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The $239.99 Sony LED Bulb Speaker is a dimmable, color-changing LED smart light bulb and a Bluetooth speaker combined. It comes with a physical remote, offers a few basic smart features like timers and color-shifting patterns, and is a step up from the Mipow Playbulb Color ($80.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) and the Sengled Solo in terms of sound quality. But it’s more than twice the price of either of those bulbs. You’ll get a lot more for your dollar by buying separate bulb(s) and Bluetooth speaker.
Design and Features
The Sony LED is a modestly sized bulb. It measures 4.6 inches tall and 2.4 inches in diameter, weighs 6.7 ounces, and works in standard E26 screw sockets. The bottom half of the bulb is made entirely of smooth white plastic, and the top half is opaque with a flat, rubbery speaker grille at the top. Behind the grille is a 2-watt speaker. You can pair your device with a second Speaker Bulb for stereo separation, but that requires close to a $500 investment!
A 40-watt equivalent, the Bulb Speaker outputs light at up to 500 lumens, which is slightly less than the Sengled Solo’s 550 lumens, but far brighter than the Mipow Playbulb Color’s 200 lumens. Like the Solo, the Sony LED is only capable of giving off warm white light at a 2,700K color temperature. Unlike the Solo, the Sony LED is capable of multiple colors and brightness levels. But it’s also quite dim, even with the brightness set high. It disperses light at a 105-degree angle, so it only shines up or down, but not out, which means it’s more suitable for mood lighting than filling a whole room.
You also get a circular physical remote , which pairs via Bluetooth and is required to set up the bulb. The remote has On/Off, White/Color, Play/Pause, Stereo/Double, and volume control buttons, with a dimming wheel in the center. The Stereo/Double button also acts as a shift key, so you can hold it and press another button for additional functions. For example, holding Shift and pressing the White/Color button turns the bulb’s sleep timer on or off. This can get confusing, but there are directions on the bottom of the remote that explain all of the button’s functions, as well as a battery compartment that houses a basic CR2032 coin cell.
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Like most LEDs, the Bulb Speaker is estimated to last nearly 23 years based on three hours of use per day, or about 25,000 hours total. As for energy consumption goes, it uses 8.6 watts.
Setup, Apps, and Performance
It doesn’t require a hub, which is nice, but you need two separate apps to control the light and music playback. To get started, you need to screw the bulb into any lamp or light fixture with an E26 socket. Then, with the remote, press the Play/Pause button, which also acts as a pairing button. Once the bulb is in pairing mode, open the Bluetooth settings on your Android or iOS device, and search for the LED from the list of available devices.
Once connected, open the Sony LED Bulb Speaker app, which you can download from the Apple App Store or Google Play, to actually control the light. For music playback, you need to download the Sony SongPal app. The process would be a lot easier if you could pair and control everything from one app, like you can with the Playbulb Color.
The LED Bulb Speaker app is very basic. Nearly identical to the Mipow Playbulb X app, it contains a color wheel and an On/Off button on the home screen, along with a list of preset patterns at the bottom, including Warm (red colors), Cold (blue colors), Pastel (a cycle through a pale rainbow), and Vivid (a cycle through a richer rainbow). You can also customize your own pattern by selecting a range of colors from the wheel. The light can also react to the speaker, either by rhythm or volume.
At the top of the screen, there are tabs for Color, White, and Timer. Color is basically basically a shortcut to the home screen. White switches the bulb to a white hue and brings you to a screen that contains a dimness slider. Timer takes you to a screen where you can set a sleep timer that will turn the bulb off after a selected amount of time. There are no other features to speak of, like alarms, scheduling, or If This Then That (IFTTT) integration, like you get with bulbs like the Philips Hue ($199.99 at Verizon)(Opens in a new window) .
To control music playback, open the separate SongPal app. The main screen has buttons you can tap that let you connect the app with your device’s music library, Pandora, and Spotify. You can also return to the LED Bulb Speaker app or access settings, where you can add more apps like SoundCloud or YouTube to pull music from.
As for sound quality, the LED Bulb Speaker fares better than the Sengled Solo, but it still can’t produce much in the way of deep bass, and audio becomes distorted at higher volumes. I played multiple tracks, including Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” Journey’s “Separate Ways,” and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” At mid volume, they were all passable, but at higher volumes the sound began to distort. You can get better sound quality with even an inexpensive Bluetooth speaker like the JBL Clip 2 ($72.98 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , which provides balanced and powerful performance for its small size. And Sony’s own SRS-XB3 ( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) is a much choice if you’re looking for significantly more powerful low-end response.
Conclusions
The Sony LED Bulb Speaker simply doesn’t offer enough as a smart bulb or a Bluetooth speaker to justify its high price. You’ll find a much better bargain in an inexpensive bulb, like the color-changing TikTeck Smart LED Light Bulb , and a separate Bluetooth speaker, like the aforementioned JBL Clip 2 or Sony SRS-XB3. Not only do they offer superior light and sound, they’ll leave you with cash to spare.
2.5
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The Sony LED Bulb Speaker is a smart light and Bluetooth speaker in one, but it costs too much and offers too little.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/sony-led-bulb-speaker