British tech company Pure is expanding its range of wireless speakers at CES, adding the $299 Jongo T4 model to its existing lineup.
Jongo speakers can stream music from an Apple phone or tablet, Android device, or a computer via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The T4 is a 50-watt model and joins the big-daddy T6 -- with 100W of power -- and the smaller T2, with 20W.
Until now, however, you've been limited in the streaming-music services you can use with the Jongos. Pure says that's about to end, announcing in a press release today that its products will support "any music-streaming service, including Pandora, Rdio, Deezer, and Spotify." The feature will roll out to new and existing Jongo speakers in the first quarter of 2014.
As before, you can join more than one Jongo speaker together to form a stereo pair, or to have the same music playing in different rooms. But Pure also announced today that the experience will now be much better thanks to its new Caskeid (pronounced "cascade") technology, which improves audio synchronization. The company claims it can achieve "a level of synchronization only possible with wired systems" using Caskeid, which will matter more if you have a stereo pairing.
To get this to work, you'll need to use the Pure Connect app to set up the speakers, then stream music from your app to the Jongo via Bluetooth. The speaker then sends the audio to the other speakers you set up.
Finally, Pure is also offering its snazzy swappable speaker grilles in a bunch of new colors, including "Goblin Blue" and "Travertine." They'll ship in the first quarter of 2014 for $20 in the US and 13 pounds in the UK.
The Jongo speakers compete in an increasingly crowded market dominated by Sonos. In terms of price, the Jongo T4 is pitted against the Sonos Play:3, which uses a proprietary Mesh networking system for wireless audio, rather than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Sonos products support a wide range of streaming-music services, but Sonos doesn't claim that they work with any and all.
