Bluesound Pulse Flex Smart Speaker (White/Tan)

I bought the Bluesound Pulse Flex speaker to listen to music in the kitchen. The unit is very easy to set up with the Bluesound app that you have to download. Control from your phone is easy and streaming connectivity is stable. The main feature I was looking for was Roon compatible as this allows me to play all my owned music stored from my old CDs, music from my streaming service (Qobuz in this case) and use Roon’s discovery feature to find music I might like. The speaker is excellent value at £279 that I paid for it.

Top Produkt

Wow! This thing can really kick out some sound! The box was pretty hefty. As any audiofile would know the heavier, the speakers, the more the punch On an audio device that is basically just two speakers the heavier it is means the larger the magnets are on the speakers. The sound is very, very clear even at high volume. We placed ours in our living room and it fills the adjacent kitchen and entry hallway loud and clear. Clear highs mids, and lows, which is great. And no cheap thumping bass. You can hear bass as the instrument that’s playing the bass not just thumping. It’s a cool black sort of contoured shape in a tight rugged feeling fabric texture. Very few buttons, which makes it very nice. On top there’s the ‘on’ indicator light that is the Play/Pause button when pushed. This is ringed by four simple arrows. They are just the same soft texture, barely visible, which is nice. The up arrow is volume up. The down arrow is volume down and the left and right arrows are Previous Track and Next Track. It’s pretty simple and when the Pulse is on, that top little light is a really nice dark blue. That may sound dumb, but when it’s the only light in the room, its a nice color. One thing that is really strange is that when you plug it in it is on there is no off button so it’s permanently on with the light on. On the back, there are a number of different ways to connect. Everything from a Cat5 line to an old-fashioned audio jack. The thing is very cool looking and very well made and well balanced. It came with a couple of instruction manuals (quick start and a more involved manual) to get the most out of it. Although you can control it manually, using the BluOS app on your phone gives you a lot more control of everything, obviously. This has a lot more functionality than using the buttons. The Pulse is pre-loaded with more music services than I ever even knew existed and then once you click on yours, it basically just hooks to that app that’s already on your phone One of the things that I think is the coolest is that it is a modular system. You can have one speaker and everything is fine and you can add a second speaker and through the BluOS app on your phone, connect them and set them as a “Stereo Pair“ and boom, stereo. You can continue to add other units to other rooms just by ‘adding more devices’. Built into the really neat little package is Bluetooth APTX HD, which allows you to stream through your Wi-Fi network lossless quality! That is fantastic! It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it for the quality of sound it puts out! Yeah…VERY happy with the Pulse.

This is the version of the speaker that was released in late 2025. I got the tan/white color, which looks very nice. Set-up took about 20 minutes. You have to download the BluOS app, and the app connects the speaker to your wifi. The app also controls many settings, since only the most basic functions are controlled by on-speaker buttons. After power on, the app automatically found the speaker and added it to my network. Then it prompted me for a firmware update, which took more than 10 minutes, and I walked away to do something else. A couple of times during this whole setup/networking/firmware update process, there was a failure or interruption and I had to start that step over again, but I never had to redo a step more than twice, so at no point did I get frustrated. I'm only using this speaker with AirPlay, which was seamless. I also wanted to test the USB A input with an HDD that has a large library of music files, and after plugging that in, the app showed that it was scanning the library. However, it's almost 2TB, so it was taking a long time and I wanted to unplug the speaker and move it to a different room, so I cancelled the scan. But with AirPlay, audio played smoothly from Apple Music, Safari browser, YouTube Music, and the YouTube video app. The one source that didn't work was the Overcast podcast app on my iPhone. For some reason, when I hit play it would either stall or stutter and stop, and I could never get it to work no matter how many times I tried. There are many more music source options that you can add in the app, but I didn't try them. The sound is good, but seems to emphasize the midrange. The high frequencies are slightly less prominent and less detailed than with my iPad's speakers, my studio monitors, or my floor-standing speakers. The bass is also less prominent than some other similar speakers I've heard, which makes for a more balanced sound. The app also has a tone control that lets you adjust the highs or lows with sliders (so 2-band equalizer) plus or minus 6dB, and it also has a Loudness setting that the app calls Front Row. The sound is just fine for my use-case, which is a kitchen speaker to play while cooking or doing the dishes. Some of the biggest differentiators of this speaker are the connectivity options, which include USB C and A (with server capabilities), Toslink, Ethernet, and 3.5mm analog jack, and integration with the Bluos/Bluesound ecosystem. So I think people who need several different physical connection options, want to play local or networked music files, or already have other BluOS devices would benefit most from this speaker. Someone like me who's only going to use AirPlay or Bluetooth and don't have a multi-device BluOS set-up would probably be better off spending this not cheap amount of money on something else, since I'm not going to use the special features that differentiate it from other Bluetooth/AirPlay speakers.