The Bose Portable Speaker Is Excellent

Before you buy more speakers, learn how to get the best quality out of the equipment you own. Even budget speakers sound better when used properly.

There are two kinds of portable Bluetooth speakers: some are so bulky that they don’t fit in your backpack, or they take up all the space, leaving none for other items. They’re meant to be portable in and around the house: you can take them from room to room, or into the garden. That’s about it. On the other hand, you have genuinely portable speakers like the Bose Portable Speaker¹. It fits in your backpack, leaving enough space for other things. It also has a handle to carry loose:

It can handle bumps, drops and light rain.

This speaker has excellent sound, not just excellent for a portable speaker. In fact, I was amazed to find this level of quality from a portable speaker. I was used to muddled, tinny, unsatisfying sound. The Portable Speaker’s sound is rich, full and detailed. I can hear each instrument clearly. You don’t feel like you’ve compromised by buying a portable speaker.

The bass is full. When placed 8 feet away, I can feel the bass through my feet. And a little through the sofa. I can feel it my stomach. Movies become emotional, bringing a tear to my eye at times. I thought that to get great bass, you need either a woofer or floorstanding speakers, but it’s amazing what this speaker can pull off, all on battery power. The rules of audio are being rewritten.

I’ve never heard a speaker this small with such exceptional quality. I’ve listened to many portable speakers from Bose (SoundLink Max, SoundLink Flex 2, SoundLink Revolve+ II, SoundLink Micro), Sonos (Roam 1), JBL (Clip 4, Go 4, Flip 6, Charge 5 Wifi, Xtreme 3) and Sony (ULT 1, XB100) and Devaliet (Mania), and I’ve never heard a speaker with such exceptional quality as the Portable Speaker in its size.

If you have a budget speaker system or soundbar (let alone the built-in speakers of even the best TV like the Sony A95L or the best laptop like the Macbook Pro 16-inch), the Portable Speaker will blow it out of the water.

The Portable Speaker is a 360-degree speaker and it lives up to it: I can walk around the room and enjoy great music everywhere in the room, and even the next room. This is unlike my earlier computer speakers, where I had to be in front. With the Portable Speaker, the music fidelity from behind is 90% as good as from forward.

The only way I can make it sound bad is by comparing it to my tower speakers powered by a receiver, which take up a lot of space in my hall, involve multiple cables, required me to get a rack made from a carpenter, required installation, and cost me 1.7 lakh. The end result is a user-unfriendly system in comparison to the Portable Speaker. If you don’t have the patience for this, get a Portable Speaker.

This speaker is bad for podcasts — it’s too bassy even at minimum bass, and voices are not clear, as compared to my floorstanders or TV, but better than my Echo Dot With Clock (3rd gen), Macbook Pro (16-inch, M1), iPad Pro (11-inch), iPhone 15 or Pixel XL.

It comes in white and black. Buy white — it looks beautiful.

Connection Types

The speaker has no wired inputs. The USB-C is only for charging. It supports AirPlay 2, Google Cast and Bluetooth.

Among these, use AirPlay in preference to Google Cast in preference to Bluetooth.

Why? Bluetooth quality is noticeably worse than both AirPlay and Google Cast. In fact, I unpaired the speaker from my Mac, iPad and iPhone to ensure that I don’t accidentally select Bluetooth. Having said that, when I take the speaker out with me — after all, it’s a Portable Speaker — I’ll have to use Bluetooth, since both AirPlay and Bluetooth require the speaker to be on the same Wifi network².

AirPlay seems to sound slightly better than Google Cast.

Further, Cast is slower to connect³. Even after the speaker chimes indicating it’s connected, it takes time for the audio to start playing through it. Cast glitches when you seek. The volume controls on the Mac don’t work with Cast, while they do with AirPlay. Cast is also supported by only some apps, while AirPlay is supported OS-wide.

Finally, I often play a Youtube video which is a podcast — the video is unimportant and typically just shows people talking:

I want the audio to play on the speaker while I walk around doing housework. Google Cast doesn’t support this. The way it works is that if the source is a video, then only destinations that support video (like my TV) appear in the Cast menu. Cast doesn’t let me route just the audio to the speaker while the video continues playing on the laptop. The audio and video have to play on the same device. AirPlay doesn’t have this restriction, so I use it.

Works well with My TV

I tried using this with my Sony A95L, which has excellent built-in speakers for a TV.

I connected using Bluetooth⁴.

Despite my reservations about wireless lag, lip sync works fine. This is because of something called Bluetooth A/V Sync, where the speaker tells the TV how much lag there is in the audio, and the TV delays the video by the same amount to sync with the audio. Cool!

An action scene like

comes to life on the Portable Speaker, thanks to its bass. I feel it in my stomach. It’s way more exciting, lively and emotional. It brought a tear to my eye.

A documentary like

is cinematic, immersive and profound on the Portable Speaker.

When playing a music video like

the music is much better on the Portable Speaker, while the TV has way less clarity, as if it was playing in the adjacent room. It was as if someone had turned the Music Quality dial down from 8 to 2. When the bass kicked in, the Portable Speaker made the floor and my slippers vibrate. I could also feel it through the sofa⁵.

Before I bought the Portable Speaker, I was using my TV’s speakers, and the Portable Speaker turned out to be a significant upgrade over them. They elevate my TV viewing experience. This is a pleasant surprise — I didn’t expect such a small, portable, mono speaker to be able to do this. It’s like a scooter towing a trailer. The Portable Speaker takes up little space in my hall, doesn’t create a rat’s nest of cables, and I can also take it with me to a different room or outside the house. I don’t know whether it will have lip sync issues with your TV, but it works great with mine.

Doesn’t Work as a Computer Speaker

The speaker doesn’t work well as a computer speaker. To begin with, it doesn’t fit below your monitor. Some speakers can support both a horizontal and a vertical orientation, but not this one. So the sound comes from one side, which is odd.

Besides, when you’re watching a video, the lip sync fails, which is unwatchable.

This would have been fixed if the speaker supported a wired connection, be it USB, HDMI or 3.5mm, but it doesn’t. Bose should release a software update enabling audio input via the USB-C port.

Turn Off Alexa

The speaker supports Alexa but it doesn’t work as well as an Echo Dot with Clock 3rd gen (which costs a fraction as much as the Bose Portable Speaker). It also works poorly in an absolute sense⁶, so turn it off.

“Smart” and “portable” don’t go together in a speaker.

Is the Portable Speaker right for you?

The Portable Speaker is the best speaker that you can take with you in your backpack, on a hike. No other speaker delivers such wonderful sound quality for its size. But is it for you? To determine that, ask yourself the following questions⁷:

Do I want a home portable speaker? That is, a speaker you’ll take from room to room but not carry in a backpack when you hike. If so, there are bigger, battery-powered speakers that should sound better, though you should verify this rather than assuming bigger is better.

Do I want a smart speaker? If so, buy an AC- rather than battery-powered speaker.

Do I want a computer speaker? If so, buy the Bose SoundLink Max. It has a 3.5mm jack, so you can connect it to your computer, unlike the Portable Speaker. It also fits below your monitor, unlike the Portable Speaker. The Max has better quality than the Portable Speaker, but can’t get as loud and is too boomy. Still, it’s noticeably better in quality. It’s not a 360-degree speaker, so it sounds worse than the Portable Speaker unless you’re straight in front of it. It’s battery-powered⁸ and fits in your backpack, but is 50% bigger, so leaves less space for other items.

Do I want the absolute best sound quality? If so, buy floorstanding speakers powered by a receiver. I love the Q Acoustics 5040 powered by the Denon DRA-800H. This system takes up a lot of space in my hall, involves multiple cables, required me to get a rack made from a carpenter, required installation, and cost me 1.7 lakh. The end result is a system of exceptional quality but it’s less user-friendly than the Portable Speaker. If you’re not a geek and don’t have the patience for this, get a Portable Speaker.

How to get the best out of this speaker

As I mentioned above, use AirPlay in preference to Google Cast in preference to Bluetooth.

Turn off Alexa.

The speaker has too much bass, and I found these EQ settings to work well:

The speaker gets loud, in case you want to be overcome by music or dance to it. Beyond two-thirds volume, the quality decreases, so limit it to that. But that’s still loud. It fills the room. My friend used it for a party, and he said guests enjoyed the music.

I’ve found that placing it 4 feet away from the wall improved quality⁹.

It was on a glass table. Covering this table with a tablecloth significantly reduced boominess and improved quality.

Placing it on a coaster¹⁰ further improved quality slightly:

Voices became slightly easier to understand, with clear inflections.

Multiroom audio

This speaker supports two different technologies for multiroom audio:

AirPlay 2

If you have another speaker that supports AirPlay 2 (the Denon DRA-800H in my case), you can play audio simultaneously on them. Open AirPlay:

Then select one speaker:

Then the other:

Now the audio will be playing on multiple speakers!

You can adjust the volume of each:

Bose

In addition to AirPlay 2, the Bose speaker supports its own multiroom system. I use this with my Echo Dot with Clock (3rd gen), which doesn’t support AirPlay 2. To set this up, go to the Bose app, go to the speaker:

And tap Group:

Then select the second speaker, and you now have a group. Then play audio from any app and AirPlay to the Bose speaker, and it relays it to the other speaker:

This works with any Bluetooth speaker, because from its point of view, it’s just a regular Bluetooth connection — it’s receiving audio via Bluetooth and playing it, as if from my phone.

Amazon multiroom

Amazon has its own multiroom system that this Bose speaker doesn’t support, despite it supporting Alexa: In the Alexa app, when I try to create a multiroom group, it says that there’s no other speaker found.

AirPlay 2 + Bose multiroom

Surprisingly, you can combine the two multiroom systems:

This is the only way I can get all my three of my speakers (Bose, Denon and Echo) to play at once, since the Echo doesn’t support AirPlay 2.

When I did this, the audio played perfectly in sync on all three speakers! I could adjust the volume of each, one in AirPlay and the other two in Bose to balance it out so that it didn’t suddenly get louder as I walked into another room.

1. Referred to variously as “Bose Portable Smart Speaker” and “Bose Portable Home Speaker”.

2. I wanted to check if I can create a hotspot on my phone and connect the speaker to that, so that they’re on the same Wifi network and so AirPlay works. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. So, when I’m on the go, I need to use Bluetooth.

3. Google Cast needs to be enabled in settings.

A glitch I encountered is that I have separate 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz networks, with the latter requiring Wifi 6, and the former the fallback for old devices. My phone is on the 5 Ghz network, but the Portable Speaker can’t connect to it, and so is on the 2.4 Ghz network. This caused Google Cast to not get enabled. To fix this problem, I temporarily connected my phone to the same network as the router, enabled it, and then switched back, after which it has been working well with no problems.

4. The speaker has no wired input, and the TV can receive AirPlay from an Apple device, not send AirPlay to a speaker. So Bluetooth is the only option.

5. The Portable Speaker is slightly worse than the TV when watching a scene focused on dialog like

When using the Portable Speaker, the sound comes from below the TV, while the TV’s speakers make the sound come from the character’s mouths, as if they’re talking, which makes it feel that they’re really here.

The TV speakers have an expansive soundstage — background music seems to come from the background, and dialog from the foreground. It feels open. By contrast, the Portable Speaker has a narrow soundstage, as if all the sounds are coming from one point. It feels closed.

Voices are also clearer on the TV’s speakers.

So, while the TV performs better for this scene, the Portable Speaker performs better for the remaining three scenes I tested. It’s not just the number of scenes where each outperforms the other but also the extent of the outperformance: when the Portable Speaker outperforms the TV, it does so significantly. It’s immediately apparent. On the other hand, when the TV outperforms the Portable Speaker, it does so subtly.

1. The Bose often doesn’t hear “Alexa”.

2. Even when it recognises the wake word and lights up, or when I press the button, it often doesn’t respond and gives an error: (Specifically, it blinks amber at the top and bottom multiple times. Thinking it’s going into low-power mode when it’s on battery where the Wifi connection is powered off till needed, I left it plugged in, but it didn’t help. I wondered if it was a Wifi range problem, so I moved it closer to the router hoping it will work reliably (despite the Echo Dot handling the previous room just fine) but it didn’t help. Besides, AirPlay still works, so it’s not a Wifi problem. Resetting the device by holding down ⏯ for 10 seconds didn’t improve anything.)

3. Alexa sometimes takes hours to start working after I power the speaker on.

4. Sometimes it would respond after a long delay, to the extent that it didn’t make sense to use Alexa to set a timer when I could reach for my phone.

5. When I asked, “Alexa, what’s your battery level?” it responded that this device doesn’t have a battery, which is obviously wrong.

6. Sometimes, when I’m closer to my Echo and give a voice command, the Portable Speaker processes the request, and I hear a response from the other room, which is odd. If I’m closer to the Echo and say, “Alexa, set an alarm for 6 AM” and it happens to be set on the Portable Speaker, if the Portable Speaker is out of battery by 6 AM, the alarm won’t ring on the Echo Dot, either. It will ring in the evening when I plug in my Portable Speaker to charge. So, alarms worked more reliably before I purchased the Portable Speaker.

7. The Echo Dot with Clock serves dual purpose as a clock. When a timer is running, I can glance at it to see how much time remains. I can’t do that on the Portable Speaker.

8. On one occasion, when I asked for the date, both Alexas answered.

6. When it works, Alexa’s voice sounds more natural on the Portable Speaker than on the Echo Dot.

7. What if you want an even smaller speaker than the Portable Speaker? Then, buy the Sonos Roam 1, which is the best speaker for its size that I’ve tested. You can toss it in your backpack without thinking. You can place it vertically (in which case the sound goes level) or horizontally (in which case the sound angles up). But there’s insufficient bass, so it lacks strength even when the bass is set to full. Its maximum volume is also low, so if you’re in a hyper mood, it doesn’t work. I wouldn’t buy it, because the music is unsatisfying to listen to.

If you want a tiny speaker, consider the JBL Go 4 — it’s smaller than my iPhone 15! It’s as wide and 70% as high, but much thicker. It has great quality and volume for its size. Buy this if the alternative is using your phone’s speaker. You can think of this as a phone++. You can adjust EQ in the app, and it has physical buttons for +, -, ⏯ and Auracast.

8. Speakers sold as “computer speakers” are typically bad.

9. Closer and it becomes too boomy — it’s distracting, and instruments become muddled together rather than sounding discrete.

The speaker does have more energy at 2 feet distance from the wall, but is more boomy and less clear. If you prioritise bass over clarity, this would be an option for you.

The optimal distance may be different for your speaker and room.

All distances are from the wall to the closest point on the speaker’s circumference.

10. The coaster in the above photo is the one on the right in the following photo, but the one on the left works equally well:

But this trivet

made the sound worse and more boomy, probably because the empty space under the speaker acts as a resonant chamber.

I also tried a microfiber cloth but it made no difference.