Bose might not have changed much but the SoundLink Revolve II has a lot to like if you’re looking for a compact Bluetooth speaker with 360-degree sound and some smart features. This is still a compact cylinder that’s wider at the bottom than the top and there are rubber sections at either end to absorb impacts if you do happen to drop the speaker. The SoundLink Revolve II sounds great for a wide range of music, able to deliver enough oomph for The Prodigy while handling the delicate guitar and vocals of Ben Howard. It does sound best at medium volume levels, but quality does take a bit of a dip at the higher end if you’re trying to fill a large space.
Instead, you get some basic info and settings like battery level and the ability to adjust the auto-off timer and switch the voice prompts if they get annoying. You can buy a charging cradle – it’s a bit like the base of a kettle – which make things a lot easier, although you’ll have to cough up another £24.95 for it.
The Bose SoundLink Revolve II is available to buy now priced at £179.95, although it’s discounted to £154.95 on the official store at the time of writing. You can also buy it from Currys PC World and John Lewis for effectively the RRP, while Amazon and Argos have the speaker for £199. The app could do with an EQ and it is surprising to see Micro-USB on a high-end speaker in 2021, but with battery life extending way beyond the quoted figure of 13 hours, these are fairly easy to forget about.
Bose SoundLink Revolve II Review
Its multifunction button plays, pauses, backtracks, and skips your tracks and can also be used to activate your paired voice assistants.
Bose SoundLink Revolve+ II Review
Update 04/29/2021: You can mute the microphone during a phone call by pressing the + and – buttons at the same time. Its multi-function button is used to play, pause, backtrack, and skip tracks.
Customer Reviews: Bose SoundLink Revolve II Portable Bluetooth Speaker Triple Black 858365-0100
The bass in particular was notable not so much because it was booming, but rather it added an excellent fullness to the sound that was noticeably lacking in the speaker I was using for comparison purposes, although I didn’t realize what I was missing until I heard the Bose playing the same song. Across a variety of songs from several different genres I found this speaker produced exception sound accuracy for its size, not muddy or distorted at higher volume.
While I don’t generally listen to my music at max volume, I look at this speaker as intended for an outdoor event/party so I cranked it all the way up as a test. I thought this would be bad as it seemed that the battery life dropped so rapidly, but I guess the update was just power intensive because over the course of the next several days I ran it a total of 22 hours at home and at work.
The body has a rugged metal casing that doesn’t deform at all under pressure, even around the perforated base. The finish appears to be very scratch resistant and shows absolutely no fingerprints even after several days of frequent handling.
The top, including the control buttons is a smooth, soft rubber material that like the metal housing, seems to be impervious to fingerprinting. It is something that I have found is extremely common even in much, much less expensive speakers, and it just felt oddly cheap to leave out of the box.
I also realized upon looking at the bottom of the speaker that it has the ability to be set on a charging base, and I think that would have been a nicer touch to put in the box than the USB cable.
Customer Reviews: Bose SoundLink Revolve+ II Portable Bluetooth Speaker Triple Black 858366-1110
Place it next to the corner of a room, and the audio sounds more spatial, adding more dimension, and fullness. Dialogue and voices have such clarity that when you’re listening to a program or podcast, it almost sounds like the person is present in the room with you. And all of this splendid audio is coming from a tapered cylinder that is only 7” tall, weighing only 2 lbs that you can easily carry in one hand with the rope handle. +Tripod Mount – For those times when I’m outdoors doing gardening work and don’t have a stable surface to place my speaker and don’t want to place it on the grass or dirt, I can bring out my tripod and attach it to the receiving tripod mount on the bottom of the Revolve+ II. Then you’ll be able to make or take calls, check the news and weather, play music, etc. While I love singing the praises of the Revolve+ II, I think Bose could have done some things better: -This speaker is still using the Micro-USB port to charge the battery.
I don’t know why Bose doesn’t switch to the USB-c charge port, other than to save a few cents in using the older usb standard. As much as I enjoy Bose’s signature sound, there are times when I might want to turn up or down the bass/treble to suit the specific audio I am listening to. I would recommend that Bose provide a firmware update to allow the user an option to decide whether or not to have the speaker power up from the app.
There are a number of bluetooth speakers on the market that have a higher IP rating allowing them to be submerged in water. On my Revolve+ II, the top protective bumper appears to be made of a high quality rubber material that can take some abuse. However, the lower bumper doesn’t feel as thick as the rubber material at the top of the speaker.
Since audio is highly subjective and based on individual experiences, I would recommend that you audition the Revolve+ II with other speakers.
Bose SoundLink Revolve review
The Bose SoundLink Revolve aims to solve the main problem with most wireless speakers: despite their convenience, they’re usually directional, sounding their best in one specific spot. The Bose SoundLink Revolve continues the company’s history of excellent build quality and sound and crams it all into a cylindrical speaker you can take with you on the go. One negative point we’ll mention straight away is that the IPX4 rating on the SoundLink Revolve means the speaker will survive splashes but probably not a dip in the pool or a trip to the beach. The Revolve takes the design of its predecessor the SoundLink Mini II and stretches it into a cylindrical shape that slightly resembles the Dalek robots from Dr. Who.
The Bose SoundLink Revolve feels extremely well made, and should put up with being tossed in a bag with keys and knick knacks (for example). On top of the Revolve speaker you’ll find buttons for controlling every feature of the unit, including volume, playback, Bluetooth 4.0, aux and power.
The SoundLink revolve works great as a speakerphone for taking calls – something lacking on one of this speaker’s well-regarded contemporaries, the UE Wonderboom. It’s disappointing that Bose didn’t throw in the $30 (£19.95) charging dock for free like it does with the slightly cheaper SoundLink Mini II, which costs $180 (£170, AU$300).
On the inside the Revolve features a dual passive radiator setup running up the sides of the speaker to fill out the lower end of the audio spectrum. Mids and trebles are handled by a downward facing transducer, which uses a deflector plate to distribute sound equally in all directions. Compared to the aging SoundLink Mini II, the SoundLink Revolve sounds almost as good but can’t match the expansive soundstage and instrumental separation of the Mini II – though, admittedly both speakers sound very good and you’ll be hard pressed to notice the difference unless you listen to them side by side. Both the Color II and Revolve are IPX4 rated, which means they’ll survive splashes but you won’t want to dunk either speaker in the pool.
If bass is your game, the JBL Charge 3 is an excellent fully waterproof speaker that sounds great, but is big and heavy along with it.
Review: Bose Soundlink Revolve II and Bose Revolve + II
I had some small troubles with those speakers, so when I heard Bose had announced a 2nd generation of the Revolve line more than 5 years after launching the originals, I knew I wanted to test them out to see if they’ve made improvements. The main differences are the size, battery life and volume, and of course price – which we’ll get to.
The first thing I noticed is that the speakers don’t arrive charged, which is a bit of a disappointment and means you’ll need to wait 4 hours before your first use. Even so you can set these speakers up in seconds; when you turn them on, they go into pairing mode and you’ll find them instantly in your phone’s Bluetooth menu.
Bose’s app give you a few additional features for your speakers including the ability to pair them together for stereo left and right channels, or set them up in what’s called party mode where the same sound will play across multiple speakers. Verbal confirmations (which you can enable or disable inside the app) follow from the speaker. Each of the layers—the high, the mids and the low end— feel like they each have their own place in the room and overall they sound really really great. At 75% volume on the Revolve +II the sound filled the huge open concept living room and kitchen and carrying on a conversation was impossible. Stereo pairing is a really nice way to get more immersive sound if you do want to splash out and get two speakers. While this is probably not a make or break feature for some shoppers, I do feel like giving consumers the option to add voice control is now table stakes, so the fact that it doesn’t have voice control makes it feel a bit lacking. I tested this out, placing the speaker on one end of the house and then going to the other, putting multiple walls between me and the Revolve. In my opinion after testing both, you can be very happy with the size, power and room-filling ability of the smaller, less expensive Bose Revolve II and save yourself some cash.
Overall I’m glad to see that these speakers are small but powerful with outstanding sound quality and easy set up, pairing and multi-room connections. There’s no native voice control or smart speaker connections, and the battery life could be longer, particularly at this price point.
Bose SoundLink Revolve II Speaker review: Built for mobility
The brand improved the dust- and waterproofing of the device, achieving an IP55 rating, and Bose says that “water-resistant design means you can use it more places without worrying about an accidental showering of water, like by the pool or by the kitchen sink.” Bose also added an optional charging dock, another extra element of practicality. We put the Bose SoundLink Revolve II through our rigorous DXOMARK Wireless Speaker test suite. The Bose SoundLink Revolve II falls into the Essential category of devices in the DXOMARK Speaker rankings.
From a global performance standpoint, the Bose SoundLink Revolve II’s score of 107 puts it in fairly good company, alongside the Amazon Echo 4th Gen, which had a score of 109, and between two other top competitors in our Essential Speakers category: the Google Nest Audio (112) and the Apple HomePod Mini (98). The 360-degree approach of the Bose SoundLink Revolve II is designed to be optimal in the middle of a room or group. In the bathroom and bedroom use cases, the Bose SoundLink Revolve II’s 360-firing impinges on distance rendering.
The drawbacks of the SoundLink Revolve II include midrange rendering that is slightly inconsistent, with a small lack of upper mids. In the bedtime and bathroom use cases, the 360-degree approach hinders distance rendering, with voices perceived as diffuse or as coming from the back of the device.
The DXOMARK Speaker overall score of 107 for the Bose SoundLink Revolve II is derived from a range of sub-scores.
In this section, we will take a closer look at these audio quality sub-scores and explain what they mean for the user, and we will show some comparison data from two of the SoundLink’s principal competitors, the LG XBoom Go PL 7 and the Sony SRS-XB43. The SoundLink Revolve II performed fairly well in the timbre attribute, with good trebles and high-end extension. In quiet environments, our engineers observed a slight lack of upper spectrum content and clarity.
Bass and low-end extension is sorely missed at those higher volumes, which led to a lower score in the party use case. Our dynamics tests measure how well a device reproduces the energy level of a sound source, taking into account attack, bass precision, and punch. In addition to the lack of low-end at loud volume, bass precision and punch are strongly affected by heavy compression. Good distance performance allows for a realistic placement of voices, except in the case of podcast content, where midrange resonances slightly impair voice-distance perception.
Here are a few sound pressure levels (SPL) we measured when playing our sample recordings of hip-hop and classical music at maximum volume: While watching television, audio is quite delayed when the video uses Bluetooth, but latency is acceptable when using the jack to connect to the sound source. Some of the Bose SoundLink Revolve II’s strengths lie in it design: it’s a small, highly portable, 360-degree-firing speaker that produces decent results in several attributes, especially at low and nominal volumes. When connected with its built-in jack to an audio source, latency isn’t a problem for watching video content.
And at loud volumes, the tonal balance becomes very midrange-focused, with metallic trebles and a strong lack of bass.
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