You can use your iPhone to carry out a conference call with a bunch of other people. If you want to make sure your conversations are loud and clear throughout, though, reinforcing it with something like the Pioneer Rayz Rally will probably provide a much better experience.
A pocket-size speaker with a built-in mic, the rig is tuned to facilitate loud, clear, and uninterrupted conference calls, allowing you to turn an erstwhile humble iPhone into a full-fledged conferencing system. Seriously, Pioneer claims this is good enough to fill up any conference room with sound, allowing you to enjoy professional-quality conferencing without the expensive hardware investment.
The Pioneer Rayz Rally connects to your iPhone via the Lightning port, so it’s a wired connection, ensuring all audio passes through cleanly in both directions. There’s no onboard battery, so there’s no regular charging necessary. Instead, it draws juice from your iPhone’s battery to power the integrated speaker and microphone. Pioneer claims it operates in a mode that uses the lowest amount of power possible, so it won’t put that much of a drain on your battery life (according to reviews, it uses up about the same as the phone’s onboard speakers). Do note, the device allows pass-through charging, so you can charge your iPhone while it’s connected to the speaker, in case you’re worried about losing power.
No exact specs are available regarding the hardware inside the device. Based on the compact size, however, we imagine you can find portable Bluetooth speakers with much better drivers at the same price range. What makes it special, though, is that the speakers are optimized towards playing people’s voices, rather than music, so you get a really strong mid-range with a minimal amount of bass, ensuring conversations come through loud and clear. There’s also a noise reduction feature that allows it to dull some of the background noise in the room (emphasis on room, as the noise reduction probably isn’t good enough to silence road traffic), so the speaking voices can be picked up clearly by the mic.
A single button in front of the Pioneer Rayz Rally serves as the sole point of control, allowing you to mute and unmute phone calls with a single push. It automatically turns on as soon as you plug it into an iPhone or iPad, along with automatically launching the app, by the way, turning off as soon as you pull it back out. Oh yeah, aside from the iPhones and iPads, you can use a Lightning-to-USB cable to hook it up to a Mac or PC, in case you prefer doing your conference calls using a desktop software.
Dimensions are 2.4 x 1.9 x 0.8 inches, so it’s small enough to carry in your pocket, ready to deploy at any time. Whether you’re at work, at home, or traveling on the road, this thing lets you have a capable conferencing system squarely in your arsenal.
Want one? The Pioneer Rayz Rally is available now.
- Lightning-powered: no batteries or charging required and integrated charging port for talk and...