Panasonic ALL8 Wireless Bluetooth Speaker - Portable Waterproof Speaker with Rich Bass, 20H Playtime - Perfect for Outdoor, Travel, Beach & Home Use (Black)

Update 2016. I sadly can't recommend these, there is an inherent design or manufacturing issue with SC-ALL3 and SC-ALL8 units. I have now had 5 replacements, all fail after a few months with crackling and distorted output. Panasonic deny there is any problem, and keep sending replacements, and the CV replacements fail in similar ways. Avoid 1st generation Panasonic Allplay is my advice, stick to the 2nd generation units (the ones that do Bluetooth restreaming eg: sc-all2, sc-all05, sc-all9 ), or buy sonos instead. Panasonic, of you read this, do right by your customers, acknowledge the problem rather than trying to bury it.===SETUP===Setup was mostly painless, connect to it's Wifi, open up the web based configuration page, set the device name and configure the connection to your router. Job done.===HARDWARE===The hardware itself is quite good, it has a solid feel, and a LAN connection if you want to connected it wired. There is also a 3.5mm Audio AUX in.===SOUND QUALITY===I sent a high quality FLAC file to the unit and it sounded VERY good indeed. This is where allplay clearly comes into it's own. Because it's Wifi based, it can handle far bigger, less compressed files than the regular common or garden Bluetooth streaming solutions. High Resolution audio is where this product really comes into it's own. AllPlay is currently the ONLY streaming solution that supports it. This is currently it's USP. If you want the best possible music quality, AllPlay should be seriously considered over more well known systems (not mentioning any names...).I streamed a High Resolution audio (96 khZ/24-bit) FLAC version of Led Zeppelin II and sounded amazing, and I then tried to compare it whilst connected locally to my Xperia Z3 Tablet (which also plays High Resolution Audio natively without down-sampling) and I couldn't notice any perceivable difference in sound quality. So from an audio standpoint, I am very pleased with the AllPlay hardware.===SUPPORTING SOFTWARE===The Panasonic All Play Android app, is where this package is badly let down. Firstly the moment you run it, it looks truly horrific, using Android 2.x look and feel, it works in a very clunky, unintuitive way, lots examples of poor UI design (like popup "help" that doesn't really help, that default to show all the time and even re-appear after a screen-off), worst of all, I never actually managed to get any music to play from it. It simply refused to play music from my DLNA server (despite this being a supposed supported feature), displayed the album art, and then a unhelpful message telling it that it "can't play music". It did offer me to do a device firmware update, which I did, and this did not improve anything.Thankfully, you don't aren't forced to use Panasonic's dire AllPlay app, Qualcomm (the company supporting AllPlay system) have a couple of Android apps, and these are vastly superior "Qualcomm AllPlay Streaming" and "Qualcomm AllPlay Jukebox". These should really be your first port of call, and not the Panasonic app (at least not currently).===MUSIC SOURCES & SERVICES===Both the Qualcomm and Panasonic apps support the same set of services, which are:Local Playback of music on the device (FLAC, ALAC, AAC, MP3, WAV, including High Resolution Audio)Network Playback from a DNLA media server (e.g, a NAS or smart router)Online Music Services (Spotify, Napster, AppPlay Radio (TuneInRadio) and a few others that don't work in the UK or aren't worth mentioning).Sadly my music service of choice wasn't listed, Google Play Unlimited. This is quite an omission, as it's one of the biggest and best services on the market. iTunes is obviously also not supported (as this isn't an Apple product).===MULTI-ZONE SUPPORT===I bought the ALL8 after getting an ALL1 for the main Hi-Fi. Multi-zone is implemented very well. No sync issues, independent music and party modes, independent or overall adjustment of volume control, good attention to detail, like if you adjust the volume locally on the All8, the volume control change is reflected in the app slider on your phone.