A whole world in my bucket
As the portable member of Bose’s Smart Home wireless multiroom family, the Portable Smart Speaker delivered trouble-free takeaway tunes.
Last issue we conducted a frighteningly huge survey of wireless multiroom systems, including Bose. And while we had reviewed all of the company’s original SoundTouch products, we hadn’t heard the more recent ‘Smart Home’ family, which combines wireless multiroom abilities with built-in Alexa voice control. Keen to plug the gap in our knowledge, we requested a review unit to assess, and here it is, the attractively buckety Bose Portable Smart Speaker.
Equipment
The Portable Smart Speaker delivers something that the SoundTouch family never did — a genuinely portable unit. While the SoundTouch 10 is an easily compact size to shift around the home, and has Bluetooth to play music if you step outside the home network, it is still tethered by a mains cable wherever you go. Not so the Portable, which has an internal power pack which you can keep permanently charged either by sitting it on a neat circular charging cradle, or just by plugging in its USB-C charging cable to the unit itself at the rear.
We say ‘rear’, but the Portable Smart Speaker kinda has no rear in sonic terms, being an omnidirectional design sending forth music in all directions. Those who read through our 40 multiroom reviews last issue will recall that omnidirectionality in a speaker like this is invariably a positive spin on being mono, which is indeed the case here, with a single active full-range driver firing down onto a reflector which disperses sound through the grille structure at the bottom of the unit. But this does not operate entirely alone, being supplemented by three passive radiators higher up in the unit, spaced an equal 120 degrees apart.
Performance
Externally it’s a pleasing design, with its fabric-covered flexible handle emerging from holes on either side, and the top studded with membrane-covered buttons surrounded by a grilled ring which contains the “custom-developed” microphone array that allows you to interact with the unit by the power of voice, as with all units in the Smart Home range. We were a little disappointed that the oft-pictured base was not included in the box, with
Bose charging a further $39.95 for this charging cradle. But the USB-C cable plugs neatly into the back of the main unit anyway, and we were soon into set-up. The little printed guide in the box is limited to plugging the unit in and then instructing you to ‘Get the Bose Music app’, but this worked flawlessly, and upon its initial connection the formerly quiet amber light on top of the unit turned white and began swirling madly in what can only be described as anticipatory glee, while we pondered which of the name options offered by the app to choose for the unit. These include the usual ‘Living Room’ ‘Bedroom’ etc., but then descend through the likes of ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Jukebox’ to the less commonly encountered ‘Thudbucket’, ‘Bass Monster’ and ‘Tower of Treble’. It seems you are encouraged to have fun even during the necessary trials of Wi-Fi set-up.
The Smart Home platform’s offer of Music Services is less entertaining in comparison with some rival systems, being limited to Spotify, Amazon Music and Deezer, along with the free TuneIn for the wide world of internet radio.
An update was then announced, so we put the kettle on and settled down to read the nicely informative email which Bose had thoughtfully sent us the moment we’d logged on to our longstanding Bose account and connected the Portable speaker. Impressively joined-up procedures from the Massachusetts Mountain!
After an update came a second set-up procedure, this time creating a connection to our Google Home app (you can choose Alexa instead), which required a fresh link to our Bose account. Unusually Google had a problem, and failed multiple times (Google’s fault, not Bose’s, we think) so we tried Alexa instead. This was quickly completed. Points for Alexa.
Our first command was ‘Alexa — play Radio Northern Beaches on Tunein’, and goodness, it actually worked. The voice announcing its success was three times louder than the radio station. That’s partly because the sensitive engineer running our local community station chooses not to squelch the signal to the brutal levels delivered commercially in Sydney, but it certainly made the missus jump first time she talked to it. We couldn’t find a separate level control for voice versus output, something from which voice-controlled speakers could often benefit but don’t yet seem smart enough to do so.
Fully charged and indeed having been warming up on casual duties for some while, the Bose engaged our enthusiasm from the minute we detached it from its USB-C charging cable and plonked it utterly untethered on tne coffee table. Shuffling faves by AirPlay from an iPad Pro, we were first impressed by its delivery of the banging drums and humming bassline opening Crowded House’s Saturday Sun, kicking out from a position on the coffee table, untethered to power, its batteries announced at 100%. The bass continued to ooze out all over on Beth Orton’s Could Cause Me Harm, while the edge to her voice was kept deliciously just on the right side of sibilance, though her voice was not entirely filled out below.
The Whitlams’ No Aphrodisiac was the same — another full bassline (slightly swollen, indeed; we ended up taming the bass back two stops in the app) with the vocal clear but not full-sized, a mini voice, a little less than entirely human. Still, if that’s is the only non hi-fi characteristic of a handy portable speaker, it’s quite the achievement.
While vocalists could lack a little substance, they were never ever sibilant, continuing Bose’s tradition of smoothness over sheer extension. Yes some jangling was still available: there was an ear-tingling zing from the chains which jangle on cue amid Tom Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open. In addition, many elements had a feel of physical separation between the bass below and treble above, and perhaps it was this frequency spread which had us nearly writing that the harmonies in No Aphrodisiac were off to the right — except they couldn’t be, because this is a mono speaker. It’s a reminder that being mono doesn’t mean zero degree of separation in imaging; acoustic and instrumental separation is entirely possible in mono, and was offered here by the Bose as the Whitlams track grew to its climax.
In close proximity, as in a desk working situation with the Bose just beyond a laptop, say, there’s power a-plenty and more than enough bass to pump some tunes pretty proudly, while the minimal driver count still manages to hold music together. You could even bring it closer, especially as wall proximity can woof and soften the bass; the Bose gives its best balance in free space.
Hung and swung
Indeed what we found right remarkable, we must say, is just how much space the Portable can handle, and the balance it emits when being hung and swung on its fabric-covered handle. Shorn of any surface reinforcement you might expect the Bose to shrink back in its size of sound, and indeed if you hold it up in front of your face it does close up to the dimensions of the bucket and the limits of a 19cm-high speaker. But down in your hand, it’s capable of a sound that any shouldered boombox of old would have considered respectable output, and here emerging from a small if not weightless (just over 1kg) bucket, filling the air with clear tunes and while experiencing a resonant rolling battery-powered bass, which when carried may be partly ‘felt’ through handle conduction — the throbs of Kosheen’s Gone pulsed right up our arm. This bass is only augmented when you pop it on the floor. Both kick drum and bass guitar had the power to resonate both nearby feet and even up to the guts. It’s a slightly exaggerated bass; it brought out richness even from fairly thin digitisations that could be more accurately (but not really more enjoyably) delivered.
Back on the table one fine example of its talents was to thump out The White Strypes Icky Thump with its raucous guitar, extravagantly tub-thumpy drums from Meg and a positivity cut-throat vocal from Jack White, sharpened, yet not to an abrasive level, by the remarkably high octane output of the Portable Smart Speaker. While some of our favourite wireless speakers of this size could match it for level, they didn’t do so with this smooth and friendly performance across the board.
Conclusion
It’s the sophistication of the sound that brings the Portable most credit, along with its role in the extended wireless multiroom Bose Smart Home family. A creditable performance.