Many years ago I had a hi-fi system. It consisted of a central tuner, cassette player, record player and graphic equalizer plus.. two speakers. Two stereo speakers. A right channel and a left channel. You could position the speakers around your room for the best stereo sound.
The Bluetooth speakers we’re reviewing today are, if you look at them quickly on the Amazon listing, like many others.
The thing is though. They’re not. Not at all. For £49.99 you actually get two speakers, not one. Sure, if you’ve got limited space or storage capacity you can perhaps just use one. You can even have one for yourself and one for someone else. They’ll quite happily work independently.
However, they can also pair with each other and generate stereo sound.
Yes. You read that right. Stereo sound.
Remember that?
We seem to have forgotten about it thanks to all the Bluetooth speakers available. All those years of technology – the switch from Mono recordings to Stereo recordings.. the change from Medium Wave transmissions to pure stereo FM transmissions. What happened? Why did we suddenly accept a single speaker pumping out music from one central point? That’s not how it’s meant to be. There’s meant to be a cool stereo sound, just like in your car. Just like when you’re sitting in the cinema.
So why are we suddenly so “ok” with one speaker doing everything ?
Here then is the AOSM 68 Bluetooth Dual Speakers. Turn them both on at the same time, wait for the “bleep” to say that they’re powered up, then tap the power key again to get them to pair with each other. Once that’s done, you’ll see that one speaker has a solid blue LED light and the other has a flashing blue LED. It’s then just a matter of grabbing your phone and connecting up – you’ll instantly get stereo sound and you can place the speakers at different ends of a room to get the full stereo experience.
Even as I type, the speaker are either side of the laptop and they sound brilliant – you can really hear the difference thanks to that stereo output. It’s almost perfect.
I say almost because the bass isn’t hugely deep, despite those end-mounted woofers that you’ll find at the top and bottom (or left and right, depending on how you look at it) of the speakers.
Both speakers have the same specs and will last for around 8 hours playing music. You’ll then be able to recharge them in about 3 hours. Of course, it should be noted that charging two devices (instead of one) is a slight faff, but it’s either that or attach them both with cables and.. nobody wants that do they?
As I touched on before, if you don’t fancy hooking the two together, you can still use them one at a time by pairing normally. Just power one up and connect to your phone – it’ll output the sound as normal.
On the base of each speaker, under a flap, you’ve got the power (microUSB) and the 3.5mm audio input. You can also adjust the volume here (long press) or short press the – / + to skip tracks. There’s a play / pause button and you can adjust the volume here too.
In dual-pairing / stereo mode, it really does sound rather good and you can use either speaker to adjust the volume. Both speakers produce clear audio with sufficient, but not overly strong, bass. There’s a water resistant shell to protect from rain showers but they won’t survive a drop in water. Both speakers also have small lanyards so that you can attach them to bags and the like.
The setup and operation was easy, and I really did enjoy hearing music “properly”. It also made a difference when listening to audio books and talk shows too, as you could decipher which party was speaking just from the left / right audio channels. The battery lasted for quite some time, but if you’re going to have these more permanently setup (perhaps attached via Bluetooth to your TV) then you’ll have to leave them plugged in. Overall, for £49.99 from Amazon, really not bad at all.