Bose’s New SoundLink Home Speaker Is Thankfully More Chic Than Flashy

Bose precocious refreshed its SoundLink Bluetooth talker enactment with 2 caller products: the SoundLink Home, released today, and the 2nd procreation of the SoundLink Flex, which deed store shelves past week.

As the sanction suggests, the SoundLink Home is the location counterpart to the SoundLink Flex, which is designed to beryllium taken connected the go. This 1 is meant to unrecorded connected your bookshelf and hopefully capable your country with its guaranteed premium sound. It retails for $219 and is disposable successful 2 colorways for the US: Light Silver and Cool Grey. In China, there’s an further Warm Wood, which I privation was an enactment for us, too.

If you perceive astatine maximum volume, Bose’s latest talker promises 9 hours astatine a afloat complaint and 2 and a fractional hours. That artillery beingness isn’t precise awesome astatine this terms point, considering Sony’s caller Ult Field 1 offers 12 hours for $129. Sony’s offering is an outdoor talker wherever a long-lasting artillery beingness becomes other crucial, but if I’m investing implicit $200, I wouldn’t privation to beryllium tethered to a socket adjacent wrong the confines of my house. The SoundLink Home besides takes 4 hours to afloat recharge, which I’m unsure if I person the patience for.

Its connectivity features dependable a spot better. There’s multipoint up to 2 devices and an further wired connectivity enactment implicit Type-C.  It besides offers a stereo mode that tin beryllium enabled by pairing 2 SoundLink Home speakers, conscionable similar connected the JBL Go 4 and Click 5. The 2 speakers enactment arsenic a near and close stereo transmission successful this setup. Sadly, it lacks a enactment mode (usually contiguous connected speakers with stereo mode), which would let the 2 connected speakers to play from the aforesaid root alternatively of assigned L and R channels.

Another glaring omission connected the caller SoundLink Home is that it doesn’t link to the Bose Connect app for adjusting EQ connected the fly. It besides doesn’t diagnostic particulate oregon h2o resistance, which is simply a effect of being an in-the-home talker and thing you mightiness not necessitate anyway.

If you’re looking for a portable talker with dust, water, shock, and rust resistance, a beefier artillery lasting 12 hours, enactment mode on with a stereo mode, and adjustable EQ connected the Bose app, the caller $149 2nd-Gen SoundLink Flex should beryllium your pick. For its humble price, this 1 besides offers fancy features specified arsenic PositionIQ tech, which auto-senses the speaker’s presumption (hanging, standing, lying) and adjusts its audio successful existent time. The SoundLink Flex Gen 2 is admittedly clunkier and acold little flashy than the SoundLink Home, but its usage lawsuit warrants that dramatically antithetic design, too.