’t crank it up too loud in the house, it seemed to lack some oomph, it didn’t sound quite right – but then I remembered this isn’t really intended to deliver the same quality sound as a hifi speaker.

After taking it outside and using it to play some reggae via Tune In radio while we had an outdoor game of “Kubb”(a Swedish wooden block team game) I realized just how good it was. Good at amplifying the small sound from a mobile phone via BT. Good bass. So good in fact that my 14 daughter was worried the neighbors would think we were a bit “loud” and crazy – this is Sweden and you should behave. Regardless, we all enjoyed the sound from it whilst playing our game and many positive comments were made from the other players on the MCP50.

It’s next task was with my 4 year old daughter and a bit of karaoke. We hooked it up to the MacBook pro laptop via a 3.5mm to 2 x phono cable and booted up YouTube. I couldn’t find my wired mic, so we were left with the wireless unit which is included. It’s adequate for non-professional use. A couple of nursery rhymes later and the wife was complaining about the noise. Luckily 4 year olds have short attention spans and quickly moved on to building some Lego instead, and we shut down the unit for the day.

The following day my 14 year old daughter invited her cousin over and disappeared upstairs with the MCP50, my laptop and the wireless mic. They were gone for hours and found it easy to use and had a lot of fun singing and larking around. She did call me up once because it was making a horrible squealing noise, but I found she was putting the mic too close to the unit and getting feedback, and that’s quite normal. We tried also to use the same wireless mic supplied with the other unit I’m testing (the MCP100) but as they are on the same frequency, they just interfered with each other when used together. For once when she returned a piece of equipment to me it wasn’t because the battery needed charging, they’d just exhausted their vocal chords for the day. We’ve used it a couple of times more, once with BT to my Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 and as some background music in the garden on a rare sunny day. The battery still hasn’t died. According to the specs it lasts up to 10 hours on a charge. Whilst I haven’t yet reached 10 hours, I’ll still give it good marks for battery life.