Philips Fidelio SoundRing

The Philips Fidelio SoundRing, a speaker system armed with Apple's wireless streaming AirPlay, uses its eye-catching circular design to fill a room with sound. Its front and back panels use identical pairs of full-range drivers, so whether you're in front or in back of the speaker, you ears have a direct line to the sound. Unfortunately, the $299.99 SoundRing distorts at high volumes, and generally behaves like a far less expensive speaker. The SoundRing ?is good-looking and offers quality audio at moderate volumes, but the inflated price tag is because of the AirPlay functionality, not because of the speaker system's audio performance.

Design
The SoundRing, like nearly all AirPlay docks, is black with chrome accents, and has very few controls. The donut-shaped speaker, which can be removed from its small, circular base that also acts as a stand, measures 8.3 by 7.6 by 4.5 inches (HWD) when sitting in the charging base. It's portable in a room-to-room sense, but it only works in AirPlay mode when undocked, and doesn't seem ideal for outdoor use?primarily because it needs access to your home Wi-Fi network to stream audio, and also because the black portions of the speaker are cloth, covering the array of four 1.5-inch drivers. When not docked in the stand, the speaker can still sit upright thanks to a flat lower panel.

A thin metallic band along the center of the speaker's top panel (when upright) houses the Power, Play/Pause, and Volume buttons. The back panel of the ring houses a USB port, a 3.5mm Aux input, and a Wi-Fi Setup button that, along with an LED on the front panel, underneath the black cloth, flashes different colors to indicate connection status. The SoundRing has no remote control, but comes with a 3.5mm audio connection cable and a power adapter.

The manual claims that if you've stopped any AirPlay streaming music and have nothing connected via USB to the rear port, the system automatically defaults to the 3.5mm Aux input. But there is no indicator for this, and our review unit didn't play nice with any device connected via 3.5mm. This is a design issue more than anything else?if you have multiple sound source options, you should have a source button like just about all of the competition has.

Performance
At moderate volumes, the Philips Fidelio SoundRing provides quality audio perfomance on tracks that don't challenge it with deep bass. Less heavy rock songs, classical and instrumental music, and other less bass-intense genres are delivered with a strong emphasis on midrange frequencies. The result is crisp, clean sound, and as long as deep bass doesn't enter the equation, the SoundRing sounds quite nice even at close to maximum volume, albeit not like a $300 system.

Trouble comes in the form of low frequencies. Even at about 75 percent volume, the Knife's "Silent Shout", a particularly bass-heavy track, distorts in ugly ways. At maximum volume, it sounds like the drivers are about to explode. This is clearly not a system for bass-lovers, but moreover, this distortion shouldn't be happening in this price range.

Sticking to less challenging tracks?in terms of low end?is the key to getting the most out of the SoundRing. John Adams' modern classical piece, "The Chairman Dances," benefits a little from the focus on mid-range frequencies. But much of the beautiful resonance of lower-register stringed instruments and percussion feels thin or absent on the SoundRing, while higher-frequency content, like wood block hits, is delivered cleanly and loudly.

If you don't listen to tracks with deep bass, the SoundRing will likely disappoint far less, but there are some usability issues as well. Aside from the aforementioned difficulty with listening to 3.5mm aux input sources (we had no trouble at all using the USB port to both charge and listen to an iPhone 4S), the setup process is a drag. We won't detail the process here, but it's tedious, and makes you do some back-end work in Safari that a free app could handle after you enter your Wi-Fi network's name and password. Much of the competition, like the Altec Lansing inAir 5000 Wireless AirPlay Speaker ($499.95, 4 stars), has opted to use an app instead?the resulting setup is usually more user-friendly, and typically much quicker. This is most likely a one-time annoyance, but worth noting.

To put it bluntly, the Philips Fidelio SoundRing sounds like a fantastic $150 speaker dock. The problem is, it costs twice that, and it doesn't provide a very polished experience. We've seen this before with the JBL OnBeat Air ($249.95, 3.5 stars)?speakers that have boosted prices because the inclusion of AirPlay technology is so costly. You end up with a speaker worth far less than the final, inflated price, at least in terms of audio quality. This isn't the case with all AirPlay docks, but the strongest systems, like the Klipsch Gallery G-17 Air ($549.99, 4 stars) and Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air ($599.95, 4 stars), have hefty prices that reflect the great internal speakers as well as the AirPlay functionality. For our money, the best wireless speaker system doesn't use AirPlay, however?the Bluetooth JBL OnBeat Xtreme ($499.95, 4.5 stars) is our current Editors' Choice.

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