I’ve had the Belkin Soundform Elite Hi-Fi speaker for almost 2 weeks now. This is the first Google Assistant speaker I have seen out of Belkin, but they are not new to the smart home game (Wemo). This speaker comes in at a premium price that rivals that of the Google Home Max. However, the Soundform Elite has the extra feature of a wireless charging dock.
Design
The Soundform measures in at about 6.5” in all directions. It comes with a little bit of heft mostly -located in the bottom where the woofer is located. The shape and design reminds me of the UE Wonderboom speaker, albeit in a much larger size. It has a similar rounded shape and comes wrapped in a fabric mesh. The speaker has no physical buttons, but does have a touch sensitive panel with your standard controls – Bluetooth (pairing), volume ±, play/pause, and mic mute. Atop the speaker is an angled cradle with a rubberized surface – this is the 10W Qi wireless fast charger.
I had somewhat of a tough time sussing out the internal details of the speaker. The most informative source ended up being from Belkin’s partner on the sound side - Devialet. A couple of other review sites helped fill out the details. The Soundform has a 3 speaker setup – a single 35mm full range speaker, and (2) 70mm woofers. The 35mm fires straight ahead and is positioned just behind the 4 LED lights of the Google Assistant. The 2 woofers fire out either side in Devialet’s signature push-push setup which minimizes/cancels out vibrations in the speaker housing. I will admit that I had not heard of Devialet prior to getting this speaker, but it becomes apparent that this company knows what they are doing once you take a peak at their lineup. The 3 speaker setup doesn’t quite give you 360° sound, but it does cast a wide sound stage.
The only port on the Soundform is the molded power connecter slot on the bottom. There are no USB charging ports, or 3.5mm AUX. So its wireless or nothing.
Setup and Connecting
Setting up the speaker was pretty easy. It apparently has a strong Wi-Fi receiver as I was able to set it up and connect it fairly far from the nearest router. There’s no app for the speaker, unlike Belkin’s Wemo products, so the setup is done through the Google Home App. If you have multiple phone users in your house, make sure to add them to the Household under the Google Home app or else they won’t be able to cast to the speaker from their phone. You can also connect to the speaker via Bluetooth, which is great for guest phones or devices that don’t support Chromecast/Wi-Fi casting.
A quick note about audio quality. Bluetooth has a lot of compression and just isn’t the best (or even capable) for listening to full resolution Hi-Fi music. Same with most streaming services. Spotify premium does a good job, and doesn’t sound lossy. Deezer is the only service I have used that supports Hi-Fi music casting over. I’m sure there’s others, but it makes me sad that there’s no AUX because I have a phone with Hi-Fi quad DAC’s (LG V40).
Performance
The speaker has 3 areas that I looked at, as far as performance goes. How it functioned as a Wi-Fi/BT speaker, as a Google Home device, and as a wireless charger.
As far as a wireless speaker goes – pretty good. It’s not the best I have heard but it’s no slouch (I think the Google Home Max, and Sonos One have a bit better sound from my experience). Sound quality out of the Soundform is crisp. It never sounds muddy or tinny across the spectrum. The highs and lows on the speaker were really well balanced. I thought with 2 active woofers the bass would be overpowering, but its right where you want it – a good amount of bump and rumble. The push-push setup works quite well. You’d expect some vibration out of the speaker but its rock solid. Like I said the highs were really good as well and had good presence – never had any static, clipping, or crackling. This helped keep the music bright and not sound shallow. The only area I thought could be improved was the mids. They just weren’t as strong as I would have liked. Rock, metal, alternative kind of suffer a bit because of it. I’d hedge a bet that the single full range speaker is to blame here. If it was a speaker and separate tweeter then the mids could be tuned in better. One speaker covering the whole range is really tough and you always have to make compromises. If you plan to listen to Pop, rap/hip hop, electronic, etc where the bass and highs are the most important then I don’t think you will really notice this as much. And its not that big of a detractor here because the bass and highs were great, its just that the mids are average.
You would be hard pressed to find another speaker with as good of clarity at volume. This speaker is loud, and still sounds great without any sign of overdriving the speakers. This is right on par with the Google Home Max and Sonos One. The difference being the sound stage. Those speakers are more directional, whereas the Soundform is pushing sound in 3 directions to broaden things a bit more. I really don’t set the speaker above 4 (out of 10). At this level it completely fills a medium sized room and spreads throughout my upstairs. At max volume I can hear the speaker outside of my house.
Performance as a Google Home device is important to me. I love my little Google Home Mini’s. I have 16 light bulbs, 8 switches, thermostat, and door lock to control so having the assistant work well is crucial. My Mini’s are responsive and process my requests fairly quickly. I also have the Lenovo smart clock – it is slow to process in comparison (by several seconds). I am happy to see that the Soundform did not have the same limitations as my clock, and it performed better than my Mini’s. The mics do a great job of picking up my voice, and I don’t have as many false prompts with it as I do my mini’s. My son is named Cooper, so sometimes when I call out “hey Cooper” it will prompt my mini’s. The Soundform didn’t get tripped up by this nearly as often. I am very pleased with it as a Google Assistant device.
The charger performance is the last on the list. I had just picked up my LG V40 when the Soundform came in. This is my first wireless charging enabled phone so I was excited to try it out. On a regular wall outlet charger (a Qualcomm 3.0 fast charger) it takes around an hour to fully charge my phone. I know wireless induction charging is slower, and it used to only be practical for overnight charging or keeping your phone topped off while you are at a desk working. This is mostly still true, but the 10W charger could bring my phone up from 3% to fully charged in about 3 hours. That’s only a little bit slower than if I used a standard wall charger (not a 3.0 fast charger). Phones used to take 4+ hours to get that much battery life, and that was on smaller batteries. I also didn’t have any issue charging my phone in a case, which is where my timing came from. It might be faster without a case, but that’s never going to be a use case for me. Also, the lack of vibration by the push-push setup really comes into play when charging.
Other Thoughts
There were a couple of things I didn’t care for about the speaker. I’ve already mentioned the lack of AUX 3.5mm jack. It limits you to only being able to use newer, streaming compatible equipment. Legacy media players are out.
The lack of an app is unfortunate. You just have to have a solid built in equalizer in your phone if you want to cast from your phone library via Bluetooth. Also means you will need to setup a streaming server like Plex if you want to pull music from your PC.
The power supply is huge. Why does it have to be proportioned like this? It covers the adjacent outlet on the wall depending on how you plug it in. Even worse on some power strips. It’s bigger than the old iPhone/iPod charger brick.
Overall, this is a really solid setup. It combines a Google Assistant, Wi-Fi/BT speaker, and Qi charger into a single package. There’s nothing else like it on the market, so I find it to be pretty innovative.
