JBL Authentics 200 – Retro Style Smart Home Speaker with Built in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Voice Assistants, Alexa and Google Assistant, Multi-Room Playback, Automatic self tuning

Shocking audio performance
To give a bit of background I am an audiophile (a lover of music) and take my music quite seriously. I run some serious hardware from meze elite epoque headphones to legacy signature speakers. I say all this to give a bit of credit to my background on sound and knowing where a good set of transducers can take you.I recently changed my bedroom audio setup to move my floor standing speakers (old wharfedale diamond 9.5’s) to acomidate my tv. This had the drawback of removing them from my echo and I needed a solution to provide the room with “good enough” audio that the little echo just could not muster. So I started my search for a new all in one voice assistant but did not want a second set of tower speakers in the room so I looked at the usual suspects. The echo studio, sonos, etc but none of them had what I was looking for when it came to sound quality. Enter the jbl 500 it was not on my radar at all but I stumbled across it in my searching. It had mixed reviews with an emphasis on the size of the speaker. Now for me coming from a set of tower speakers size was not the limiting factor. So I ordered one and had it at my door in no time at all. This guy was well packed and had a good presentation my only complaint is that the bass driver is exposed and you have to be cognizant not to put a finger through it as you lift it out of the box. This speaker has a good amount of weight for its size and feels well built. Physical setup is a breeze with one power cable and you are done. After that you need the app which is not the best but definitely not the worst I have used. In the app you will connect it to your wifi and then setup your voice assistants. This guy supports both google and alexa with the former being very easy to setup and the latter being a oddity. The google setup punched right in like any other google home device and setup was a breeze. The alexa app on the other hand just opened to a spinning circle with no errors. After contacting tech support I tried everything under the sun to get it to take and somewhere along the line fixed it. I am not sure if it was a wifi bug or just needed to run in for some time but after I tried the next day everything popped right in no problem.Now on to the sound… good golly this was not what I was expecting! This guy goes to show what modern tech has brought to the table vs my older diamond speakers. I started it on some tash music because I was not expecting much from this guy but what came belting out from this box was clean powerful sound. My first stop was “the used – in love and death” and there it was a musical tonality that I would described as playful or V shaped. The bass was plentiful but not overwhelming, solidly in the fun category but not drifting into bloated or slow territory. In short it sounded good, darn good… better than it had rights to sound given its size. So intrigued I switched from background music to my analytical music section to see if this was some kind of fluke. I popped on one of my favorites the live copy of “Fink – troubles what you are in” and gave this speaker my full attention. This speaker did not shirk from my critical ear as the acoustic guitar was crisp and you could distinctly pick out the difference between the sounds of his palm on the wood vs the cajon. I was gobsmacked, baffled, dare I say impressed. I tossed the kitchen sink of all the greats (steely dan, daftpunk, pinkfloyd, etc) at this box and it continued to impress. I was left wondering if I toss the diamonds in favor of picking up another one of these it is THAT GOOD. The fact that a single six inch driver could come even close to the range that four drivers of the same size is witchcraft.I love the sound profile that this uses with the heavy V shape. To me this is one of my favorites as it sets the toes a tapping and head a bobbing more than that holy grale flat profile. I would compare this to the fiio FH9 as something that I turn on and go “that sounds right” no tweaking or changes it just sounds like my ideal of what I want from music.If you made it this far into the review I commend you! If you just scrolled to the end for the TLDR buy it you wont be dissapointed.

Sounds good and my wife likes the way it looks!
Not cheap, but a great sounding speaker for the size. Of course, you’re not going to get a stereo image out of a single speaker, but it sounds good for what it is. We have it on the counter in our kitchen, and I use it while cooking and eating. More than powerful enough to be heard over the super loud downdraft exhaust fan on our stove when cooking. I’m a recording/mixing/mastering engineer, so I’m picky about sound. Sure, this is not as good sounding as my studio monitors, but it serves its purpose and is much less expensive and smaller than my studio monitors.I’m using primarily Amazon Music which it has built-in support for (among several other services), and there are no issues with that for the most part. Once in a while I have to login again to my Amazon account. Or, on rare occasions, this speaker gets disconnected from the network, but is easily fixed by simply unplugging and plugging in again. It does have a wired ethernet connection if you want a more reliable network connection, but I didn’t have an ethernet port nearby and the wifi signal where the speaker is located is not great.The main reason I got this type of speaker is that it streams directly from the services via WiFi, as opposed to a cheaper Bluetooth only speaker that would use the lower quality Bluetooth audio format. So, with Amazon Music HD, you can get at least CD quality, lossless audio, which is important to me. You can set it up for Alexa to use voice commands to start streaming from Amazon music, or you can use the Amazon Music App on your phone to connect to the speaker and stream in HD (as opposed to Bluetooth), as the speaker will still do the streaming itself and the phone is just the interface. The JBL One app is nice for setting this up and for control volume and such, but it misses out on some features of the Amazon music app, such as the ability to shuffle a playlist.

Not really that portable, as it is quite heavy. However, I bought it to serve as a Bluetooth bookshelf stereo speaker for my reading room. I play music on it from my iPad and it does it very well! I play rock music and jazz (once in a while classical) on it. Very impressive with loud and quiet music.

La verdad es un buen altavoz, tal vez algo caro, pero para mí lo vale. El hecho de que lo pueda enlazar por wifi sin necesidad de conectarlo por bluetooth es mucho más práctico, y en fiestas o reuniones solo es necesario poner la aplicación que más te guste de streaming y transmitir, rápido y sencillo.El sonido está bastante detallado, me gusta que el bajo sea profundo, sin llegar a lo exagerado, igualmente lo puedes modular con sus botones. La construcción y su apariencia es un punto a favor.