Bose SoundLink Home Review: Big sound from a sleek, small Bluetooth speaker

The best way to describe the newness of Bose SoundLink Home ($219) wireless speaker is the spiritual successor to the company’s own SoundLink Mini 2 speaker, which was quietly discontinued in late 2018. Available in two color options, the SoundLink Home is a portable Bluetooth speaker with up to 9 hours of battery life, but it has more of an indoor design, with an aluminum chassis and no water resistance. In other words, you can move it around, but it’s probably not a speaker you’ll take to the beach or on a camping trip.

Read more: Best Bluetooth Speakers

In addition to the attractive design, the great strength of the SoundLink Home is the sound quality. Equipped with Bluetooth 5.3 and weighing just over 2 kilos, it produces an impressive amount of bass for its compact size and also offers decent clarity. Overall, it sounds excellent for a mini Bluetooth speaker and has a bigger and slightly richer sound than the SoundLink Flex ($150).

However, like any small speaker, it has its sonic limitations. If you turn up the volume on more complicated songs, it can sound a bit reserved at certain frequencies as the digital processing tries to avoid distortion. Moreover, it is more suitable for small to medium-sized rooms. It filled my bedroom and home office with sound, but it felt a little too small for my living room, although it was fine for creating background music.

Note that this is a mono speaker that uses some digital processing tricks to widen the soundstage and make the sound appear more expansive. That’s all fine, but pairing two of these speakers as a stereo pair produces significantly better sound. You can also connect the speaker directly to a computer, smartphone or tablet with a USB-C cable for wired sound. As you’d expect, the SoundLink Home sounds a little cleaner and more detailed in wired USB-C mode.

There are no additional features except a built-in microphone that allows you to use the speaker as a personal speakerphone. And in that capacity it works well. Callers said my voice sounded clear and the background noise reduction was good.

Even more critically, the SoundLink Home is a bit expensive and doesn’t link to Bose’s companion app for headphones and other Bluetooth speakers. That’s a bit weird and you can’t adjust the sound profile with some equalizer settings. While I didn’t feel a great urge to adjust the sound profile, I only point it out for people who like to play with the sound settings of their speakers.

Bose SoundLink Home vs. SoundLink Flex

The big question for many people will be whether they should go for the cheaper Bose SoundLink Flex speaker or this model. Bose recently released a 2nd generation Flex that adds a few new features, including a new keyboard shortcut, compatibility with the Bose app (you can now adjust the sound profile with an equalizer and create a SimpleSync connection with another compatible Bose product), and support for the AAC and AptX audio codecs. While these aren’t major upgrades, they do make an excellent portable Bluetooth speaker a little better.

The choice ultimately comes down to how you want to use these wireless mini speakers, and whether you want a speaker with a more robust design – the Flex – that delivers very good sound for its size (and has an extended lifespan of 3 hours). battery life) or a less robust speaker that offers about a 30% improvement in sound quality. However, you will notice the improvement in sound quality more with some songs than with others. For example, if you play a simple ballad or acoustic song that doesn’t have much bass, the gap will be less noticeable. All of these compact speakers usually have varying sound quality depending on the quality of the recordings and the type of songs you play.

Please note that the SoundLink Home currently supports the SBC and AAC audio codecs, but not AptX. That omission isn’t a big deal, especially considering you get that USB-C audio with the SoundLink Home.

I wish I could tell you to place one speaker above the other, but it’s not that simple. However, if you expect to use the speaker mainly indoors, say in a home office, bedroom or kitchen, with the occasional trip to the patio, then the SoundLink Home is probably the better choice – as long as you’re willing to shell out the extra dough for it. Of course, in an ideal world you could connect a SoundLink Home to a SoundLink Flex, but that option isn’t currently available and who knows if it ever will be.

As for other competing products, there are obviously many compact Bluetooth speakers available. JBL, Klipsch and Marshall have wireless table speakers (Marshall Acton 3 And Kilburn 2) that are billed as home Bluetooth speakers (some also offer Wi-Fi streaming), but they tend to be larger than this speaker, and not all of them are portable. I like the JBL Authentic 300but it’s much bigger than this Bose speaker and also costs considerably more. You also have the Sonos Roam 2, which is slightly smaller than the Bose but is designed to connect to your Sonos home Wi-Fi system and also work as a portable Bluetooth speaker. However, the Bose Soundlink Home sounds better than the Roam 2.

Ultimately, both Bose’s SoundLink Flex and SoundLink Home are excellent small Bluetooth speakers. But if sound is your priority, the SoundLink Home is the winner.

Bose SoundLink Home key specs

• Dimensions: 4.33 x 8.50 x 2.34 inches
• Weight: 2,046 pounds
• Bluetooth 5.3 (9 meter range)
• Battery life: Up to 9 hours at moderate volume levels
• Charging via USB-C (4 hours to fully charge, no charger included)
• USB-C audio wired mode
• Built-in microphone for speaker capabilities
• Stereo mode (2nd Soundlink Home speaker required)
• Light silver and cool gray colors
• Price: $219