Bose has upgraded its SoundTouch series to version 3 and added the new entry level SoundTouch 10 to the existing 20 and 30. Bose has implemented a new dual band wifi platform with better performance and now supports b/g/n. Bluetooth has been added, which is fine but AirPlay has been removed for some strange reason. So this is obviously a potential deal breaker if you use AirPlay. The previous version of SoundTouch series will continue to have AirPlay support.
The new SoundTouch 10 is a direct competitor to Sonos Play 1 and replaces the previous SoundTouch Portable. It has (like its bigger brothers) support for Spotify Connect and Bluetooth. Bose also has support for internet radio and Deezer through their own app. It also has USB and AUX inputs for external sources. SoundTouch 10 costs 199$/179£ and comes in white and black.
The SoundTouch 10 sounded lovely. Unfortunately, I had to return it. It had a serious problem with my large music collection (about 25k MP3 files), and spent most of its time syncing. Their user forum was not much help, other than the Bose engineers wanting lots of logs and other technical details. I didn’t pay 200 bucks to be a beta tester, so I returned it.
I had a brief dalliance with the Hitachi Wi-Fi speaker (its desktop Mac software was nearly useless–with small maximum playlist sizes, and such–it really hated my large collection). Note to self: never buy audio devices at WalMart.
The Samsung Radiant360 R1, purchased at Costco, was semi-decent, other than problems quite similar to the ones I was experiencing with the Bose SoundTouch 10 (large music libraries stymied it). I kept it and am almost glad I did, as Costco renegotiated the price and sent me a $20 gift card reflecting the savings they got from Samsung.
After spending what seemed like weeks in the return line, I gave up and went with the Sonus PLAY:1, which I should have from the start. It’s a great little speaker and I have zero complaints. Sonos has been in the WiFi game the longest. I tried several different things to get the Sonos and the Samsung to sync up so I had the same music throughout my little townhouse, with no luck. I was close with one solution: using Rogue Amoeba’s Nicecast to create an in-house Internet (intranet?) radio station. The Sonus connected without fanfare or fuss, but the Samsung did not let me enter my own radio station URL, so I finally tried Bluetooth which worked, but had a 10 second delay compared to the Sonus speaker. I killed Nicecast and went back to the Sonus software that cleanly and quickly synced and interacted with my iTunes library, but had the same delay. Guess I should’ve just bought another Sonus PLAY:1. Seems like they just work.
I would have also liked to try something with Airplay, but it seems like almost no one supports Airplay these days. Bose even dropped what support they did have. Wonder if Apple charges a small fortune for the WiFi Airplay? Is there required hardware that only Apple can provide? Again, really annoying.