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With their "The One" Bluetooth speaker, Klipsch has created a piece of audio gear that stands apart from the rest.
Instead of relying on fancy gimmicks or superfluous features, The One is almost refreshingly bare-bones.
It does one thing — play music over Bluetooth or a cable — and it does it well.
While I'll spend most of my review telling you about this speaker's audio capabilities, it'd be a disservice not to start with its design. It's a beautiful piece of equipment that's well crafted and easy to use.
The speaker's wooden frame and golden controls make it an aesthetic slam dunk regardless of your decor. It's a far cry from the typical plastic or rubber speakers I'm used to testing, and I instantly enjoyed just having it in my apartment. Setting the speaker up took no time at all; it automatically started searching for my phone when I first turned it on, and it paired instantly.
If you've been looking for a Bluetooth speaker that delivers room-filling sound, this is it.
I'm still amazed at how loud this speaker can get, and although there's some audio degradation at ear-impairing volumes, that's to be expected from almost any speaker.
In my testing, the audio quality varies a little bit, but it's mostly stellar; it's definitely a higher-end speaker than I'm used to testing, which justifies its higher-than-average price tag. More intricate elements in songs, like the Indian percussion and sitar in The Beatles song "Within You Without You" came through very clearly. The acoustic guitars and vocals in Oasis's "Talk Tonight" were also very rich-sounding, as were the horns on Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers' "Moanin.'"
Where the audio quality of the speaker fell down is when I played music that was clearly mixed with a pair of traditional speakers in mind. This isn't a big problem if you primarily listen to music from the last 15 or 20 years, but it can be a problem if you're a fan of music created earlier than that. It's not Klipshch's fault, and the songs I played all sounded good. But in some cases, they sounded a little congested. Because of the way the speaker is built — a single unit — there's no way to experience true stereo separation.
With that caveat out of the way, I can still recommend this speaker to almost anyone who cares about audio and only wants one speaker in their home. It isn't waterproof, highly portable, and doesn't support high-res, but Klipsch made a good-looking, great-sounding, high-end Bluetooth speaker.
If aesthetics and audio quality matter to you, your search for your next speaker might start and end here.
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