Customer Ratings & Reviews

This speaker cranks with volume that easily reaches several rooms. Has powerful low end bass that you can turn off, with good mid and high ranges for a well rounded balance. Aesthetically the lighting is a fun touch. I chose it in store comparing it's sound directly with other brands. The speakers that beat it's sound quality cost more than double. I got it on sale at $79.00.

Spent more than an hour at the store listening/deliberating between Sony and Bose. Sony hands down won! Features like easy one touch pairing with my Samsung phone, long battery life, power bank charger, rubbery case is well made than Bose's plastic exterior, lights are awesome and classier compared to JBL's tacky lava-like lights and the SOUND is SUPERB!!! Was able to play it out of the box. Did not download the app, very satisfied with the quality of the sound. At max volume, sound frequencies like highs, mids and lows are maintained and does not get distorted thus I found no need to have an equalizer from the app. Always take into consideration the source ( Pandora, Spotify, Youtube, Mp3, etc ) you're getting the music from because it's crucial to the overall output of the sound. I listen to Pandora and recordings are consistently crisp, full and clear. Some sites have inferior recordings, no matter how much tweaking you do with an equalizer it will still produce an inferior, muffled and distorted sound. Another feature I've noticed is when paused for a considerable amount of time, it turns itself off. Compared to the XB40, XB30 IMO delivered a crispier, undistorted sound at max volume. XB40 was slightly louder, a given. Could not be happier with my choice. Growing up Sony was already a household name in quality and performance. With the proliferation of newer and good brands in the market today, Sony has retained its global reputation of excellence in electronics technology. Time spent at Best Buy wasn't wasted and was on sale. Lastly, the red is gorgeous! More like red orange.

This speaker can put out strong volume, bass, and overall sound quality. Long battery life span and it charges quite well (compared to certain speakers and even phones) If you want to listen to music differently and hear certain sounds only heard while wearing high quality headphones, this is a must buy for you!

Amazing sound!I love the speaker. It was easy to set up, the lights are fun, the sound is fantastic and you can daisychain several.

First off, this was a spontaneous buy for me. I usually am a JBL guy, but This speaker caught my eye, and ears. I checked it out in the store and the sound was incredible for such a small package, it's in a very nice looking case, 3 color choices, I got blue The sound is amazing, I have my phone and desktop synced up to it You can "daisychain" 10 of these badasses together I paid $99.00 for this, was $149.99 So I got a great speaker for a great price and how can you go wrong with SONY? They invented technology

I got this speaker on sale at the store, price-matched with the online price at BestBuy.com. I’ve been extremely happy with this product - the sound quality is great, and it isn’t a puny Bluetooth speaker like similarly priced ones I’ve had in the past. The battery life has been awesome too, I have no issues with this so far! Highly recommend if you need a durable Bluetooth speaker with high volume capabilities! :)

Look no more other than sony when shopping for bluetooth speakers. This speaker (xb30) outputs amazing sound with deep rich bass. The look and feel is well designed too. Do not let the price chase you away. Just don't. The battery last a long time even with the extra bass on along with the cool disco/strobe lights on as well. Looks beautiful during the day and epic at night.

This speaker is amazing. The sound is crisp, the bass is loud. I enjoy every moment of this Speaker and the lights are bright as well. The sickest think about this Speaker is the fact that you can add other speakers and have like a surround sound going.

This speaker is amazing! The sound is perfect and it’s super easy to set up! I love that you can change how the lights work and the extra bass to it. It’s got amazing sound to it.

Love the sound and bass from this music maker . I like the fact that I can connect two of these speakers together . The light show is fun and can be relaxing .

I give this speaker 5 starts actually going to buy one for my girlfriend for Christmas

Speaker is well made and solid. Sound is fantastic (I do have to admit I loved the sound). Lights are kind of gimicky but easily changed or shut off. Downside for me was the battery. Advertised as 24hrs of play time sucked me in. But I quickly learned that was not the case if you're planning any sort of volume. The charge lasted about 6 hrs at 80% volume. I learned later on that sonys help section about the product, in fine print, it says it will only last about 4 hours on full volume. Haha. This was purchased to last an entire shift at work for me. I ended up returning to store in exchange for another brand of wireless speaker with a bit bigger of a battery. Pros - great sound and solid speaker with plenty of features. Cons - battery life is short with any sort of volume.

This Sony XB30 Is Really Among The Best wireless Speakers available Today. Great Sound and With Lighting Show . Simply Beautiful!

Right after I paired the Sony Bluetooth portable speakers to my cell phone, I opened my music app. Without thinking, I pressed play.... holy cow, I should have turned the volume down on the phone! You'd swear the sound was coming out of my Sony AV amplifier and bookshelf speakers. Big bass, clear mid-tones and highs. Truly amazing sound. I paired the speakers and my phone with the phone's Bluetooth setup. Very easy. Then I read you can load the Sony NFC app and pair your device with NFC by just touching the phone to the center of the Sony speaker. Nice feature. This is the perfect addition for my Amazon Echo DOT. The unit is rechargeable so it's truly portable. The boom box sound for todays connected world. I can't wait to take it to the beach. The speaker's volume buttons control the player device's volume so be sure to turn down our phone before connecting. The LED ring glows with multi colors to your music with pulsing white lights for a dramatic visual splash.

I'm sorta a low key audiophile on a tight college student budget, so I did a lot of research on different speakers. It came down to this Sony xb30 and the JBL charge 3. While both are very similar, the JBL, although loud with good bass, sounds mudder compared to the Sony. At higher volume especially, the bass of the JBL distorts and degrades the overall sound quality. Sony, with its optional extra bass is much clearer and accurate. The sound quality is much more authentic and doesn't distort at higher volumes like the JBL. That doesn't mean that the Sony has less bass, it's just better balanced at higher volumes. Lows and mids are amazing. The bass is good for a small speaker. It's not water proof but water resistant, which is enough for me. The weight is heavier than I expected but it's not a problem at all. I usually keep the lights off while in use, but when I have friends over, they enjoy watching the light show. The battery is great too. Overall the Sony xb30 sound is fantastic and in my honest opinion better than the JBL charge 3. It's very impressive for it's size. It works great indoors and pretty good outdoors. THINGS TO KNOW: This speaker has a high quality Bluetooth receiver called an LDAC. It's compatible with my pixel 2 xl but should work with any Android phone running atleast oreo 8.0. To get the most out of the sound quality, download the Sony music center (SongPal) app. Then go into the settings and make sure to use the LDAC and set the playback quality to Prioritize Sound Quality. Also most music player apps have their files default at normal quality to save storage space. I suggest you go into your music player app settings and either stream or download music in the highest quality possible. If you do the things I just mentioned, you'll definitely get the most out of this awesome speaker. I would recommend this speaker to anyone. JBL gets all the hype but this Sony is hands down the better product

Good speaker. I'm happy with my selection. nice sound.

After a few minutes playing with SONY's new XB30, I knew I was in trouble. Too many nieces and nephews who would feel left out if I gifted any one of them and not any of the others with this truly fun music box. Great sound, immense power handling, colorful, bright, and wickedly cool. Took mere seconds to get my laptop connected to the SONY XB30. Hit play and Adam Levine was sounding big, bold and great filling my large family room on this rather pint-sized sound box. Disconnected it from my laptop, and pulled out my iPhone 6. Within minutes I was playing Feist with perfect sound quality. My iPhone offered to download a Sony App to further control the XB30, but it was not necessary. It does let me adjust the volume from the App so I don't need to go up to the Sony XB30, but so what. The SONY XB30 has a few special tricks. A double click of the play button skips you forward. A 3 click pattern jumps you backwards in the song. It will apparently tie together with multiple SONY devices of this special EXTRA BASS SERIES so the kids can have a really loud party. Yikes. Oh . . . and it's a L-I-G-H-T S-H-O-W. Yeah, it lights up like an 80s disco. Shrink that massive boom box from the 70s/80s into a milk carton size (quart!), double the volume, add a light show and it connects with whatever music library you have on your phone. Not bad. Not bad at all. I'm gonna need to get a few more of these. SUMMARY: If there is something I could bring back from a visit to the 1980s, it might be the totally frivolous spirit of musical fun embodied by boom boxes. Boom boxes, for the too-young-to-know, were portable, but powerfully loud, all-in-one stereos that could entertain your moving party. Sony brings back all of the fun and eliminates the unnecessary. The ubiquitous smart phone has all the music you could ever carry, and bluetooth links to Sony’s powerful speaker. Add to the mix a light show using LEDs creating little burden on your portable power, you’re ready to go.

Despite its best efforts to scare me off, I actually do like this speaker a lot. Unboxing the speaker two things immediately struck me. First, the speaker is smaller than I'd thought it would be based on the box (lots of packing materials to keep it safe). Second, the speaker feels surprisingly heavy given its size. It only weighs a little more than 2 pounds according to my kitchen scale, but it feels a lot heavier than that when you're holding it in your hand. I got the speaker in blue (one of my favorite colors). The blue is a duskier shade than I was expecting, but it's still pleasing to the eye. That being said, I do regret not having picked this up in black as it would have coordinated with my furniture better. The texture is lightly rubberized and purports to be water resistant. The front of the speaker bears an LED light ring that can be customized to hit a range of different colors. All of the speaker's ports are hidden behind a door on the back right-hand side. It came with a great big notice taped to it advising you to make sure that the door is shut when the unit is in use. I can only presume that this is to ensure the unit's water resistance as it seems to operate perfectly fine with the door wide open. A surprising addition to the ports is a traditional USB type A port. It should be noted that this port is for power output only and does not support power input or data transfer. The documentation says that the port is included to charge one's phone or tablet using the speaker. This is a nice addition, but it feels a little random to me. Turning it on proved to be the first stumbling block for this review. Following the instructions, I charged the device for four hours prior to attempting to use it. With the speaker still plugged into the wall, I pressed the power button . . . and nothing happened. I tried pressing it several times and got no response whatsoever. I worried that I might have received a defective unit, but unplugging the device from the wall and pressing the power button finally yielded results with the device promptly turning on. Oddly, this was the only time that I encountered this issue. I have since left it plugged in and pressed the power button, and it turns on right away. Charging proved to be another oddity with this device. Using it for about two hours, I was down to 75% battery according to the phone app that goes with this speaker. With the speaker still on, I plugged it in to see about charging it while using it. An hour later, the app still reported a battery status of 75%. I'm not sure whether this is a characteristic of the device itself or a glitch with the phone app. Pairing the device was simple enough on an android phone. I did have to turn my Bluetooth on and off to get it to show up, but I suspect that was the result of a bug on my phone and not with this speaker. The app that works with this speaker is a little too generic and lacks polish. This is where things start to go downhill. First, the big selling point for this speaker is its ability to wirelessly pair up and synchronize with other speakers from this series to create a stereo or surround sound effect. I couldn't test this as I only had a single speaker to work with. Sony really ought to consider selling these in multi-packs if they're going to make such a big deal of this capability. I knew from my own research prior to getting this speaker that this capability only works with other speakers from this series. You can't use other bluetooth speakers from other manufacturers or even other models of Sony speakers to do this. That being said, the language in the app is very vague and makes it sound like you can grab any old bluetooth speaker to create a wireless speaker network. Curious to see if this was actually the case, I grabbed a pair of bluetooth speakers from other manufacturers and attempted to pair them. Sadly, as expected, neither one of them would pair. Second, the app's control of the customizable LED light ring isn't quite what I was led to believe given the packaging and documentation. My hope was to use this speaker with my home theater system and have it paired with my home theater PC rather than a phone or tablet. Given the speaker's ability to link up with other speakers, I'd had thoughts about maybe using this to eventually implement a wireless surround sound and/or whole home speaker system. My PC setup has a nice blue LED lighting effect, and I thought it would be cool to get the LED ring on the speaker to match the blue that the rest of my setup has. That's when I discovered the second shortcoming of the app. You can't select a single color for the LED ring to glow. The app only gives you a list of preset color schemes that you can choose to have it cycle through. You can't select just a single color and tell the speaker to hold it continuously (special PSA on the lighting: if you're epileptic, don't attempt to use this speaker until you adjust the color settings. By default, this speaker came in "RAVE" mode which has white flashing strobes along the left and right edges. There was no mention of this strobe effect in any of the materials I read prior to getting this speaker, and it's a little disturbing that this was enabled by default). Third, the voice control button within the app doesn't appear to actually do anything. Pressing it prompts you to say a keyword. I tried saying "Sony," "Speaker," "Hey you," and "Play Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody,'" but I had no luck getting the app or speaker to react. Pressing the help button within the app didn't lead me to anything offering any support for this. Saying "Google" did pull up a screen with icons for Google Music and Youtube, but I couldn't get the app to do anything beyond that point using voice controls. Unfortunately, the shortcomings aren't limited to just the app. The speaker also has a button on the top for bass boost. Upon first using the speaker, I was very impressed by the sound. It was clear and loud with a lot of punch to it. Curious to see what it would sound like with even more bass, I pressed the bass button on the top . . . and the sound immediately went flat and tinny. Apparently, the bass button was already enabled by default. Given the way that this is set up, the bass button is less of a boost button and more of a "make my music sound anemic and bad" button. The perception would have been much improved had they not opted to have this enabled by default. Using the speaker on a phone call yielded mixed results. The audio came over both loud and crystal clear on my end. That being said, the person on the other line said that my voice was distant and full of distortion. Suffice it to say, that speaker's microphone isn't very good. A couple of warnings if you're going to try and use this as a speaker on a PC. First, you won't be able to control the speaker's settings from the PC. You're going to have to use the phone app to control things like power management and the LED lighting. Secondly, you're going to want to go into the power management options within the app to turn off the auto-off power saving feature. This feature is enabled by default. The speaker doesn't automatically wake after powering down. If you don't turn off the auto-off, then you will be forced to press the power button on the speaker to turn it back on after it powers down. The amazing thing is that despite the shortcomings that I've listed, I still really like this speaker. The LED lighting is fun, the sound is terrific with lots of volume and bass, and the aesthetic is nice and clean. Is the speaker perfect? No. Is the speaker really good? Yes. Despite the shortcomings, I'm still seriously considering buying another one to use in my home theater setup. I would recommend this product.

I nitily had given 1 star, but after getting a little more warmed up to the speaker, when it DOES work, it’s pretty great. That being said, in regards to the 1 rating I had given previously, I had only had the speaker for two weeks and after listening to it for a short period of time, the volume would just drop so low out of nowhere!!! So I played it for an hour & a half in my home, no problems ( even though I can’t sit it on my tv stand & play it while my tv & its Samsung speaker is on-so sensitive this speaker is!!!) Days went by and I was listening to it and, again, drop down low, but if I wait awhile & turn it off, then on again, it MIGHT work!!! I was so frustrated that I decided to take it back, but I had already reached the time limit of returns, so I turned to the website to read AGAIN, if this problem had occurred w/ anyone else & I had ran into one reviewer who had ran into the same problem, to which he/she just turned it off, then on again & said the problem was fixed. While I was continuing to read reviews, I also stumbled across a reviewer who said that it was in issue w/ syncing the speaker w/ IPhone 7s.. I don’t know, but every now & then, it occurs!! I’m stuck w/ it now & overall it’s ok, quite the handsome little thing! I still plan on either getting another 30 or a 20, & by then I will have an iPhone 8 or 10

We need music to function and this is the cherry on top! We love it!