iLive Concierge Wireless Alexa Enabled WiFi Speaker (ISWFV387G) Review

iLive Concierge Wireless Alexa Enabled WiFi Speaker (ISWFV387G) Review

Buy it at Amazon: iLive Concierge Wireless Alexa Enabled WiFi Speaker (ISWFV387G) [Affiliate Link]

Takeaway: Works great for Alexa features, sound quality is decent, but could be better.

The Concierge speaker comes with a male-to-male audio cable, a microUSb cable, and instruction manual. This speaker looks similar to the Amazon Echo but is a little bit smaller. It measures 7" tall and has a 2.75" diameter. The speaker weighs just under 1 pound. The housing is made of plastic with a twill fabric wrapped around the grill. The Concierge is compatible with Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa which you can set to listen for voice activated commands. Setting up the speaker on your home WiFi network is wquick and easy using the iLive app. Make sure you're connecting to a 2.4 GHz band network because it currently does not support 5 GHz connections. The speaker automatically reconnects to the WiFi network each time it is powered on and switched into WiFi mode.

In the app, you can change the settings for the speaker. If you log into your Amazon account you should be able to access Alexa features. The speaker is always listening when it's on, even if it's not pluffed in. This tends to drain the battery quickly and it'll last about 5 hours at 50% volume on a full charge. In the app, you can see how much battery is remaining for the speaker. You can also mute the mic by pressing the second button on the control panel on the speaker. This also saves a little bit of battery. If you have a second iLive speaker, you can sync multiple speakers together for multi-room playback with a simple drag-and-drop. I found that the synced connection perfectly aligned the music playback so that there was no lag or delay between the outputs from the speakers. You can set each speaker to play only the left or right for a true stereo experience.

The app also lets you stream from a handful internet radio stations like Pandora, TuneIn, IHeartRadio, and Spotify, although you'll need a premium subscription to stream Spotify. You can save any of the stations for any service to the speaker by clicking the speaker icon and then selecting a preset content slot. You can save up to 10 total stations.

The sound from the speaker is pretty good but not spectacular. The balance is weighted towards the trebles and mid-bass but there isn't a ton of bass or low bass present in the mix to balance it out. As a result the mid-ranges get a little bit lost making the sound less full. At the loudest volume, there's some distortion from the housing vibrating and the quality overall is a bit boxy. It's likely that the fabric layer softens and somewhat dulls the sound giving it a muffled quality rather than the clean, crisp audio I was hoping for. You can also stream to the speaker using Bluetooth or Aux-in with the included wire. However, with Bluetooth I found the connection to be somewhat unreliable with occasional dropped connections and garbled blips. These issues were not present using a wired connection.

Overall, the Concierge does a decent job with the Internet of Things functions. I like that I can sync multiple speakers to play the same music and control different devices on my home network using the always listening Alexa service. It's also nice that there's an internal battery, and I can move the unit from room to room and still access Alexa. The audio quality and Bluetooth connection reliability could be a bit better, but it gets the job done.

Buy it at Amazon: iLive Concierge Wireless Alexa Enabled WiFi Speaker (ISWFV387G) [Affiliate Link]