Echo Sub – Powerful subwoofer for your Echo – requires compatible Echo device

Terrific Performance
Amazon Echo Sub-WooferWhere do I start? At this point I am here to say this is a GREAT product, well worth the money.Five Stars for sure.But I digress…I started out with an Amazon Echo, first generation, paid nearly $100 for it, but was quite pleased with its performance. I was very pleased with the sound output of that small device. I liked it so much I bought another for another room. Being an Amazon Prime member, I started listening to music from Amazon. Again, pleased – and I decided to add the unlimited subscription to Amazon Music.I have a traditional stereo system – two speakers, an amplifier, and a CD player. I got to thinking I would like to feed the Amazon music into the stereo and researched the subject on the internet. Turned out to be stupidly simple. I bought a third generation Dot, now less than $50, and a simple adapter cable. The cable plugged into the output jack of the Dot and into the right and left stereo inputs on my amplifier. I had to do a little volume adjustments of the Dot and of the stereo amp to get the levels right – but that was a five minute exercise, and suddenly I had beautiful music in full stereo.But in researching the stereo bit, I discovered something else interesting on the internet – that it was simple to set up two identical Echo units to give full stereo. Well, I have two identical first generation Echos. So I tried it, setting up in a different room. A note here – it is unlikely that most of us could ever set a stereo pair up without some very simple instruction from the internet. You have to use the Amazon app on a smart phone. But with that instruction it is a very simple exercise. I did it. And it sounded great.And that’s also about when I discover the existence of the Amazon Echo Sub-Woofer. OK. I admit at first I was skeptical. How could a six inch diameter speaker generate significant base? But then how could a tiny Amazon Echo Dot sound so terrific? But they do.The gold standard for bass performance for many is the piece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss. To quote Wikipedia, “The piece starts with a sustained double low C on the double basses, contrabassoon and church organ.” This corresponds to a tone of some duration at a frequency of 32 hertz. Only higher end classic stereo systems will deliver this tone. In most, it plays as a low level buzz that would be obnoxious were it any louder.So OK. I pulled up the specs on the unit. Hmm. Goes to 30 hertz at minus 6 db. You know, that ain’t bad! And you could goose up the low end a bit with the equalizer in the Amazon app. The built in 100 watt amplifier and cross over network built into the sub-woofer help a lot. Hmm. OK, I went ahead and ordered it. And immediately discovered that at the time there was a 4 week wait for delivery.The unit did show up as promised, and I was anxious to get it going. A comment here: normally I am rather contemptuous of “unpacking” videos on the internet. But, the packing and packaging of this unit is a performance art master class on how it should be done. I will say no more on that subject except that I was hugely impressed.Setting it up was mostly easy – but NOT as easy as the Amazon site suggests. The main issue is that if you integrating it into an existing stereo pair of Echo units, as I was, first you have to unpair the existing units, then rebuild with the addition of the sub-woofer. Very simple to do on the app – but NOT intuitive. Again, the internet is your friend. I easily found simple instructions and proceeded – and five minutes later had everything networked and playing.It sounded OK, but honestly not all that terrific. Certainly not what I was expecting. Playing “Thus Spake Zarathustra” was, frankly, disappointing. But, I have had experience with base woofers before, and had a suspicion it wold improve. It seems such speakers need to be used a bit to loosen up to reach their desired performance levels.I am very happy to report that this proved to be exactly the case. After a few hours, the speaker was clearly doing better. A few days and it was sounding great. And today, I was sitting in my chair listening to Hans Zimmer’s sound track for “The Dark Knight”, a piece I had played several times before. But this time, it seemed like the whole room was shaking from an outstanding base source. I was astounded – and hugely delighted! I am truly pleased.A closing note – truly serious audiophiles are guaranteed to turn up their noses at this system. I am talking about the people that only use virgin vinyl records for a music source, heavy oxygen free copper cables to the tube amplifier with heavy iron transformers, huge engineered bass reflex speakers or the like etc. etc. Good for them – and perfection has its price. But for us lesser mortals who love music, the Amazon system offers a quality system offering a lot of pleasure at a modest price.

Great Bass – Does not jive with Bluetooth streaming from phone to Dotsub pair
I absolutely love the depth of the bass this bad boy provides. Truly a legitimately worthy purchase if you’ve got a smaller Dot or Echo and want low end response. If you put it in a room’s corner, like WOW. Physics 101, bass is non directional, so vibrate two walls at the same time and bigger sub by design 😁 echo chamber effect.My only disappointment is that the sub does not play for Bluetooth streamed content to my Dot, which is what I got with it. I suspect it’s because the Dot is using Bluetooth tech to make the wireless connection to the sub, but it is sadly not multi-point connection capable. Maybe the hardware is, software can’t yet and some software update later we’ll get that, but as of now – no sub while streaming Bluetooth content to your Alexa device, whichever it may be. That’s why 4 of 5 stars for me.

Needs An Update To Pair Directly With Amazon Fire TV’s
EDIT: Due to the length of time the return is taking.. 30% longer than any normal return, I have lowered this to 1star.I bought it to communicate with my 75″ Omni Series TV which is FULLY Alexa enabled even turned off. Amazon lost my order completely and I had to take the next week waiting by for a delivery requiring me to be present, putting my life on hold for a product MADE BY AMAZON BY AMAZON they could not find. Finding out Amazon wanted me to purchase even more equipment to have two devices communicate that should was capitalism at its most disgusting.I choose to return this speaker, MADE BY AMAZON AT AMAZON. You’d think it would be the fastest return.Wrong.. Over a week now waiting for just ~$30 as it was on payment.This entire experience has been a nightmare of customer service and ignorance of what they ask of us when Amazon fails with little actual care from them.——————————————I purchased this hoping to pair it directly with my new 75 inch Omni series Amazon brand Fire TV.I was not paying attention to the small print when I read the compatibility chart for this speaker. When you only look at the chart the chart indicates that it should pair directly with the Amazon Omni series Fire TV. Only when you scroll to the very bottom of the page is there the small print that it actually requires a separate Echo attendance speaker to connect to to use it at all.This left me with the choice of having the lower quality sound from the Amazon Echo attendant speakers, which I would now have to purchase separately as well as two if I wanted stereo sound from my home theater using the Amazon Sub.I cannot in any right mind give this more than two stars for these reasons. Honestly I haven’t even been able to use the subwoofer in any effectiveness. To get the same quality of sound or better that the speakers in the Amazon brand Omni series Fire TV gives I would also have to purchase the most expensive Amazon brand Echo attendant speaker, the Amazon Studio.I truly hope to come back and update this review after Amazon updates both the speaker and the TV so that they can connect directly to each other as they are both Amazon Fire brands and both fully Alexa enabled.. oh yeah, the TV is fully Alexa enabled and can listen and perform functions even when it is turned off.There is no reason this Amazon sub should not pair independently and directly with the Amazon brand fire televisions. This is a scandalous and poor move by Amazon to force people who are already spending $1,000 on a 75 in TV to just keep buying more Amazon products. A very clever bait and switch marketing scheme.