All hail the Marshall amp. If you’ve ever seen a photograph of Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, Van Halen, or countless other rock stars in action, you’ve likely seen them in front of a stack of Marshall amplifiers.

Marshall has also been wedging itself into the home speaker game lately, too. Soundbars and Bluetooth speakers aren’t two markets lacking for competition, and given the brand name weight behind Sony, Beats, Sonos, and JBL, even Marshall is going up against the best.

The Middleton is the latest to go on sale for Prime Day. Even though its $300 retail price has dropped to a much more reasonable $210 “perma sale” since March, it’s still $30 cheaper than the going rate.

smaller, more splash-proof

Compared to the Marshall Acton, which is also on a $100 discount at the moment, the Middleton is significantly smaller and therefore significantly more portable. As I’d noted in the deal post about the Acton, it may have been portable, but it wasn’t something you’d bring to the beach or dangle from the ends of your bicycle handlebars.

The Middleton is exactly the type of speaker you’d use in those two cases, though, especially since it comes with a hand strap for carrying and an IP67 dust- and water-resistance rating that means you could drop it into meter-deep water for up to 30 minutes without harm.

Marshall says you can expect “20+ hours” of playtime between recharges, which I’d take to mean 20 hours. If it were 25 hours, you’d better believe they’d say 25 hours. And as always, the volume at which you set your speaker will determine its battery life, as higher volumes suck more juice from the battery more quickly.

Like its big brother, the Acton, the Middleton can be synced with other Marshall speakers to create a network, kind of like a poor man’s surround sound system.