A wireless speaker with minimalist looks and multi-room features
LG, best known for its range of TVs, is now branching out into speakers. The company’s Music Flow H3 is the kind of compact wireless speaker you can tuck neatly out of the way in cluttered or cramped spaces, such as your kitchen or a small bedroom.
It might be small, but the H3’s has an attractive, minimalist appearance that oozes class. Its controls are handily positioned on top and comprise a volume dial and a power button. The speaker’s cabinet has a metallic look, but is in fact plastic, it nonetheless feels tough and well made.
Unlike most speakers, there’s no standard 3.5mm audio port. Instead, you connect your PC, MP3 player, smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Ethernet or LG’s own wireless technology (more on this later). Connecting via Bluetooth can be fiddly, but you can use NFC to simplify this process, as long as your smartphone has both built in. When we tapped our NFC-equipped phone against the side of the speaker, a Bluetooth connection was quickly established between the two.
Once it’s up and running, you use the Music Flow app (available for iOS, Android and Windows) to stream music to the H3. The app also supports streaming services such as Napster, Tuneln and Deezer, but not Spotify. If you use the latter, you will need to use Spotify’s official app instead, but only the mobile app will work and you’ll need to be a Spotify Premium subscriber (£9.99 a month).
This lack of Spotify support is disappointing, but the Music Flow app still has plenty going for it If you’re struggling to connect the H3 to your Wi-Fi network, the app provides clearly illustrated instructions. The app can also play music stored on your computer or NAS.
But what does it sound like? Sadly, overall audio quality is disappointing. The H3 sounds flat, suffering from a weak bass and lack of detail In delicate instrumental tracks, so to hear it at its best you need to stand directly in front of it. It’s not all bad though - vocals are crystal clear and the H3 is surprisingly loud for a speaker of its size, although the sound did begin to distort when the volume approached its upper limit.
The H3 is one of the few speakers to support high-resolution audio, though it’s restricted to WAV and FLAG formats. The apparent superior sound quality of high-resolution audio is down to it being mastered to sound as close to the original studio recordings as possible. The distinction can be hard to make out even using other much better quality speakers than this, and we were unable to tell the difference between high-resolution files and standard MP3s, particularly given the H3’s mediocre audio quality.
You can create a multi-room speaker system by connecting multiple H3 speakers (or in combination with other speakers in the Music Flow range) using an LG Music Flow R1 Bridge. This creates a dedicated wireless network for the speakers, which should reduce the likelihood of audio dropouts. However, unlike Sonos’ speakers you can’t have different songs playing on different speakers.
Overall, the LG Music Flow H3 is a workmanlike wireless speaker. While it’s compact, attractive and easy to set up, the sound quality is disappointing. In comparison, Sonos’ speakers are more suited for multi-room use because of their flexibility - no longer needing a dedicated bridge device, for example. Moreover, Sonos’ cheapest speaker, the Play:1, is only slightly more expensive than the H3, but has significantly superior audio quality.
VERDICT: Not bad, but you can get better wireless speakers for only a little more money.
SPECIFICATIONS
1 x 10/100Mbps Ethernet port • Bluetooth • 802.11b/g/n • 175x125x115mm (HxWxD) • 2.3kg • Supports MP3, FLAC and WAV files