I bought two of these to pair them with my apple tv. While they seem to work very well now, I spent hours on setup. There are several issues that may not be important to many people, but they made me regret my choice:
1. The first time you activate them (plug them in and bring your iPhone/iPad close), you are forced to connect them to the same wifi as those devices. They automatically take any IP they want and there is no room for customization.
2. You are required to enable Apple Home and by default, they suggest that you constantly listen in order to ask Siri for things. Goodbye privacy.
3. I thought I could block the things I don't like with a firewall and continued. Be careful though, if you don't know networking, it's like having a wiretap in your home by default.
4. When I connected the second one, it asked if I wanted to make them a stereo set. I said yes and they got stuck in a configuration loop.
5. Finally, searching online, I did a factory reset and connected them to my laptop (they have a USB-C cable). I did a 3.5GB firmware update that took a while to install. Luckily, I had a Mac because with Linux, I had no future.
From that point on, they were recognized by the apple tv and I had the experience you expect from an apple product (in a good way). They don't have Spotify Connect, but the apple tv does, so personally, I don't care. They also sound very nice in stereo mode.
Overall, I can say that I was very disappointed with the above and it required some network configuration on the part of my other systems:
- I set up DHCP reservations for their MAC addresses (edit: useless, see below)
- I connected the iPhone and the apple tv to the same network
- Various additional routing and firewall things to integrate them the way I want in my network and to have privacy.
However, the sound quality is very good. I can say it's excellent. I give it 3 stars to be fair, as many people are not concerned about the above. I replaced wired speakers that were much more expensive and the sound may be even better.
I don't think I would have bought them if I knew all of this.
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Edit after a couple of months:
Did you see what I wrote above about MAC address reservations? Apple, because apparently it's a device that you take to multiple networks, randomizes the MAC address to confuse you a little more. One way to give it the IP you want is to set up RADIUS or some kind of authentication. Another way to go a little more high level (done by unifi, not well by pfsense) is to assign the IP to what your router thinks the device is (based on the hostname, I think, but I was already tired and didn't look it up), without MAC address binding. RIDICULOUS.
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Another edit for apple fanboys:
Thank you for the downvotes, but if you buy everything Apple releases without question, they will never improve their products. It is unacceptable in 2023 to not be able to set basic network parameters (and privacy parameters) on a device in your own home.
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