Of course, audio is a subjective experience, and if you want something that's a little more exciting and a touch more hi-fi, you may prefer the Bose's sound. The speaker's upper-mids emphasis helps if you're using this as a speaker for your TV (yes you can do that using the audio input). Not the last word in sound quality, perhaps, but the SoundTouch 30’s room-filling performance, decent features, slick smartphone app and premium construction make it worth a punt. Turning the Bose's bass down to 7 from the default maximum 10 removed the speaker's audible distortion. With this sound system, you can play music in every room or different music in different rooms by adding new systems to the multi room set up.

While we found the original Bose SoundTouch 20 to be more neutral sounding than the original Sonos Play:5 this time around the roles are reversed. SoundTouch 30 is a wireless music system that streams songs via DLNA, Spotify, Deezer, internet radio and Bluetooth, as well as forming part of a multiroom network with other SoundTouch speakers.It was fine for streaming processed pop or country music but when faced with a metal track such as Metallica's "Enter Sandman," the sound was on the verge of falling apart (although Bluetooth streaming has improved over the years, you're still dealing with compression issues). In addition to the Wi-fi option, the sound system also features a Bluetooth function and USB audio inputs.

Thanks to its built-in Wi-Fi connection, the SoundTouch 30 lets you stream music from servers on your home network, such as PCs and NAS drives, as well as Spotify, Deezer and internet radio. There's a definite "notchiness" to the speaker's response that emphasizes the sibilants in speech or the breathiness in a sax player's noodlings. While the diminutive SoundTouch 10 stood up well against this current crop of competitors, our testing of its chunkier sibling led us to having little alternative but to review its original star rating.But there are a few holes in the feature list – there’s no AirPlay support, which might deter Apple devotees, and no hi-res music playback either. Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. However, our recent multi-room system test – which saw Bose’s Wireless Link enter our testing rooms for the first time – gave us cause to run the rule over its SoundTouch speakers once again. It contributes to the latter sounding tonally detached, a discord between frequency ranges that rankles after time.

The SoundTouch 30 is engineered with advanced technology- employs an exclusive Bose® waveguide technology produces rich sound that can fill your largest rooms. The SoundTouch 30 speaker uses a proprietary waveguide and high-performance drivers to fill your biggest rooms with deep, rich, true-to-life sound. The design is well thought out, displaying metadata in large capital letters (with the track title stylishly written in bold type), as well as cover art and pause/track skip controls. In terms of audio features, the SoundTouch 30 uses a ported box design with two custom-made mid-range/high-frequency drivers with exclusive waveguide technology and a subwoofer to give bass frequencies a boost. The SoundTouch 10 is our smallest SoundTouch speaker that delivers full, rich sound and Bose performance that seems to defy its size.Using the system buttons / remote: Once presets have been set using the app, press a preset number on the button pad or on the remote control to play that preset. To configure multiroom playback, swipe the banner upwards and you’ll see all connected SoundTouch systems – you can use this menu to group speakers together, or create multiple groups if you have four or more systems. That would be the review in a nutshell, but there's a whole lot more to chew on, particularly if you're looking to build out a multiroom system for your home and are trying to decide between Bose's and Sonos' ecosystems.