There’s a fun idea behind the Mighty Dwarf Speaker — it’s a large USB-powered speaker driver that works by vibrating whatever surface it’s affixed to. It’s an interesting gimmick, with different surfaces producing varying qualities of audio, but most outputting a lot more volume than you’d expect from a device about half the size of a can of soft drink.
The best results are obviously to be had from objects resembling speaker boxes and we found that large heavy tables produced the best audio. Pretty much anything that can be made to vibrate produced passable audio — cardboard boxes, wooden chairs and so forth, with only pliant surfaces like flesh or very dense ones like concrete floors being total duds.
That said, the fly in the ointment here is power: the Mighty Dwarf is a USB-powered device, which means you’re going to have to drag either a notebook or USB battery pack to wherever you want to stick it; we found inconvenience kills the novelty appeal, especially for a device that at its best, doesn’t produce stellar audio.
