Amazon Echo Plus
Smart home integration falls a little flat, but the same can’t be said about the Echo Plus’ brilliant sound quality
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £117 (£140 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/280plus
The original Amazon Echo was and still is a revelation; over the past year of living with this smart speaker, I’ve only had one major issue. Sound quality. That’s why I’m seriously considering replacing it with the new Amazon Echo Plus.
With the help of Dolby processing and “improved” speaker drivers, the Echo Plus takes audio quality up a considerable notch. Where the previous model neglected bass and mid-bass notes almost entirely, the new one sounds warmer, richer and is enjoyable to listen to music on. And there’s actually some bass.
As I write these words I’m enjoying a few numbers by Milt Hinton, double bass player extraordinaire, which are packed with the sorts of tunes that sounded terrible on the original Echo. I can happily report that I’ve not yet given up and switched to headphones. It’s that good.
Not that the Echo Plus is perfect. For some types of music – lightweight acoustic numbers and classical – it can sound boomy around the mids. By and large, though, the Echo Plus is a world away from the harsh, rather thin-sounding Echo.
The improved sound quality is enough to warrant an upgrade on its own, but that’s not the only improvement you get with the Echo Plus. Although it looks identical to the original Echo, the Plus includes a couple of extra tricks.
The first is rather prosaic: a 3.5mm audio jack output, which allows you to improve the sound further by hooking it up to your big sound system. If you’re planning on having it set up this way permanently, though, you might as well opt for the £50 Echo Dot.
But then you’d miss out on the real ace up the Plus’ sleeve: built-in smart home connectivity. What do I mean by this? Basically, the Echo Plus is Amazon’s attempt at unifying the rather fragmented Smart Home market. It has a Zigbee radio chip inside and this allows the speaker to talk directly to compatible devices such as Philips Hue and Ikea Tradfri lightbulbs, bypassing the need for the dedicated hardware hubs and software that these products usually need to run successfully.
This isn’t intended to replace Alexa’s Skills, which do essentially the same job but are developed by the manufacturers themselves. Those remain in place and you can choose to keep using them if you want. Instead, it’s intended to simplify things by placing control within the Echo speaker itself.
I love the idea, not least because it seems almost tailor-made for my particular circumstances. I have three different types of smart bulb (Ikea, Hive and Osram) installed in various places across my house, and the fact that each requires a separate hardware hub and app means I just can’t be bothered to keep track of it all.
What the Echo Plus promises is to revive those smart bulbs and bring them all together in one place. In particular, it will allow you to control them via the Alexa app’s new Routines and Smart Home Groups feature, which lets you group various actions and devices together under single voice commands.
Brilliant! But wait, there’s a glitch in the matrix: although the core functionality works well there are currently a whole bunch of major compromises.
First, setup isn’t simple. You can put the speaker into discovery mode by saying “Alexa, discover my devices” and this works fine to an extent – you must first reset the devices you want to control and put them in pairing mode. In my case, that’s three different types of lightbulb and two different reset mechanisms.
“The Echo Plus is worth buying for the improved sound quality alone, and it’s more than adequate as a kitchen or study speaker”
But here comes the next problem. Because Alexa doesn’t yet work with every product (only bulbs and plugs) there may be some parts of your setup it renders redundant; Ikea’s switches and motion sensors, for instance, which I use in parallel with the app on my phone to control the living room lights.
Even if that doesn’t bother you, you’ll lose out on other features, too. Paired with the Echo Plus, none of my bulbs retained their colour temperature change capabilities. It wasn’t even possible to change the colour temperature of the Philips Light Strip that Amazon sent in the reviewer’s package. And, if you use geofencing to trigger smart home actions, you’ll lose those facilities, too.
Moreover, if you have any Z-Wave-based products in your house, be aware that these won’t work at all with the Echo Plus since it’s only directly compatible with Zigbee kit.
The good news is that Amazon has a good record at steadily improving what Alexa and the Echo products are capable of, so the issues (aside from the lack of Z-Wave support) may well be ironed out in time.
Putting all that aside, the Amazon Echo Plus is worth buying for the improved sound quality alone. It’s vastly better than the original, not to mention the new version we review opposite, and although it does lag a little behind the best Bluetooth speakers at this price, it’s more than adequate as a kitchen or study speaker. It’s also worth bearing in mind that Amazon is bundling every speaker with a Philips Hue bulb worth around £15. Plus, of course, it does everything every other Echo speaker is capable of, including being able to act as a regular Bluetooth speaker and Spotify Connect target.
SPECIFICATIONS
360-degree sound speaker with 2.5in woofer and 0.86in tweeter far-field mic 802.11ac Wi-Fi ZigBee Bluetooth (A2DP and AVRCP) external power supply 3.5mm audio jack supports Fire OS, Android and iOS devices 84 x 84 x 235mm (WDH) 954g
1yr RTB warranty