When you talk about premium audio, Bose is definitely be one of the few brands to come to mind. Over the year, they have managed to produce quite a few good speakers in the market, from home theatres to portable Bluetooth speakers. They are known to be consistent with both, audio performance and premium design. With the SoundLink III, they’ve added a little more. The SoundLink III with its portable design, not only promises better performance but also a longer lasting experience. We’re here to test how well it performs overs the SoundLink II and other products sold today.
Features
Underneath the steel grill, the speaker holds four drivers and two passive radiators. They’re good enough to deliver sound loud enough for a small outdoor party. The passive radiators are a way of using power-less cones that can help produce deep bass . The speaker remembers up to 6 devices, so you don’t have to keep pairing your devices every time you want to listen to music. The Bluetooth range is promised to be a good 30 feet. That sounds good but we’ll find out if it really works seamlessly at that distance.
The best part of the Bose SoundLink III has to be its battery life. Bose claims that the speaker can play non-stop music for 14 hours, only with a charge of three hours. That is twice as much as the Bose SoundLink II, and many other speakers out there. Like the previous model, the SoundLink III uses a DC jack for power. This means you have to carry the charger everywhere with you. With a micro USB port you could just charge with any Smartphone USB cable, like most other Bluetooth speakers.
Design and Build
Bose is always known for its amazing and sturdy designs and the SoundLink III is no different. Like its predecessor, the SoundLink III has a metal build, which needless to say, is as sturdy as Bluetooth speakers can get. The speaker has curvy edges and this time, the leather cover that comes attached to the speaker has been ditched. Bose promotes the optional covers that you can buy separately for the speaker.
The newer model looks a lot simpler and minimalistic that the SoundLink II. However, it still looks premium and quite sophisticated. It’s also a little bulkier and heavier. That’s mostly because of the drivers and the higher capacity battery Bose claims to have equipped the speaker with. It still doesn’t feel too heavy, because the weight is well balanced across the product.
There is a grill at the front which extends itself to the back. There are six buttons at the top that let you control volume, change the source or mute the speaker. They have a rubber coating on top just like the one seen on the SoundLink Mini. They have a soft-touch but require a little pressure to press. There are LEDs at the font that indicate the power and the source connected. Because the leather stand isn’t present, Bose has added rubber pads at the bottom to reduce vibrations when placed on a surface.
Performance
The sound of the SoundLink III had changed quite a bit compared to its predecessor. Bose has focused more on the lows this time and this means everything sounds a bit bass heavy. It also added to the depth and the fact that there is no distortion didn’t really make the songs sound bad. It’s definitely a lot louder than the SoundLink II as well. We were surprised how well the speaker manages to hide distortion while playing music so loudly.
The sound separation with the speaker is quite good. It’s certainly not the best stereo sound you can get, but to be able to notice the separation with no separated speakers is pretty impressive. We played a couple of genres on the SoundLink III and were more than happy by the performance. Groovy songs like ‘Come and get your love’ from 8 RedBone sounded great. The bass line sounded prominent and resonating. Not just that, the speaker did justice to the vocals and the guitar solo sounded rich too. Soul and pop songs sounded good too, but we felt that music was a little subdued here and the vocals were a bit exaggerated. In case of heavy rock songs, everything sounded just about right. Right from the punchy bass drums to high pitched cymbal shots. The speciality of the SoundLink III and most Bose speakers we reviewed lie in the slow pop and acoustic songs. With all the acoustic songs we played, we could hear every guitar pluck and the vocals just sounded mesmerising.
Coming to connectivity, it’s quite easy to connect to the speakers using Bluetooth. The speaker doesn’t take a lot of time to start and it connects automatically to the device if you’ve already paired it. The SoundLink III managed to play audio seamlessly from a distance of 30 feet.
Verdict
Plenty of changes have been made to the SoundLink series, but only the popularity and feedback of users will tell if everyone likes the change or not. When it comes to sound, we didn’t really feel like this speaker was the follow-up for the SoundLink II. Rather, it felt more as a bigger variant of the SoundLink Mini, which also is a little base heavy and really loud for its size. If you’re looking for a complete all-rounder, then the SoundLink III is a great option. It sports a sturdy and premium build, an amazing 14 hour battery life and does overall justice to every genre of music you can think of playing. If you have around Rs. 22,400* to spare, then look no further.
