With Jongo X series, Pure is back for another bite at Sonos
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi combine to stream audio from any app around your house.
Sonos may be the company most people think of for multiroom streaming audio, but there are plenty of decent alternatives around. One is from British company Pure, which has been making its Jongo range of streaming speakers since 2013. Pure is the consumer-facing arm of Imagination Technologies, the chip and licensing company best known for supplying graphics chips to Apple for use in its iPhone. Now, with the Jongo X series, it's time for a refresh.
Visually, the range gets a new speaker grille featuring a smaller logo, and a choice of black or white. The grilles can be swapped for a bunch of different colours should you wish.
But it's under the hood where the most differences can be seen. Jongos are rather like a Bluetooth speaker and Sonos combined. The idea is you can stream audio from any app to one of the speakers via Bluetooth.
If you have more than one Jongo in your household, it uses Wi-Fi to send that audio around the house, using an Imagination Technologies invention called Caskeid to keep the audio in sync. Imagination says the technology has good enough audio quality to replace wires, and it's licensed it to Onkyo and others for use in its products.
The new speakers introduce some improvements on how this works, Pure says, with more stable synchronisation of audio. The speakers will also remember how you had your speakers setup the last time you used them: currently if you lose your Wi-Fi connection, you have to set them up again.
There's a new setup process that's intended to be easier to follow, and some audio tweaks that add "a richer bass and finer tuned audio regardless of the volume level."
The new range consists of the Jongo T2X (£100), T4X (£150) and T6X (£200), which are all standalone speakers with both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi that increase in size and audio quality as the price goes up. There's also the S3X (£130), a portable model with a rechargeable battery that lasts for 20 hours per charge.
As with the previous Jongos, you can buy two of the same model and pair them together for stereo. That makes all of them much cheaper than their Sonos counterparts, which run from £170-£350 in the UK, and arguably more flexible.
The X series will be out in October in the UK, shipping to the US and elsewhere at an as-yet unannounced date and price. (The UK prices convert to around $165-$330, or AU$180-AU$360.) For those who already own Jongos, a software update in September will bring you the features of the X series for free.