Best known for its DAB+ radios, Pure has released a new wireless speaker combination. Stephen Dawson investigates.

‘Pure’ is the brand name of consumer products from a company called Imagination Technologies Limited. Based in the UK it owns a lot of the technology associated with things like DAB+ digital radios. It is probably best known here for its rather clever digital and internet radios.

But now it also has a set of wireless speakers out, dubbed ‘Jongo’. There are three models available, but here I’m looking at the compact Jongo S3 models (more precisely, the S340B).

These stand only 135mm tall, yet weigh a surprisingly solid 1.25kg. Each packs five drivers, five amplifiers and network connectivity, which is probably the best way of feeding signals to them. But they also each have a 3.5mm analogue audio input and a USB socket into which you can plug the tiny Bluetooth dongle with which each is supplied.

Four of the speaker drivers are 19mm units, one on each of the four vertical faces. Each gets 2.5W of power. The fifth is a 90mm upwards facing mid/bass on the top, powered by ten watts. In the base of each unit is a fairly large rechargeable Lithium Ion battery pack. This is rated at over 32 watt-hours. Pure says a fully charged pack will run the unit for 10 hours.

On one edge are volume and mute controls at the top, with the power button at the bottom. On the opposite edge is a tiny LCD display with a key for WiFi and another key for playback mode.

The grille wraps around the four sides of each unit and can be replaced with a range of colourful ones. You get to choose one of the colours as a purchase bonus.

Setting up
So you’ve got a network-capable, compact little speaker that bears on its surface a total of six control buttons and a display screen that measures just 14mm wide and 21mm tall. How do you interact with it?

Pure has sorted this pretty well by providing two major options. The first is sensible automation. You can connect a Jongo most easily to your WiFi network by means of WPS. You press a button on your wireless router (if it has one), hold the WiFi button on the Jongo and within about 30 seconds the two devices will find each other, discuss terms and form a connection.

What if you don’t have WPS on your router? That’s where the second option comes in. When in WiFi setup mode, the Jongo itself looks like a WiFi access point. You can then use any WiFi-based computing device – from an iPod Touch or Android phone through to a tablet of either persuasion all the way to a notebook computer – to connect to it. Then key its network address (192.168.1.1) into your device’s browser and the Jongo presents a web page by which you can interact with it to log onto your home network.

Clever and elegant.

I gave both methods a whirl and both worked well.

Less pleasing was what happened when I’d connected both the review units to my network and then started up the free Pure Connect app on an iPod Touch. It found them both and then promptly started to update them to the latest firmware.

Without asking for permission.

I hate that. What if a friend has popped over and I wanted to play some music? And my speakers go into an update mode? Users should be encouraged to keep their gadgets’ firmware up to date. But not forced.

Now this might not happen to you. Both of the review units had clearly been used before and both went very weird indeed after the firmware updates had apparently been completed. Whenever I tried to access them with the Pure Connect app on an iPod Touch or an iPad they restarted their firmware update. Each time took eight to ten minutes. I figure I updated their firmware about eight times in one evening. Oddly, the Android app didn’t have that problem, and it seemed to work all right.

Anyway, a reset of one (there’s an inset button which you press with a straightened paperclip), and removing and re-installing the battery in the other, sorted all that and then both worked the way they ought to.

According to the manual a shiny new Jongo – that is, what you’re likely to purchase – boots up the first time in a fresh state looking for a WiFi network. Chances are a normal purchaser won’t be subject to these puzzling loops.

Performance
You can, of course, use the Bluetooth connection and – let’s be serious here – any relative difference between WiFI and Bluetooth audio quality isn’t going to be obvious from portable speakers. Nonetheless, around the home WiFi is the way to go if you have a couple of Jongos. With Bluetooth it’s strictly one playback device at a time. With WiFi you can select several Jongos at once and enjoy multi-room sound, or even rather good stereo sound.

I did try the Bluetooth connection of course, and they each operated just like any Bluetooth speaker, pairing in the usual way.

And while I did virtually all my listening with the WiFi connection, don’t dismiss Bluetooth out of hand. It has its own uses. First, and obviously, when you’re away from your WiFi network (a picnic for example) then you’ll need Bluetooth or a wired connection. Second, the use of the system by WiFi is intimately tied to the Pure Connect app. This provides a lot of content… but not all of it.

Pure Connect reads and indexes the music on your device and makes that available for playback on the Jongos. It can also provide ‘environmental’ sounds – which is such a horrifying concept to me that I didn’t check it out – but also lots of internet radio stations and streaming music provided by Pure Connect’s internet portal. Sign up and you can ‘Favourite’ various radio stations so that they are very easy to access in the future.

But what it won’t provide is access to non-music audio on your device, nor to other music available on your network. If, for example, you have a few dozen gigabytes of music on a DLNA or iTunes server plugged into your network, Pure Connect cannot make use of it. Nor does it recognise podcasts on your Apple device (a while back Apple separated podcasts from other audio content).

You can use the Jongo for those (one Jongo at a time) simply by using the Bluetooth connection and employing whatever app you use on your portable device to access them.
Sound
Each Jongo can be set to operate in one of four audio profiles. Mono simply pumps the sound equally out of the four side speakers (the bass going to the bigger driver of course). Outdoor Boost tailors the response to sound better in open spaces. Stereo 360 sets to the two left drivers to deliver the left signal, and right ones to do right. Forward Facing Stereo only uses one of the side drivers for the left and one for the right.

The stereo effect, obviously, is minimal with one of them. The Outdoor Boost mode makes minimal audible difference. I’d just stick with the Mono mode as the setting for each unit. But within the Pure Connect app you can ‘Pair’ two Jongos together so that they become a pair of stereo speakers, one doing the left channel, the other doing the right.

Indeed as I sit here I have both the review units in that mode sitting on my desk, very widely spread. I am enjoying King Crimson’s album Thrak delivered in a very respectable stereo presentation.

Obviously there are limitations on what a small loudspeaker can produce in the way of bass and volume. But I’d say the Jongo S3 speakers go pretty near as far as physically possible. They are tuneful and produce a surprisingly well-balanced tone. My guess is that their bass extends down to about 100Hz, allowing the Crimson bass line to be musically relevant and clear.

I was going to check the frequency response of the units using the normal WiFi connection, but found what appears to be another limitation in Pure Connect: it doesn’t seem to support the AIFF format I use for my test signals.

But using a wired connection, it did turn out that the overall tonal balance wasn’t bad at all from about 130Hz up to about 10,000Hz. There seemed to be usable bass down to about 110Hz, or even lower, with the frequency range from 50 to 100Hz sitting on a plateau about 12dB below the higher frequencies.

Conclusion
Jongo isn’t the cheapest way to go wireless, but it sounds better than most, is conveniently portable and works well.