Today we are talking a hands-on look at the brand new Bose SoundLink Home Bluetooth Speaker. The combination home and on-the-go speaker immediately caught our eye at launch with the retro chic design, and now it’s time to see if its impressive looks and sound quality are worth the price of entry. Head below for our hands-on impressions of the Bose SoundLink Home Bluetooth Speaker in the latest edition of Tested with 9to5Toys.
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Hands-on with new Bose SoundLink Home Bluetooth Speaker
The new Bose SoundLink Home Bluetooth Speaker is sold exclusively through the official Bose site and comes in two colorways (Cool Gray and Silver) with a $219 MSRP.
Features at a glance
- Cool Gray and Silver colorways
- Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity
- Up to 9-hour battery life
- Brushed metal design
- Siri control
- USB-C charging
- USB-C charging input lets can connect with laptops
- Pair two SoundLink Home Speakers in Stereo Mode
9to5Toys’ Take
The new Bose SoundLink Home Bluetooth Speaker just debuted as the most recent release in the lineup with the usual impressive sound quality and a particularly striking design. The latter of which is quite possibly where this speaker shines most, so let’s start there.
While the look and feel of anything, tech or otherwise, is an entirely subjective thing, I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks this isn’t a pretty speaker. I personally would go so far as to say it is hands-down the most gorgeous Bluetooth/home speaker I own and have seen in recent memory, especially in its size and weight class. For me, this is simply a gorgeous piece of kit that looks as nice on the shelf or countertop as the pristine sound it pumps out.
The whole unit consist of a build made up of aluminum, nylon, plastic, silicone, and steel to highlight the fabric speaker module int he middle.
The brushed metal, rounded-rectangular strap frames the speaker unit within and carries through the bottom side to provide the unit’s footing – you’ll find a soft silicone-like pad hidden on the bottom that provides nice stability and safeguards your shelving and table top and counter surfaces. I love the way this metal bezel looks and the way it enhances the almost floating speaker like look.
This metal frame also houses the subtle USB-C charging and audio port on one side with matching metal buttons for volume, Bluetooth pairing, and main power button and more.
The fabric-wrapped speaker unit within slightly protrudes out from this metal frame – a particularly nice deign touch if you ask me – while featuring an inset circular shape for the actual speaker itself on the front and a similarly concave full horizontal trench along the back. Add the metal Bose tag on the left side of the unit’s face, and you’re looking at a seriously premium looking speaker.
The whole thing comes together with a sort of retro-modern vibe for me, and I absolutely love it. I have only had a chance to see the silver model you see on display here and wish I could have gotten hands-on with both, but either way this thing is absolutely beautiful – I’m not sure I’d change a single thing about the design.
The Bluetooth pairing process was, like all Bose gear I have used as of late, entirely seamless. You hit one button on the top of the unit and it immediately appears on iPhone 16’s Bluetooth menu – it took literally two seconds.
From there the speaker is ready to go for your usual streaming action alongside the ability to be used to accomodate any calls you might receive and enable Siri voice commands. Calling up Siri on the iPhone 16 to send audio commands to the Bose SoundLink Home Bluetooth Speaker has also been a flawless experience for me thus far.
Sound quality
This is a Bose speaker so it should come as no surprise to anyone who has been graced with the brand’s Bluetooth speakers in the past, or slapped a pair of its wonderful headphones over their head, that the new Bose SoundLink Home Bluetooth Speaker sounds wonderful. It sounds a touch better than the older SoundLink speaker I have in the office and puts the HomePod mini to shame – for my ears, it even sounds better than the standard HomePod, and especially so in the lower end.
Sound quality is arguably an even more subjective thing, but I for one think this thing sounds beautiful. It can’t quite keep up with a pair of studio monitors connected to an audio interface on my Mac, but also of course it can’t. Toe-to-toe with any of the Bluetooth speakers I have in my possession though, it is easily among the best.
Ok now let’s talk tech and the companion app. Or let’s not because as far as tech goes we have already touched on everything this speaker can do in that department and there is no companion app for it. This, for some, might be the biggest let down, but for me, I would rather not tinker around with EQ and a companion app when it comes to stuff like this – the speaker should already sound as good as it can straight out of the box in my opinion.
Some people like to toy around the bass and the high-end, I’m just not one of them, and there’s even a part of me that feels like this get-what-you-get, straight out of the box and go approach is a serious breath of fresh of air. Not everything needs or even should have an app, never mind allowing music listeners to tinker around with music production tools to (ruin) alter the way the song was meant to be heard. If you want to mess with these sorts of settings, go for it, I’m not mad it, but this is a nice change for someone who is just already reaching for the App Store these days before I even open the box with most gear.
In the end, this is just a speaker, but a seriously great one at that. There’s no bells and whistles, there’s no onboard displays, or app control, or really anything like that. Just an absolutely gorgeous speaker that happens to sound as good as it looks, and I’m totally here for it.
Buy the new Bose SoundLink Home Bluetooth Speaker
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