BOSE SOUNDTOUCH
Bose has excelled at simplifying multiroom streaming into a system anyone can use, whether they own a smart device or not.
There might be a tendency to think of Bose as a mass market brand, simply because of its size and presence. But that doesn’t mean its products can’t be hi-fi — indeed economies of scale may make it easier to offer better value than products from smaller companies, while the clever decisions made my Dr Amar Bose before his passing in 2013 have made sure that the company is control of its own future — the money men can’t dictate what Bose does in terms of research and product design.
The proof is, of course, in the listening — Bose continues to excel in personal audio, notably areas such as noise-cancelling headphones and Bluetooth speakers. Its series of ‘dock’ speakers have always been both popular and well reviewed, and as docks gave way to streaming, Bose developed its SoundTouch platform, which combines online music services with networked music streaming, Bluetooth and multiroom operation. Until the current Series III, SoundTouch units could also receive using Apple’s AirPlay streaming system, but sadly this is no longer included, a shame for Apple users as it was CD quality, rather than the lower option of Bluetooth.
Another merit of Bose’s wide appeal is that its systems are among the easiest of all wireless multiroom platforms to use on a day-to-day basis. While smartphones and tablets can be used to control the system, you can run it equally easily from a PC or Mac using free software, and every unit comes with a proper remote control. Key to the SoundTouch system is the use of six preset buttons common to every device as well as every app and program. Once you’ve allocated your favourite radio stations or streaming services or playlists to these six preset buttons, you can get music flowing at a single button press, no controls required at all. Every time we review a SoundTouch product we love this instant access to music, and we reckon it must increase dramatically how much the systems get used by those who buy them. Which is, of course, an exceedingly good thing.
The SoundTouch family extends beyond the three main speaker units. There is a SoundTouch-enabled Wave radio, plus four Lifestyle entertainment packages and three home cinema systems, from simple soundbar and sub solutions up to 5.1-channel systems using either Jewel Cubes or larger slimline surround speakers. We note that Bose recommends only four SoundTouch devices operating on Wi-Fi at once to avoid straining the average household router, but you can add more if you give them Ethernet.
Setting Up SoundTouch...
We heartily approve of Bose’s provision of Mac and PC software which can control your SoundTouch system in the absence of a smart device — and of course the preset buttons and remote control allow music-making without even a computer.
But for set-up, it’s certainly far easier to have the app on a smartphone or tablet device — because if you use a computer for set-up you’ll have to make a physical USB connection to each SoundTouch device... easy enough with the smaller units, but a bit inconvenient if shifting around the bulk of, say, the SoundTouch 30!
Either way, Bose walks you through your possible choices with great and thoughtful attention to detail, even including likely questions in a panel to the right. So when the app tells you to connect your smart device direct to the unit’s Wi-Fi hotspot, these extra questions explain exactly how to do that in case you’re not a genius with smartphone settings, and how to get back again, and even why they want you to do it in the first place. Our guess is that the company has collected the most common questions from its Helpline calls and have built the Q&A lists from there — far better than an online manual or a helpline database, which will probably be too complicated for those in trouble anyway.
As a result, it’s hard to imagine anyone having trouble setting up a SoundTouch system, maintaining Bose’s tradition of making units like the longrunning WaveRadio, which have always been utterly plonk and play in their ease of set-up and use.
The SoundTouch app
In terms of real estate, the app focuses on the six SoundTouch presets perhaps too strongly, pushing all the main sources and browsing abilities off to the right under a small vertically-written ‘Explore’ tab. This then opens a list (right) topped by a useful if grammatically questionable ‘Recents’, followed by whichever online music services you’ve activated — our examples show Deezer and Pandora, but there’s also Spotify (Spotify Connect is supported), and SiriusXM, though that’s not officially supported here in Australia.
Then come Music Libraries, if you’ve set them up — this requires moving to your PC or Mac, downloading the SoundTouch software and then identifying the folders or NAS drives you wish to access. Each becomes a separately listed Music Library, so your list may have Music Library showing three times, with small subtitles indicating the custom names you’ve given them. Both iTunes and Windowm Mieda Player libraries are easy to link and get indexed for faster access — though there are still no alphabetical jumplists to get you through long artist or song lists, and scrolling through long lists jams up every so often for the list to refresh, which made things borderline unusable for our main iTunes library of 37,000 tracks. You can search artists, albums or tracks, which is quicker if you’re looking for something specific.
Track support has improved over the generations of SoundTouch, now able to stream MP3, WMA, M4A, AAC, FLAC and Apple Lossless formats. We couldn’t persuade it to play any files above CD quality except, most unusually, Apple Lossless files, which streamed from both NAS drives and iTunes all the way up to 24-bit 192kHz with no problems whatsoever. Few high-res releases arrive in AL format, but conversion from AIFF or WAV is easy within iTunes, while conversion from FLAC is easy with any number of free converters. So if anyone tells you the Bose system can’t do high-res, you tell ’em they’re wrong; it’s just a bit picky.
We were surprised to find no way to ‘scrub’ through a track, no rewind or FF keys either, so if you need to get halfway through a symphony or a podcast, you’re a bit stuck. Nor does the app have any queuing system to browse ahead of what you’re playing — we couldn’t even find a way to play a whole album at a single press as is common on other systems, but it will move from one track to the next without prompting, and under artists there is a ‘play all’ option.
So a few omissions — but what’s there in the app is fairly extensive, impeccably well organised, works reliably, and everywhere you can load or select those six presets that do make the SoundTouch world so very friendly.