Is the Saregama Carvaan Mini meant for you?

The most impressive thing about the speaker is that you can raise the volume to a level adequate for a party without it crackling, says Khalid Anzar.

Saregama, India's oldest music label, recently launched the Carvaan Mini at Rs 2,490.

The Bluetooth speaker, which has USB and AUX ports and an FM/AM receiver, also comes pre-loaded with 351 songs, which makes it a unique product in the portable speaker segment.

The Carvaan Mini is similar in design to single-side cassette players of yore.

Saregama's piece is a near-perfect geometrical cube with curved corners.

The front is covered with a metallic mesh sheet with illustrations of legends from the Hindi music industry printed over it.

Just like the cassette players, the buttons on the speaker, like play/pause, next/previous and the volume rocker, are placed on the top along with a power button.

For ease of use, the speaker features separate keys for different modes -- Saregama, FM/AM and Bluetooth.

Overall, the Carvaan Mini has a solid build and a pretty good portable profile.

But the most impressive thing about the speaker is that you can raise the volume to a level adequate for a party without it crackling.

There is a flipside to the compact speaker, though.

The music isn't properly documented.

For instance, I had to go through the annoying routine of switching from one song to another to get to Kishore Kumar's Main shayar badnaam.

It would have been much better if the songs sung by each crooner were under a single cluster.

But I guess that becomes difficult with duets.

The collection itself is good, but not great, with the gems being interspersed with the purely passable and downright duds.

A compilation of classics should not have fillers.

You can always get the junk on the radio.