Customer Ratings & Reviews

Bose performance and quality sound but for the price point, I was expecting a longer battery life. All in all I would buy it again. 4.5 of 5 stars (for the poor battery life)

The Bose SoundLink Max rechargeable portable speaker, simply to say, lives up to Bose quality and sound. Packaging - great packaging and visual setup instructions Design - strong quality build that is small enough to carry around but feels sturdy and tough enough to last through daily use and listening on the go. The speaker is metal with a rubber skin to protect it from bumps and drops. The layout of buttons is simple and straight forward. The carrying handle is soft but strong and seems like it will hold up for the long term. It looks cool with the corded handle with rubberized grip. The size is also large enough to pack great sound with speakers on the front and sides. It is also waterproof to a point so you can take it outside and not worry about it getting wet when it rains or by the pool. Connectivity - Bluetooth is quick to connect but also provides a mini phone jack for direct connection if needed. A USB charger is included but also you can charge your phone with the same port when you are away and your phone gets low battery. Controls - Buttons are provided for power, volume, pause/play, input source and shortcut. Sound - Great sound that is full and room filling and seems to provide sound that a much larger speaker would provide. Great bass which sounds like a subwoofer is built-in. It gets really loud when you need it for outside listening with good treble and midrange. The midrange provides really good voice quality to better understand the words. It also sounds great at lower volumes. The quality sound is Bose good. Bose App - you can control the EQ settings for bass, midranges and treble through the app. You can also control the speaker volume, pause/play and switch input sources. You can create shortcuts to play from Spotify or to switch to audio line in.

#1 feature about this speaker is that it’s waterproof. Pictures are worth a thousand words so they speak for themselves. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I had this strapped to my bag and accidentally dropped it into the river for like 30 seconds while kayaking, but to my surprise it was still playing the entire time. The name micro is misleading because it fits perfectly in my palm and sound quality is solid. Sound starts fading out at peak so best to keep volume below 80-85% to keep it crisp and balance. It has better than average bass for a speaker this size, but don’t expect too much out of it. I like the durable tear resistant strap and the outer shell design. So far, I haven’t encountered any problem with strapping it to my bag or bike, but to the on the safe side I would loop another strap around it because it’s not a cheap speaker and I wouldn’t want to lose it. Batter life has been great for me ranging ~5 hours continuously playing. Make sure to download Bose Connect to get the best out of it because it offers “party mode” in which you can connect multiple speakers together. Unfortunately, I am the only one in my group that has this speaker so I don’t get to use this functionality, yet.

I believe this is one of the best portable speakers I’ve ever had. I’ve always brought Bose products.

This little speaker is great. I like to use it while riding my bike. I attach it to my handlebars and roll out. It’s loud and has good full sound considering the size.

This fairly little speaker puts out awesome sound, especially bass. Not at all surprising from Bose. The speaker isn’t tiny like the Bose Soundlink Mini II, and the sound is actually slightly better. Being probably three times the size of the Mini II, it is still very portable. Extremely portable in fact with the very comfortable built-in (but interchangeable) handle. It is heavier than I anticipated, but my guess is that is why it delivers bass that is deep and rich, comparable to many speakers way bigger than this one is. It doesn’t end with the bass. The speaker has incredible midrange and treble also. Turned all the way up there is no sound distortion that I detected. It has the ordinary Bluetooth control buttons (see picture) with an extra shortcut button (more later on that). It utilizes the Bose Music App which is a huge benefit as I can control it from the same place I do other Bose speakers. With the app, you can change the input source and customize the equalizer (or use four preprogrammed equalizer presets). The shortcut button is disappointing. You can turn it on and off or program it from the app. But there are ONLY TWO options for it. Those are to use the auxiliary (3mm) jack or Spotify. The shortcut button is pretty much worthless for those of us who don’t use Spotify. Not sure why Bose didn’t make other services such as iHeart, Apple Music, etc. available with the shortcut bar. It charges with a standard USB C to USB C cable and comes with its own power brick. So far battery life has been amazing. I haven’t actually timed the battery life but have played it all day long without draining the battery. The tips in the app suggest it is water resistant, as they show how to remove moister and dry the speaker. I didn’t read anything elsewhere about it being water resistant. I don’t plan on testing this out. However, it will be going to the beach a lot. I have several Bose speakers and just like the others, this one definitely delivers. Again, the sound is amazing for a smaller portable speaker. I very highly recommend this speaker for anyone looking for a quality, higher end, portable Bluetooth speaker.

It's a GREAT portable speaker the quality of the sound and the loudness is remarkable they can hear me coming 5 cars away AWESOME!!!!!!!

Good sound and quality for the lightweight dpeaker

Terrible purchase. Wasted $400. The Power button is FLIMSY and WEAK. I pressed the button too hard and heard the plastic break and fall into the speaker. Now it is un-usuable. There is also no remote or automatic bluetooth turn on functionality so now the speaker has become a brick. I only owned it for 7 months. And trying to replace it with BOSE now, the serial number is printed so poorly they cannot recognize the ID. Please don’t waste your money and time with this poorly made product.

It sounds so nice for such a small speaker love it

Love love the beautiful sound with this Bose speaker. Bose is always a good purchase!

Bose Rock's Bose a very good company I recommended to anyone going to get the speaker it's a very good speaker

Amazing battery life, sound is great. Light weight. Easy to carry even in the pockets.

These are my best portable speakers I’ve ever bought. Much louder than I remember testing them at the store and the connected is easy. It stays next to my bedroom window. Definitely thinking of getting a second one.

This small speaker performs exactly to the expectations of what Bose has always been. Great sound quality.

Excellent compact travel speaker with very good sound quality

The Bose SoundLink Max is the latest iteration to the SoundLink family, a well respected line up of portable Bluetooth speakers. Does this one live up the name, and as its own name suggests, provide the Maximum experience? Lets take a listen and find out. The packaging is clean and straightforward, with an emphasis on minimal use of plastic or Styrofoam. Refreshingly, the speaker comes with both a USB-C cable and a high wattage charger, bucking a recent trend of not including chargers with products. Other than those two items, some basic documentation, and the speaker, there is nothing else in the box. The speaker itself looks like a grown up version of the SoundLink Flex. It has side grilles for the passive radiators, a set of buttons on the top, and the carrying handle. It’s an understated design with no flashing lights or other gimmicks, which is what a speaker should be, in my opinion. The Blue Dusk color is very on trend and looks great. Inside, the speaker features two woofers and a tweeter, and does support stereo sound, which is nice to not have to link two smaller speakers together. It also supports Bluetooth 5.4, finally moving the line away from the older Bluetooth 4 standards. Another nice include is an analog audio input, letting you connect it to any number of devices, like a turntable if you are hopping on the vintage audio trend of late. You can also use the battery in the speaker to reverse charge your phone or other device by plugging it into the USB-C port. I do wish there were dust covers on the ports to keep sand and liquids out of them, especially the aux input port. If you are going to take it outside you might want to get a couple of dust plugs for the ports to keep stuff out of there. After charging the speaker the recommendation is to connect it and use the Bose app to configure things like the EQ, apply any product updates, and customize the shortcut button. Weirdly, the shortcut button right now has just two options – configure it to switch to the line in input, or be kind of an oddly hacked up interface only for Spotify. I left it at input switching. You don’t have to use the Bose app if you don’t want to, but a few controls do require connecting it to the app from time to time. After connecting, it’s time for a listen. It’s immediate that this by far has the most bass of any SoundLink speaker to date. It’s not room shaking, as there are limits to the size and power of a portable speaker, but it is present for sure. It also has a very wide stereo sound stage, remarkably so for a smaller speaker, especially at the sweet spot of about 4-5 feet away. Bose is claiming they are using some of their virtual surround enhancements normally reserved for a soundbar in here, and there is kind of an uncanny depth to some audio tracks that does sound more like a surround sound setup than just stereo. It may also lead to kind of an overprocessed sound on occasion, with Charle Puth’s “Left and Right” (which I used to test the stereo separation) having an oddly distorted sound at some moments in the drums. This could either be an issue with the track’s encoding or how the speaker is processing it, and Bose may still be working the kinks out of how their sound processing works with this specific speaker. I found the speaker with the default EQ to be a little bright and actually a little lacking in bass when used outside. I tuned the EQ to +5 bass and -2 treble to find what I found to be a more balanced sound. It can get SUPER loud at full volume. Overall, it sounds good, which at this premium price point, it should. As anyone with other SoundLink speakers know, one feature of the SoundLink family is the ability to link SoundLink speakers together in a “party mode” to spread sound around a space. Sadly, this speaker, despite the name SoundLink, does not actually link to any of its SoundLink cousins. In fact, it uses the Bose app, not the Bose Connect app, so it sits outside of the SoundLink line and only seems to share the name and the look. That said, this speaker is quite capable of filling a space with sound on its own, and having stereo means you don’t need two speakers linked together for stereo sound. You can link it to some other Bose smart speakers as well, but it's still a little odd that the SoundLink Max can’t link to the other SoundLink speakers. Overall, this is an expensive, premium portable speaker that punches well above its size. Showing up at a party with it or using it when you have guests over will almost certainly get comments about how much sound is coming out of this still relatively compact package. Portable, modern Bluetooth and charging capabilities, and still having an analog input make for a well rounded speaker that will keep your party rocking for hours.

This speaker's sound is elite. The battery is ok but after just 5 months the sound is distorted and crackling speakers. I'm sad.

I own several Bluetooth speakers but this one Takes The Cake, specs say 6hr batt. life but I get twice that at least, plays for a constant 10hr shift, and most of the next, I Love This Thing

Its handy and have a good sound on it the battery last long too..