The Sky Soundbox

Sky Soundbox the first two  hours.

Packaging is very superior on par with Apple products. Opening the box the first thing that strikes me is the weight of the Soundbox, wow. There is nothing here that gives a wow feeling it is just a big heavy black box. Everything you need apart from the box is cleverly packed away and is sheer joy as it unfolds as you pull it up to reveal all the connecting cables.

Set up was simplicity itself. Take the pink HDMI cable from the back of the Q box and slot it into the back of the Soundbox, next insert the supplied HDMI cable into the other HDMI slot and back to the Q box. Next connect optical cable from box to optical on TV.

Then switch on!

The remote controls the volume but you can set up your Q remote to control the volume. Go to Home button>Settings>Setup>Remotes then choosing the Bluetooth remote it brings up the option for setting up the sound system, choose Sky and all is done. The remote has a source button and this  has three spoken options. These are Optical, Bluetooth and HDMI. Sadly it won’t cycle through these automatically according to the selected source. There is also a sync option if you find speech and picture are out, but I didn’t need it.

Now to sound quality, this was a replacement for a Bose Wave connected via the TV headphone socket. The sound from the Wave was fantastic but then it cost me over £600 a decade ago. There was no wow factor on using the Soundbox I could here sound separation though in a way I haven’t before. The real test will be on the first film I watch and F1. I did watch the first ten minutes of the Flash and liked it very much. Moving over to try Netflix the sound coming through the optical cable was no different to what I had before.

THEN I switched off the TV and the Q box and set it up as a Bluetooth speaker, grabbed my iPhone and paired it easily. Now I am listening to my music. NOW, there is a world of difference! I particularly like the absolute separation and clarity of the Cello Concerto I chose, it is perfect. Some Coldplay and many others followed and I am in love with it. My audiobooks sound great as well a big plus as I can no longer read physical books and I read about a hundred books a year.

It is better than what I was using not by a great deal but it is less than half the price. If I had nothing but  TV sound it would be blowing my mind with its quality, and make no mistake this is a quality product. I have over the years tried various sound bars and bases but none could beat my Bose set up, this does and for a great deal less than I paid for other products.

Unless it develops a fault I can only see it improving as it beds in and I try other options. For just now I am thoroughly enjoying it as Bluetooth speaker as I write this, feeling it was a bargain buy. I have however no place now for my PS4, no great loss as I wasn’t using it.

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