There’s still room for improvement in the sonic and streaming service department, but right now it shapes up to be a good value option for those who are after the whole works. It’s a comfortable listen – insightful and clean – and while it may favour a club beat, doesn’t turn its nose up to the more folksy sound of a man and his guitar. With the exception of Trueplay, the Sonos and Bose app experience are pretty similar. One important difference between the apps is the integrated services each system supports. Supported Services Experience your favorite music from one or many SoundTouch® speakers, with the SoundTouch® app. SoundTouch® is a family of wireless speakers for your home that play the same music throughout, or different music in different rooms. They both have embedded OLED displays in the center that show connection and music data. Manual control consists of six physical preset buttons, AUX input, and a power button. The presets can be assigned to six favorites of your choice, perhaps your iTunes library, a Spotify playlist, or your favorite radio station. This is an excellent feature that will save you the trouble of taking out your phone every time you want to play something specific.

But if you want the added convenience and functionality of multi-room and wi-fi as well, the SoundTouch 20 III is a more pertinent choice – not to mention a better proposition than its predecessors offered a year or two ago. A tiny tab on the right leads you to the options, where you can browse for music. You can also add extra SoundTouch devices for a multi-room system.And if you’ve bought into the whole Apple ecosystem, you may like the system’s network integration. With the Bose SoundTouch speakers, you have to use the app if you want to program internet radio stations to the preset buttons on the top of the speaker. When Bose first introduced their SoundTouch lineup, they had to be initially set up by plugging the speakers into a computer, configuring them, and then placing them in your home. Now set up can be completely done through the app. Content comes from whatever device you’re using for control, or from networked computers. Web-based streaming is limited to Pandora and internet radio stations. When you set up your first Sonos speaker, it will use your home's Wi-Fi to create its own, dedicated wireless network called SonosNet. This wireless system exists outside of your home's Wi-Fi and is the primary method your Sonos system will use to communicate with other speakers in the system and to stream music. SonosNet will reduce congestion on your home Wi-Fi, and will allow you to easily add additional speakers, making it simple to expand your home audio system.

The Bose SoundTouch 20 is a mixed bag. We like the idea of preset buttons, and being able to play our networked library with relative ease.In theory, you can plug in an iOS device or computer and just transfer your current settings over, but this didn’t work for us. The audio performance is good, but not amazing. Sound is clear and volume is never an issue, going louder than you’d ever need it to without hardening. To set up the SoundTouch 20, you need to plug it into your computer through the included micro USB cable and run the SoundTouch app. It's an incredibly simple process that walked me through configuring the speaker to access my Wi-Fi network, registering my iTunes library, and setting up my Pandora account. It was painless, but there was no option to set up the SoundTouch 20 wirelessly with my iPad. The Bose SoundTouch 20 adds additional features over the entry-level SoundTouch 10 while still offering exceptional, room-filling, audio. The design of the SoundTouch 20's speaker casing naturally produces punchy bass balanced through the high and midrange frequencies pushing through the SoundTouch's transducers. This means you end up hearing clean bass and warm high and mid-range frequencies. Once connected, the SoundTouch software is basic across all platforms, but easy to navigate. The default-screen is the same six numbers that you find on the main unit.

The Sonos App will allow you to set up and manage new speakers as you expand your system. If you are using an iOS device, you can use Sonos Trueplay (which is built in to the iOS app) and it will use your device's microphone to calibrate your speakers for optimum performance in whatever room you set up your Sonos. Keep in mind, though, Trueplay is only available on iPhone and iPad. The main difference comes in the app experience, and specifically, the way the apps integrate paid music streaming services. Sonos has a much larger offering of supported platforms to stream music through their app. Bose only has a handful currently, however, you can access internet radio stations right from the speaker after you've configured the speaker's preset buttons, which could be appealing to some users.Our major issue is the bass. The SoundTouch 20 is capable of diving right down to the depths, but the sound isn’t balanced.