Cambridge Audio’s Yoyo (M) portable Bluetooth speaker has been recalled after four separate reports of its lithium-ion battery catching fire, smoking or ejecting burning material. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says roughly 714 of the speakers are affected in the United States, sold between 2016 and 2022 for $172 to $218, with a full $218 cash refund now on offer regardless of how long ago a unit was bought.
No injuries have been reported in any of the four incidents. Audio Partnership, the British company behind the Cambridge Audio brand, issued a parallel recall in the United Kingdom covering the same speaker, sold there under three color codes between 2016 and 2023.
Thermal runaway inside a five-year-old battery
The hazard traces to the speaker’s built-in lithium-ion battery, which the CPSC’s recall notice says can overheat and pose a fire hazard. Cambridge Audio’s own safety notice is more specific about the mechanism, warning that the battery “can overheat and go into thermal runaway,” a chain reaction in which one overheating cell forces its neighbors toward the same failure until the pack vents smoke, flame or fragments of burning material.
Thermal runaway is not unique to this speaker. A New York state consumer-safety guide on lithium-ion batteries describes the same process in general terms, warning that once it starts, standard firefighting tools stop working the way people expect: water may not extinguish a lithium-ion fire, and ordinary extinguishers do not either, which is why consumer guidance for a battery already smoking or swollen calls for evacuation rather than intervention.
Confirmed fires during charging, not idle storage
Cambridge Audio’s UK notice narrows the danger window further than the American filing does, stating plainly that “units of this product have caught fire, during charging”. That detail matters for anyone weighing whether an unused speaker sitting in a drawer is safe to leave alone versus one still being plugged in on a regular basis, since the failures documented so far happened while the battery was actively drawing current rather than while it sat idle. Both governments’ safety notices repeat the same instruction as a result: disconnect the speaker from any power source now, and do not plug it back in again to check whether it still works.
Four incidents out of roughly 714 units sold in the United States is a small fraction of the total, but CPSC and Audio Partnership are treating each one as a live-fire event rather than a statistical rounding error, since a lithium-ion battery fire in a home can spread to nearby furniture and flooring within minutes of ignition. A speaker built between 2016 and 2022 has had years to accumulate the kind of wear — a dropped unit, a swollen cell, a charging cable left plugged in overnight — that pushes an aging battery pack from stable toward unstable, even without any single dramatic failure point.
A recall run through two governments at once
The UK notice, filed with the Office for Product Safety and Standards and assigned case number 2608-0060, was published Aug. 27, 2026, roughly a week before the American CPSC notice went out on Sept. 3. It names three specific barcodes — light gray, dark gray and blue — and cites Local Authority Trading Standards, rather than the manufacturer, as the source that flagged the issue in Britain.
Audio Partnership Plc, based in England, manufactures the speaker; a separate U.S. entity, Audio Partnership LLC of Clearwater, Florida, distributed it domestically and is listed as the importer of record on the CPSC filing. Both recalls point back to the same battery defect rather than describing two unrelated problems discovered independently.
No mail-back: disposal has to go through hazardous-waste channels
Owners are told to stop using the speaker immediately, unplug it, and avoid charging it further, then contact Cambridge Audio for the $218 refund. Unlike a recall that asks for the hazardous item back, Cambridge Audio’s U.S. refund form asks owners to keep the speaker itself and instead submit photographs showing its serial number as proof of ownership, with the three affected color codes listed as C10930, C10931 and C10965. Disposal is not as simple as tossing it in the trash or a curbside recycling bin either — both governments’ notices direct owners to a household hazardous-waste collection point instead, the same category used for damaged batteries generally, because a punctured or already-swollen lithium-ion cell can ignite inside a garbage truck or sorting facility.
Neither CPSC nor Audio Partnership has said what within the battery cells is failing, or whether a specific manufacturing lot rather than the whole 2016-2022 production run is responsible for the four fires reported so far. The company’s U.S. recall page was last updated Sept. 14, 2026, eleven days after the CPSC notice went out, with no processing timeline given for refunds already submitted.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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