Review: Urbanista Malibu Wireless Solar Speaker

Somewhere in a quiet corner of Urbanista’s Stockholm HQ, there’s a list of emergency place-names. Since its inception in 2010, the company has been on a kind of virtual world tour, naming each of its products after a location of lesser or greater resonance.

But there’s a finite list of evocative toponyms on this planet, isn’t there? How long before we’re offered the Urbanista Chongqing? Or the Urbanista Slough?

Right now, though, Urbanista is yet to exhaust the world’s supply of poignant place-names. And so here’s the Malibu wireless speaker, available in a most un-Malibu-like choice of black or gray finishes.

In many ways, the Malibu is a wireless speaker like all the others—but, as with the company’s Phoenix and Los Angeles wireless headphones, there’s a point of difference here. The top of the speaker is almost entirely made up of Exeger’s Powerfoyle solar cell material, which means the Malibu, like its headphone siblings, can harvest the power of light, whether natural or electrical, to contribute to the life of its 3,600-mA battery.

It’s not quite a USP—fringe brands Abfoce and Cyboris have solar-powered speakers in their lineups, too. But these brands don’t have the hard-won credibility of Urbanista, and they don’t boast the extraordinary efficiency of Powerfoyle either.

Left to its own devices, the Malibu’s battery is good for around 30 hours of playback. That’s as long as you’re listening at moderate volume, anyway. The sort of digital audio file size you’re streaming isn’t a factor, as the Urbanista is only compatible with the bog-standard, low-energy SBC and AAC codecs.

But with light shining on its Powerfoyle surface, the Malibu can extend its playtime handily. We’re not talking about an Urbanista Los Angeles–style scenario here, you understand; those headphones can actually gain power, even as they’re playing. But Urbanista suggests that even some moderately sunny days while the Malibu is doing its thing can extend that battery life from 30 hours to something closer to 45 hours. And free energy is not something to be sniffed at.

“Moderately sunny” is a relative term, of course. During the course of my time with the Urbanista, it was charged by a combination of internal light and the pathetically watery glimmers of a rainy British October that was even grayer than the Malibu’s Desert Gray finish. And even then, it was able to play for nearly 40 hours before I had recourse to mains power.

I can only imagine how long it would go for during a Malibu summer—indefinitely, presumably. Either way, the speaker’s IP67 rating should mean it’s able to stand up well to these extremes.

As is standard Urbanista practice, the Malibu is flawlessly built and finished from a selection of materials that combine tactility with robustness. Apart from the Powerfoyle, the Urbanista is made from a combination of strong plastic and a quantity of acoustic cloth.

There’s some quite assertive branding across its front face, but other than that it’s basically featureless. On the front top lip there are controls for volume up/down, play, and pause, while at the rear there’s a USB-C socket, a lanyard for secure transportation, and a power on/off button. Everything else is taken care of by a bespoke version of the Urbanista control app.

In addition to a battery life indicator, the app has a nice graphic representing the current stage of light charging and a running total of the amount of power the speaker has harvested. There’s a five-band EQ with four presets and the ability to add bespoke settings. It’s useful as far as it goes, although with some playback control it could conceivably go further.

The Malibu uses Bluetooth 5.2 for wireless connectivity, which makes the lack of compatibility with even a mildly hi-res codec all the more galling. No details of the digital-to-analog converter onboard are forthcoming, but the Urbanista uses 20 watts of power to drive a couple of 2-by-2-inch full-range drivers that deliver a claimed frequency response of 50 Hz to 20 kHz. A couple of Malibus can be joined to form a stereo pair, if you so desire.

So on paper at least, the Urbanista Malibu looks like a decently competitive proposition with a very worthy additional feature. No matter how laudable the specification, though, the battle is neither won nor lost on paper.

Wirelessly connected to an Apple iPhone 14 Pro, and with content like “Straight Up and Down” by The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Volcano Songs by Meredith Monk streaming via Tidal, the Malibu is an easy listen, if not the most faithful to the material.

Considering its physical dimensions and those of the drivers with which it’s fitted, the Urbanista generates decent low-frequency punch and presence.

Control of bass sounds is pretty good, so there’s reasonable rhythmic expression and none of the bass excitability that so many mainstream Bluetooth speakers indulge in. Detail levels are respectable too, so there’s a fair amount of insight into the nuts and bolts of recording available.

And with physical dimensions again uppermost in mind, the scale of the soundstage the Malibu creates is commendable, too—as is the degree of separation and space it manages to include.

There’s something amiss with the speaker’s tonality when it gets up above the bottom end, though. Midrange communication is good—detail levels remain high, and the amount of information the Malibu can describe about a vocalist’s technique and character is enjoyable. But the balance is on the thin and sibilant side, and this is especially apparent where the midrange hands over to the top end.

There’s a lack of substance, combined with spiky edginess, that results in unpleasant splashiness that only gets splashier and more unpleasant with increases in volume. The fact that the Urbanista’s treble extension is quite pointedly curtailed is probably a good thing—and few are the circumstances in which I would write that last bit.

As befits a speaker designed for portability, though, the Malibu does at least go good and loud if you so desire. Some 20 watts of power might not seem an especially promising start when it comes to getting meaningful volume, but the Urbanista wrings everything out of them. As long as you can live with its skinny, phasey tonality, then this speaker will have no problems keeping you entertained in the great outdoors.

It’s probably worth observing at this point that all is not as well as it might be in the wider world of Urbanista. When a company’s parent corporation is attempting to service some of its “unsustainable debt levels” and seriously considering the sale of some associated businesses in order to restructure itself—as Strax, which owns Urbanista, is—such news might understandably give some consumers pause.

Now, there’s currently absolutely no suggestion that the Urbanista brand itself, or its collaboration with Exeger, is under threat, but nevertheless, those who attach value to after-sales service and the like should be aware of the parent company’s position when putting an Urbanista product on their shortlist of possible purchases.

For now, though, it seems the rather wonky balance the Urbanista Malibu strikes between outstanding eco credentials and lopsided sound quality should be of more immediate concern.