March 9 kicked off sleep awareness week, and Jabees has an interesting tool for soothing you to sleep — an under-pillow speaker.
I have never, ever been what one would call “a good sleeper.” Even as an infant, I had difficulty catching the required amount of sleep.
I’ve tried everything. Different beds, different pillows, yoga, breathing techniques, supplements — you name it, I’ve probably tried it. I can’t take sleep medications like zolpidem as I’m one of the “lucky few” who tend to experience a wide swath of adverse reactions to drugs.
The real crux of the issue is that I have a particularly stubborn sleep disorder — narcolepsy. Specifically, I have narcolepsy type 2. This means that my brain doesn’t know how to switch into sleep mode a good portion of the time. It also means I’ve spent nearly four decades of my life tired.
I am far from the only person who has a sleep disorder, too. Somewhere between 30% to 40% of Americans have intermittent insomnia. Chances are, many of you reading this are also on Team Bad Sleep.
While there’s no magic pill or method to make me fall asleep, I have noticed that certain things help. A colder room kept nearly pitch-black is one of them.
Another is white noise. In my bedroom at home, I keep both a fan and an air purifier running. This helps to mask any sounds that my brain might mistakenly think I need to be awake for.
However, when I travel, I don’t have an elegant solution for the sound problem.
That’s why I was excited to check out the Jabees Peace Speaker — a tiny, portable speaker designed to go under your pillow.
Peace sleep speaker – Design
I’m not joking when I say Peace Speaker is small. It’s only 3.39-inches by 2.28-inches, and barely over a half-inch thick.
Jabees says it uses bone-conduction technology, which is just a fancy way of saying it has a hard surface that vibrates more than your typical diaphragm-based speaker. The speaker vibrates your pillow, effectively turning your pillow into a speaker.
On the front, there are three tiny yellow buttons. Pressing the leftmost and rightmost buttons once will turn the volume up and down, respectively.
Pressing the rightmost button twice will cycle to the next track on the SD card. Pressing the leftmost button twice will activate the sleep timer, turning it off after 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or two hours.
The center button powers on the device. Pressing the center button twice will switch it from SD card to Bluetooth mode.
It takes a while to get used to figuring out the buttons if you’re not looking at them. However, I’ve been using it enough that I can slide my hand under my pillows and pair the device with my iPhone without looking at it.
There’s a small USB-C port for charging it, an SD card slot, and comes with an SD card card. The included card is 1GB, which seems quite generous.
There is one particularly annoying flaw, though. It’s an incredibly smooth device, meaning it slips and slides around if you move your pillows even a little bit.
There are probably a few different ways you could go about solving it. If you’ve got any of those little anti-slip stickers, they’d probably work well.
Barring that, a quick and dirty fix would be to velcro it to your flat sheet. A more involved method would be to sew a small pocket in the back of your pillowcase and slide it in.
Jabees Peace Speaker – the smooth back of the Peace makes it prone to slipping around
Should you take the second route, make sure you remove it before tossing the pillowcase in the wash.
Peace sleep speaker – Performance
When it came time to use it, I typically just laid it flat on my bed, under my pillows. I found that this worked, though there were a few times I did knock it behind my bed.
If any fellow side sleepers are worried this won’t be loud enough: don’t be. In fact, I was able to put it underneath two pillows and still hear it just fine.
I was also extremely impressed that I was still able to hear the speaker when I rolled onto my back. I’m not a back sleeper in the slightest, but when I put on a podcast, I could clearly hear what the hosts were saying, provided my head was on the pillow.
A major bonus for those of you who co-sleep, your partner isn’t going to hear it — you’ve pretty much got to be touching the pillow to hear the sound. Doubly so if you have any other white noise, like a fan, in the room.
I love the timer feature. I normally set it for one hour and I’m typically asleep before it turns off. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I can just slide my hand back under my pillow and pair it with my phone again.
The whole process takes a few seconds. It would take even less if I liked any of the pre-loaded nature sounds, but I find them all a bit harsh for my taste. However, you could put whatever you wanted on the SD card, too.
Jabees Peace Speaker – this tiny speaker can go just about anywhere you do
When it comes to sound quality, I’m not going to mislead you — it’s a $40 bone conduction speaker designed to work with your pillow. It’s not going to be the same as using AirPods or even a more budget-friendly headphone. Though, I will say, there’s a solid case for not using AirPods while you sleep, too.
But the Peace Speaker quality certainly isn’t abhorrent. When used for playing white noise or podcasts, I thought it worked fantastic in both cases.
As far as music goes, it’s not the best speaker, nor the worst. If you’re an audiophile, I’m fairly positive you already know this isn’t designed to impress you with its audio quality.
There was one effect that I wasn’t expecting to like so much — a gentle, almost imperceptible vibration effect under my pillow. If you’ve ever been on a train or in the back seat of a car, you know that the gentle vibration is one of the reasons you get drowsy.
While not nearly as strong as a car or a train, I found the gentle vibrations soothing. I like it so much that I am routinely sleeping with the Peace Speaker under my pillow, even when at home.
Peace sleep speaker – Overall
If you’re wondering whether or not the Jabees Peace Speaker cured my chronic sleepyhead syndrome, the answer is no, of course not. But, as you probably have guessed, I wasn’t expecting it to.
But, it did give me a tool to help me eliminate one of the more annoying things that keeps me awake. And for that, I gotta say I think it’s kind of genius. Plus, it comes in at under $40, which is a steal.
Peace sleep speaker Pros
- Inexpensive
- Great battery life
- Comes with 1GB SD card
- Cannot be heard by others in room
Peace sleep speaker Cons
- So-so sound quality
- Button navigation is a bit annoying at first
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Note: Ranking items on a five-star scale, while convenient, doesn’t always convey how well the item would work for everyone. This is especially true for devices like speakers, where personal preference trumps nearly everything else. Because of its low cost, ease of use, and the fact that it works exactly as advertised, I gave this device a high ranking.
Jabees Peace Sleep Speaker – Where to buy
If you’re interested in snagging a Peace Speaker to try out, you can pick one up from Amazon for $39.99. At the time of publication, there’s also a 30% off coupon, dropping the price to $27.99 before taxes.
