Bose is finally jumping into the multi-room wireless audio game with its SoundTouch series. The company’s new SoundTouch app makes controlling and programming Wi-Fi-based SoundTouch speakers simple and easy, and the system’s networked design lets you play your favorite music with the push of a button, without touching your smartphone or tablet. The Bose SoundTouch 20 is the middle sibling in the SoundTouch family, and the first one we’ve tested. This $399.95 (direct) speaker sounds fantastic, but as easy as SoundTouch makes setup and use, it also lacks the power and flexibility seen in other wireless speakers. Fortunately (at least to iOS users), the SoundTouch 20 also supports AirPlay, alleviating the issues with the SoundTouch app’s current state and adding simplicity and elegance.

That all said, Android users should be wary about what you can and can’t do through the app with this speaker. If you’re an Android fan, you may have better luck with the much less expensive, Editors’ Choice Sonos Play:1($199.00 at Sonos)(Opens in a new window). Sonos’ system is much longer established, and supports many more music services than Bose’s SoundTouch, including Spotify, Songza, Slacker, and Rdio. 

Design
The SoundTouch 20( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) has Bose’s signature, simple speaker style. It’s elegant, gray, and just a few details and controls away from being truly minimalist, measuring a rectangular 5.8 by 9.8 by 2.5 (HWD) inches and weighing a solid 3.2 pounds. It evokes Bose’s popular Wave music system more than its SoundLink wireless speakers, with a gently curving front panel holding a gray fabric grille and a glossy black plastic rectangle with the speaker’s small OLED display in the middle of it. The back panel is also slightly curved; it’s a dark gray plastic that matches the fabric on the front, with a passive bass port high in the center that doubles as a carrying handle and power, Ethernet, USB and micro USB ports for setup, plus a 3.5mm auxiliary port near the bottom.

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The other sides are a glossy, patterned white broken up by gray physical controls on the top. Those buttons include Power, Aux, Volume Up/Down, and six presets that factor heavily into the simple, automatic appeal of the SoundTouch ecosystem, which I’ll explain later. The SoundTouch 20 also comes with a small but comfortable remote, with soft-touch rubber buttons matching the controls on the speaker, plus Track Forward/Back.

The SoundTouch System
In creating its own Wi-Fi multi-room audio system, Bose focused on making it simple and accessible. Its design choices make the SoundTouch 20 easy to use, but also quite limited. Testing the speaker was a remarkably uneven experience; every feature seems to lack options similar multi-room speaker systems regularly offer, but the features that are present also work more smoothly and easily by far.

Whether you want to play music from your computer, smartphone, or tablet, either streamed from the Internet or your own collection of songs, the Bose SoundTouch app is there to serve as the friendly but strict gatekeeper. The free software for PC, Mac, Android, and iOS controls and programs the SoundTouch 20 and any other SoundTouch speakers you want to use. And AirPlay works too—if it’s on and connected, it will be available both through the SoundTouch app and through iOS and iTunes as an AirPlay device.

To set up the SoundTouch 20, you need to plug it into your computer through the included micro USB cable and run the SoundTouch app. It’s an incredibly simple process that walked me through configuring the speaker to access my Wi-Fi network, registering my iTunes library, and setting up my Pandora account. It was painless, but there was no option to set up the SoundTouch 20 wirelessly with my iPad.

I was given one option for on-demand streaming music services through the SoundTouch app: Pandora. The Internet radio service works seamlessly with the SoundTouch 20. It’s also the only login-based streaming service that works with the SoundTouch 20. The app offers no options to connect to Spotify, Google Play, or other music libraries, and Bose’s iTunes support is limited to local storage and not iTunes Radio. Bose plans to add additional music services to its app, but for now it’s limited to Pandora and a wide selection of individual streaming Internet radio stations. They’re nice, but they lack the whatever-I-want-to-listen-to power of Spotify.

Of course, you can still use Spotify, or any other service, from your iOS device with AirPlay, but when you do it this way, it doesn’t integrate into the SoundTouch app. On the bright side, the remote’s playback control buttons worked with Spotify over AirPlay, and song metadata displayed on the speaker’s OLED screen even without going through the SoundTouch app. The app lets you stream different music to multiple SoundTouch speakers in your home, stream the same music to all speakers, and adjust the volume on each individually.

Presets, Performance, and Conclusions

The six preset buttons on the SoundTouch 20 add a ton of convenience through the SoundTouch app. Whatever you’re listening to, whether it’s a playlist, a genre, an artist, or a single song from your music library or a Pandora or other Internet radio station, you can set it to one of those six buttons just by holding the button down on the radio, the remote, or the app. It can then access that station or (if your computer/storage is on) local music just by pressing the button.

These presets offers instant access to your favorite music without needing your smartphone, tablet, or computer on-hand. It’s an incredibly handy and simple feature that combines the ideas of a multi-room audio system with a dedicated Internet radio device. Unfortunately, you can’t set any of your favorite playlists from other streaming music services like Spotify if it’s not available on the app.

Performance and Conclusions
For a relatively small, one-piece speaker system, the SoundTouch 20 puts out a remarkable amount of power. Our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” got downright rumbling at maximum volumes, shaking my skull with deep, powerful lows that never distorted. The bass doesn’t quite reach wall-shaking lows, but you usually won’t see that in any sound system without a separate (and larger) subwoofer. Even compared to the Bose SoundLink III and SoundLink Mini Bluetooth speakers with their excellent volume-to-size ratios, the SoundTouch 20 is impressively loud, and without a hint of distortion.

Considering its relatively small size (for a stationary, plugged-in speaker), the SoundTouch 20 delivers an impressive sonic presence that sounds very good across the frequency spectrum. MC Lars’ “This Gigantic Robot Kills” balanced Lars’ crisp vocals and the sharp ode-to-ska horns against the funky, rumbling bassline without making the former muddy or the latter indistinct. Miles Davis’ “So What” also juggled the lows of the upright bass and the wide range of the piano notes without making either overshadow the other, though at higher volumes a little extra brightness shone through—the graininess of the old recording started to become overly prominent when it usually sits further in the background.

The Bose SoundTouch 20 takes an excellent speaker and adds an ambitious multi-room Wi-Fi system that offers a ton of convenience but not a lot of flexibility. Setup is a breeze, and you can turn your local music library into a custom jukebox with six presets you can access without picking up a smartphone or tablet. That said, the SoundTouch app currently supports few music services and can’t play audio directly from a mobile device at all. The inclusion of AirPlay is the SoundTouch 20’s saving grace for iOS users who want total control over what they use. It’s a much tougher sell for Android users, but that could change as Bose adds more online services and features to its app.

If you’re an Android user and want a multi-room sound system, the Sonos Play:1 is a less expensive and slightly more flexible starting point, albeit without AirPlay support. The Wren V5PF Play-Fi( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) is another strong performer for Android users who want a multi-room speaker solution, but it has some awkward aspects in its own Wi-Fi implementation. The Pure Jongo S3($129.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) adds Bluetooth to its own Wi-Fi setup, but it simply doesn’t sound as good as the Play:1 or anywhere near the SoundTouch 20. For iOS users or anyone who listens primarily to their own locally stored music, the SoundTouch 20 is a fantastic choice. If you can’t enjoy AirPlay in addition to the SoundTouch app, though, the same aspects that make the speaker simple and convenient to use will prevent you from enjoying musical options outside of Pandora, Internet radio stations, or your own collection. For a more direct, flexible wireless audio experience without the ease of multi-room support, the Bose SoundLink III($399.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) is an excellent Bluetooth speaker that offers battery-powered portability at the expense of some of the SoundTouch 20’s volume.