REVIEW
A Sculpture That Plays Music Cleer Crescent Offers Elegant and Simple Smart Audio Speaker Option By Jeremy Glowacki Right out of the box, the Cleer Crescent smart audio speaker blew me away with its solidly built crescent shape, all-metal control panel, stainless steel mesh grille, and rubberized foundation. At its widest, the speaker is 26 inches across the top and about 13 inches at the narrowest location at its base, so it’s not tiny, but it also does not dominate the room. The speaker’s champagne color, which is currently the only finish option, is elegant, unique, and neutral enough to blend into most rooms. My first thought was, “This is a sculpture that happens to play music.” Cleer Crescent looked great, obviously, but how complicated would it be to set up, and, most importantly how good would it sound? Setting up Cleer Crescent Cleer Crescent is not a “portable” speaker, so there is no battery to charge, just an AC power cable and power adapter to connect and plug in the wall. Once connected, Crescent powered on automatically and the four LED indicator lights on the front of the speaker lit up. Although the Crescent is a Bluetooth speaker, its user manual recommends the installation of the Google Home app on a smartphone to link the speaker to your Wi-Fi network and to enable voice control. While every device these days has its own app, for some reason the fact that I would need to renew my “relationship” with Google Home to get the most out of my Crescent speaker came as an unwelcome surprise. There was once a time when Google Home and Amazon Alexa co-existed in my home. I’m not a huge fan of either service, but it was
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quickly clear that Alexa’s development had such a head start over Google Home that there was no reason to keep both devices connected. Then my family doubled down on Alexa, creating a multi-room doorbell alert and paging system throughout the house. Now, thanks to Cleer, I would be re-introducing Google Home, and I worried that, like before, she just wouldn’t be as helpful as Alexa. I was wrong. Right out of the gate, Google Home proved that it had come a long way in the two years (or more) since I last used the app. I was curious why Cleer picked Google Home over Alexa, so that’s the first thing I asked Cleer’s Vice President of Marketing, Aaron Levine, in a follow-up call. He reminded me that his relatively young company already
offers Alexa-integrated speakers in its small line of speakers, but for Crescent’s price ($699 MSRP), Google Home offered feature differentiation from other competitors in its price range. There was also the issue of retailers not especially liking the idea of selling an Alexa product, which directly supported a potential competitor in Amazon. Levine also noted that Google Home was the best option for Crescent’s linear speaker array, with the app’s wide variety of streaming content as well as better implementation of Cleer’s software. Getting It Up and Running Once the app was installed and Wi-Fi connected, I said, “Hey Google, play Taylor
