Creative Pebble V3 Review: Powerful Sound in a Compact, Affordable Package!

If you have a small table like me, you might find it hard to find speakers that don’t take up too much space. Well, Creative’s Pebble V3 are a pair of small, stylish speakers that don’t even cost that much but can pump out music at a pretty loud volume.

They come in a small rectangular box, which is the first indication of just how tiny these speakers are. You get the speakers, along with some undetachable cables connecting the left and right speakers and a power cable that terminates in a USB-C plug. There’s also a USB-C to USB-A adapter if your computer or laptop only has USB-A ports.

My biggest gripe with the speakers has to do with the length of the power cable. The cable is connected to the right speaker, and it’s only 1.2m in length. That means that there’s no way I can connect the speaker to my desktop set up since my tower is on my left and the cable is too short to run to the back where my USB-C port is if I want the speakers to sit on my table. As a result, I had to set up the speakers close to the case, to the side of my monitors. This means I could only test them out for relaxed music listening sessions and not for gaming or other activities where I need to face my screens. ~

That being said though, I think the Pebble V3 is honestly very impressive. Although the sound is clear and detailed for its size, I do feel that music with airy vocals does tend to feel a bit compressed. There’s Creative’s Clear Dialog audio processing in these and I found that for music, the main vocals do tend to sound clearer. However, if you’re listening to music where there’s a lot of background vocalising going on, the difference between the two can be pretty stark and a bit disconcerting.

There’s a gain switch at the underside of the right speaker too, which is pretty interesting, but I generally just kept it turned to high since my computer can support the power draw. There’s definitely a noticeable bump in volume when the gain is turned to high, so there’s that. An older laptop might not have the necessary 10W port, in which case, I’d actually suggest plugging the speakers into a wall power adapter and connecting via a 3.5mm cable to the aux port on the speaker or using the Bluetooth functionality.

That’s right, there’s Bluetooth on these too, and it’s definitely convenient if you’re looking to use these to play music off your phone since it won’t really be possible to do it over a 3.5mm jack since most phones nowadays have scrapped it.

At louder volumes, there is a bit of distortion, so I’d recommend keeping to around 70% volume at the most. The bass on these has a good amount of thump, although it can get a bit muddy at times.

Latency is pretty good though, there were no audio sync issues when watching videos on my phone, so I’d expect most games to work pretty well over Bluetooth too.

Honestly, there isn’t all that much to say about these. Considering that they’re just S$59, these are great speakers if you want some extra volume and oomph instead of using your laptop or monitor’s built-in speakers. They sound decent, can get pretty loud and best of all, they take up very little space on a desk.

More information and purchase options for the Creative Pebble V3 (S$59) can be found on Creative’s website.