When I was growing up, names like Marshall and Fender were synonymous with music gear and music gear only. As it turns out… I am old. Fender now makes portable speakers and wireless headphones that are surprisingly good, and Marshall predates Fender’s foray into that realm with its own slew of similar products, which started in 2012.

Slapping a Marshall logo on something may reek of gimmick, but like previous entries into that category, Marshall’s new Stockwell III portable speaker shows exactly why its pivot to personal audio has turned out to be a lot more than just an exercise in branding.

The Marshall Stockwell III is a small speaker with truly room-filling sound.

On the outside, the $250 Stockwell III may have all the sex appeal of a carton of cigarettes or a dish sponge, but the sound is anything but pedestrian.

This little speaker packs a lot of power. Inside, there’s a single three-inch woofer and two 1.75-inch drivers powered by 65W Class D amplifiers and 31W Class D amplifiers, respectively. What really makes this driver setup sing, though, is Marshall’s True Stereophonic 360-degree sound, a digital signal processing technology that projects sound on all sides of the speaker and is meant to fill rooms instead of just blasting audio in one direction. I realize that sounds like a lot of marketing mumbo jumbo, but my ears tell me otherwise.

I’m really impressed with how the Stockwell III fills up my space and how it manages to sound as though there are multiple speaker channels even though it’s coming from one speaker.

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