Philips SW750M with Spotify
It’s a multiroom speaker with Spotify Connect, but is it worth your cash?
By buying this 20W speaker, or its less powerful £80 SW700M sibling, you’re immediately pigeonholing your music. These speakers work with Spotify – and nothing else. So no AirPlay, no Bluetooth, no 3.5mm jack. What’s more, you’ll need to be on the £9.99 Spotify Premium tariff as well.
Setting it up isn’t straightforward either. Instructions are included, but this rather boring piece of paper is undermined by a glossy sheet demanding you download the Philips SpeakerSet app. The app told us the setup had failed, while the speaker was in fact working!
Thankfully, the experience of using and listening to the speaker is rather good. Although, while Spotify Connect is fairly intuitive to use, how it works is not obvious to all. The sound quality is punchy, especially at Extreme quality.
The unit boasts volume up/down, plus forward and back buttons as well as a Play/Pause button – this will resume the thing you were last playing on Spotify. A nice touch.
The speaker is always available to play, via Spotify Connect from the Spotify app on your iOS device. It can also form a multiroom system with other Spotify Connect devices – and you can play from your iOS device to your Mac. Dan Grabham
It’s expensive and has an awkward setup, but its real disadvantage is that it can only be used with Spotify.