Bose Portable Home Speaker Luxe Silver

Most Liked Negative Review

Really disappointing. Too much bass!

The packaging for the Bose Portable Home Speaker was nice and simple and minimal. The build quality, as usual with Bose, is fantastic. Even the base it comes with is well manufactured. Setting up the Portable Home Speaker with the Bose music app was easy. I named the speaker, launched a song, chose the speaker as output, and boom. Easy. Unfortunately, the rest was disappointing. I have go-to songs for testing speakers. Songs that cover loud, driving, subtle, nuanced, in your face sonic ranges. Basically songs that cover the entire musical spectrum. These include Pat Metheny Group's "The Roots of Coincidence" and "Follow Me" from the album "Imaginary Day" as well as their entire album "The Way Up." As soon as the bass drum stared at the beginning of "The Way Up" it sounded distorted as if the drum was hitting plastic. It buzzed. While playing "The Roots of Coincidence" I had to set the bass to -50 (or even lower) or it just sounded like mud with the bass very overpowering. It also sounded muffled, smooshed together, not much separation. Even at low volumes, I felt that the speaker handled bass really poorly. I found myself setting the bass into negative numbers. You'd think at zero the bass wouldn't be so bad, but it was. This speaker seemed to have so much emphasis on bass, but it couldn't handle bass well at all. It was very difficult to find a neutral sound field to let the recording shine. I had to keep adjusting the treble and bass settings every album and sometimes every song. Like I said, this was really disappointing. I'm a HUGE Bose fan. My favorite wireless speaker from them is the Soundlink Mini II. For such a small speaker, it handles bass much better than the Portable Home Speaker. I am always excited about new Bose products. This one just didn't hit the mark for me.