Kestrel Audio Nomad II

Built like it expects to be dropped

We put the Nomad II through the full abuse routine: submerged at one metre for thirty minutes, dropped onto concrete from 1.5 m on six faces, and left in direct sun on a car dashboard for four hours. It came out working, with a scuffed rubber bumper and nothing else to report.

It floats, and it floats the right way up with the drivers clear of the water, which sounds like a small detail until you are retrieving it from a lake. The port covers are moulded into the rubber rather than being a separate flap that will tear off in year two.

The strap is braided nylon, replaceable, and rated to hold the speaker's weight. Everything about the physical design suggests a company that has watched people actually use these things outdoors.

The sound is a compromise

Outdoors, where there are no walls to reinforce low frequencies, the Nomad II sounds excellent. Loud, full, and clear enough to carry across a garden without turning into mush.

Indoors it is a different speaker. Our measurements show roughly a 9 dB bass shelf below 120 Hz, which in a normal room becomes closer to 13 dB once boundary gain is included. Male vocals disappear behind kick drums. Podcasts sound like they are being read from inside a bucket.

This is the frustrating part, because it is a software problem. A three-band EQ in the app would fix it entirely. There is no EQ in the app.

Kestrel built a speaker that will outlive three phones and then stopped writing the software that makes it worth owning.

Battery and the charging trick

Twenty-six hours at 50 percent volume is an accurate claim, not a generous one - we measured 26 hours 40 in a continuous playback test with a mixed playlist. At maximum volume that drops to about 9 hours, which is still a full day at a beach.

The USB-C port does bidirectional power. You can charge a phone from the speaker, and it will deliver about 10 W, enough to take a dead phone to 40 percent in an hour. On a camping trip this is more useful than any audio feature on the spec sheet.

Recharging the speaker itself is slow: 3 hours 40 from empty at 18 W. That is the one place the hardware feels dated.

The abandoned app

Kestrel Companion was last meaningfully updated in early 2025. It connects, it shows battery percentage, and it applies firmware updates. That is the entire feature set.

There is no EQ, no way to rename the device, and no way to adjust the aggressive auto-off timer that kills the speaker after fifteen minutes of silence - which is genuinely annoying when you pause a podcast to talk to someone.

Stereo pairing exists but only between two Nomad II units, and it drops out roughly once an hour in our testing. A company that has stopped developing its app is a company you should assume will stop supporting the product.

Verdict

Seven point one. Buy the Nomad II if you want a speaker for outdoors that you will not have to think about or protect, and if you mostly listen to music rather than speech. On that brief it is close to the best thing available at $149.

Do not buy it as an indoor speaker, do not buy it for podcasts, and do not buy it expecting the software to improve. Kestrel's own Halo line gets the app attention now.

It is a genuinely good product being held down by a spreadsheet decision made in a meeting eighteen months ago.