It’s easy to see the differences between the JBL Flip 6 and its predecessor. The “ruggedized” rubber accents on the tubular speaker’s edges have been slightly softened by JBL, and the passive bass radiators now feel chilly, textured, and metallic rather than smooth and rubbery. The positioning of the USB-C connector, power, and Bluetooth buttons is the same, but they are positioned on a smaller rubber surface that does not extend the entire length of the speaker. To prevent the Flip 6 from really flipping off your desk, a tiny rubber foot has been added beneath the panel to increase stability. Previously, the wider rubber panel concealed the seam where the speaker’s fabric jacket joined, but now it is completely visible. We bring this up because JBL made a comparable decision with the Go 3 speaker, and we discovered that it led to a weak spot that eventually became prone to fraying. But in this instance, the spine feels well-finished and there isn’t a strand that can be pulled. When you install the JBL Portable app, the Flip 6 has a real ace up its sleeve. Here, you can find other JBL Partyboost-enabled speakers (like the Flip 5) and connect them in “party” (mono) mode or in stereo if you have another Flip 6 owing to Partyboost toggles. A Flip 5 and Flip 6 cannot be combined to form a stereo pair, which is unfortunate but not entirely unexpected. A three-band equaliser to adjust the sound is now available on the Flip 6’s in-app dashboard, above the feedback tone slider. This is a feature we have long wished for. We find that, as you might expect, enhancing the midrange or treble is the easiest to detect after experimenting with the bass, mid, and treble sliders. Even if they minimise the mid and treble tabs, bass fiends won’t gain much by sliding the bass tab up to its maximum, but with a design around the size of a hotdog, that is not surprising – yet this speaker does not lack in the bass department. Although we do not advise using it for indoor listening, there are times when increasing the treble or mid frequencies to drown out background noise is advantageous (at the beach, for example), and in this case it adds value.
