CMF Speaker M Review: This Bluetooth Speaker Sparks Joy

When you think of portable wireless speakers, you probably aren’t thinking of dairy, but… what if you did? What if you did and you were actually glad that you did? CMF, an offshoot of Nothing, now has its first-ever portable speaker, the CMF Speaker M. As usual, there are some quirks with its hardware, and almost all of them are focused on design: bold colors, fun knobs, and, naturally, uh… milk. CMF Speaker M The CMF Speaker M is a nice-sounding speaker in a really fun package. The price is right, too. Sound is good Stereo pair sounds great Milk! Fun potential for DIY faceplates and buttons Price feels right The software was a bit buggy and slow Some connectivity issues Buying two for stereo pairing ups the price considerably Got speaker? The CMF Speaker M looks like a milk carton on purpose. It’s silly, it’s bold, and just really fun. Rarely do I feel so much genuine joy looking at a gadget, but the CMF Speaker M, with its dairyesque shape and its two bold colors (orange and turquoise), wants you to notice it. It’s intentional design at its best—pasteurized by CMF’s team for drinking through your eyes. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo The playfulness isn’t just an aesthetic choice, either; it’s a functional one. See those knobs? The weird circle and the X? Those are interchangeable, meaning if you want to swap them, you can. Better yet, you can just 3D print your own, granted you have access to that sort of thing. The knob, by the way, controls volume, play/pause, and can skip tracks with a double press. It’s a nice tactile experience that keeps me wanting to actually use it as opposed to controlling things with my phone. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo And the bespoke front plate? That’s swappable as well. All you have to do is unlock the faceplate with the button in the back, pull it off, and print your own faceplate—whatever you want. I’ve been scrolling my feeds since the CMF Speaker M’s release, and people are already having lots of fun with it. Quite a few have even leaned into the milk of it all. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo For a little over $100, you’d be hard-pressed to find a portable speaker with this much character and practical quirkiness. And the best part? In this case, you can judge a book (or milk-shaped speaker) by its cover. Party in the front, business inside The prettiest or coolest speaker in the world wouldn’t really mean much if the sound sucked, and luckily, in CMF’s case, that’s not a reality you have to worry about. I was impressed with the sound quality for the price, and while it may not excel to the level of Sonos’ premium-priced Play (which costs almost triple at $299), it feels like a good bang for your buck—even more so if you pair two together. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo I listened to the CMF Speaker M across a range of genres and was happy with the sound across the frequency range. I listened to “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” by Steel Dan, and the rhythm guitars were bright and sparkly, the midrange was upfront—keys are very audible—and vocals came in loud and clear. There was enough bass for me, too, though I wouldn’t call this the bassiest speaker in the world. Premium competitors like Bose’s SoundLink Plus have the Speaker M beat there. In more electronic tracks like Daft Punk’s “Da Funk,” the Speaker M did a good job of handling a bass-heavy mix, giving me low end but not drowning out gritty lead synths. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo As long as we’re on the bass here, we should talk about one of the software features in the Speaker M—Ultra Bass. With Ultra Bass, you can use AI to really beef up the low end, and man, it does work. “Da Funk,” for instance, hits a lot harder with Ultra Bass enabled, which is great for people who are really yearning for more oomph out of bassy tracks. I’m not really that guy, so I can’t see myself using it that much, but it’s nice to have either way. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo Another software feature you can take advantage of in the Nothing X app is “Wide Soundstage,” which is meant to, well… widen the soundstage. In other words, it’s meant to provide more separation between instruments and frequencies, which is a noble cause. In practice, I think it works fine. I’m not blown away by toggling the feature on, but there’s definitely a difference in the mix. Everything takes on more of a live feel. Whether or not you appreciate this feature will come down to personal preference, but I’m glad it doesn’t totally ruin the mix like some other features that try to artificially enhance music. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo While the sound of one CMF Speaker M is good, combining it with another speaker really changes the game. With the help of the Nothing X app, you can combine two speakers of the same variety for left/right stereo sound. Luckily, CMF provided me with two speakers to test that out, and the results are pretty awesome. Plus, there’s the added coolness of seeing the colors play off each other. While you could get speakers in matching colors, getting one orange and one turquoise really makes a statement. If stereo sound isn’t your thing, the CMF Speaker M also comes with Auracast, meaning it can be paired with any Auracast-ready device (including another CMF speaker) to play audio simultaneously. I tested this out, too, and it worked well. All you have to do is press the dedicated Auracast button on the back of two speakers, and they should link up, though it may take a few seconds. If lossless audio is more your speed, you can also wire into the CMF Speaker M via USB-C, which is a convenient touch. Other software flourishes like Night Mode put volume limits on the speaker and dampen explosive, loud noises. I tested this out, and while I can’t see myself using it much, it did work. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo Though I was grateful to have useful and augmentative software features at my disposal, I wasn’t super impressed by the refinement of said process. It took quite a while to link two speakers together for stereo sound—I had to exit and reload the app multiple times—and I had some connection issues where the app didn’t recognize that I was connected to the speaker right away. I had to turn the speaker off and turn it back on and then reload the app. On another occasion, it took quite a few rounds of connection attempts for the speakers to pair with my phone. CMF wasn’t immediately able to identify the issue at hand—all firmware and software were up to date—but the issue did eventually resolve itself. CMF is looking into the cause of these connection issues; I’ll update this review when the company has found the cause of the issue. It’s hard to say what the issues were here, but I’d like to see a little more refinement here. As Sonos knows damn well, having clean, usable software is a major part of the battle in winning the wireless speaker war, even if Sonos speakers are more geared towards WiFi listening. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo If solid sound and a fun look weren’t enough to convince you, the CMF Speaker M is also decent elsewhere, including battery life. CMF says the Speaker M gets 18 hours on a single charge, though I wasn’t able to test that fully since the Nothing X app only gives me battery life in 10% increments. After an hour of playing music at 50% volume, the Nothing X app tells me that the CMF Speaker M is still at 100% battery. A strong start for CMF I’ve been waiting for Nothing to get into the speaker game for a while now, and while this technically isn’t the full realization of that, it’s pretty damn close. It’s a strong start. The sound is good, there are plenty of features—but not so many that you’re overwhelmed—and the look is really fun. On top of all of that, the customization adds something that you’re not going to get from most speakers. If you’re into 3D printing, you can go nuts with custom faceplates and buttons to make these speakers unique. It’s a lot in one package for a speaker that costs $110—a reasonable price in the Bluetooth speaker world. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo If there’s one thing I’d like to see, it’s more refinement on the software side—the Nothing X app felt slow and buggy to me. There’s never any guarantee that a company can fix something like that, but on paper, it feels like something that can be addressed in short order. Even with that, the Speaker M is a hard-to-beat price-to-fun ratio.