Parrot Bluetooth Sound System Speakers

ptallett — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:24:00 GMT

I recently bought a Parrot Bluetooth Sound System which is a pair of speakers with their own amplifiers, connected to the PC with Bluetooth.

http://www.parrot.com/usa/products/parrotsoundsystem

There don't seem to be many reviews about this product on the net so I thought I'd blog about it.

They are pretty pricey in my opinion - £249, but I couldn't find a comparable competing device so I went for it. After unpacking them I really struggled to get them to pair with my PC. The manual is really poor and basically just says follow the on-screen instructions. They would appear to pair, but then when I went back into "Bluetooth Devices" they had disappeared. I had Vista so thought this might be an issue and I was using my own Bluetooth dongle, so after two weeks on and off of trying, I bought a Parrot Bluetooth Dongle. This made no difference at all. Eventually after trying to pair the speakers with my phone, I realised you need to use the passcode "0000" to pair with the computer too, and suddenly I was in business.

Sound quality was not bad, but not up to hi-fi standards - more bass than PC speakers, but sounds like its playing through a cardboard tube. Just about acceptable. I was using them to connect to a Windows Media Center which is our main TV, so watching TV I discovered the first problem - the sound is delayed slightly which gives lipsync problems when watching video. This was pretty unbearable, so I decided I'd only use them for listening to music (the built-in speakers in my MCE are fine for TV). It was then that I discovered the second problem - after a few minutes listening, the left and right speaker get out of sync giving a sort of echo effect. I tried swapping the speakers left and right but that made it worse. This happened consistently all the time I was using them over the next week. The third problem is that you need to reconnect the speakers every time you boot the PC which is pretty terrible for a supposedly consumer device like MCE.

So I sent them back and got a refund. I regard this product to be seriously flawed, and recommend you don't buy it. To be fair, I think they are intended to be connected to a phone, but I still think you'd get the echo effect.

Cheers,
Paul

Paul Tallett's Web Log : Bluetooth Speaker Parrot

Parrot Bluetooth Sound System Speakers