Bose’s latest soundbar offering, the SoundTouch range, is much like the Build-A-Bear concept. You can choose your basic product first and then alternate and accessorize away to your heart’s desire.
You can add Bose’s Acoustimass 300 wireless subwoofer and Virtually Invisible 300 wireless surround speakers for a more compelling surround sound system that’s still more compact than most traditional speaker packages.
Features
The Bose SoundTouch 300 is a premium soundbar equipped with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and multiroom functionality. It streams music from Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Music and NAS drives via the SoundTouch app, while a raft of nifty audio tech delivers powerful home cinema sound on movie night. The exciting part Is that the bar is so slim and would slip anywhere without any disruption. Bose makes a bold claim that SoundTouch 300 offers “the best performance, spaciousness, and bass of any one-piece soundbar of its size.”
Setup
The initial setup is the Acoustiq room calibration system, which tunes the output to your listening room. It’s similar to the Audyssey and YPAO systems seen on AV receivers. While they tend to come with small standalone microphones which awkwardly need to be positioned at listening height, the Bose mic is built into a plastic headband. This rather brilliantly allows the ST300 to measure at exactly the right listening height.
There’s also a SoundTouch app (available for iOS and Android). The App is designed for music streaming from a smartphone, rather than full system control.
Performance
The performance is nice. It does an excellent job with dialogue, keeping centre-placed vocals crisp and clear. No trace of sibilance.
The SoundTouch 300 features such as 4K-ready HDMIs, effortless multiroom streaming, and ADAPTIQ auto-calibration makes it all fancy and worth buying. It is an elegant, streamlined design that easily lives up to the price tag.
But a lack of top-end subtlety and crispness let the side down, making it much less satisfying than the DALI Kubik One or the Q Acoustics M3.
