LG has entered the Australian wireless multiroom audio market with its Music Flow family of products – network-connected speakers that can stream audio from the Internet, controlled by an app on your Android or iOS phone or tablet. Products will be available at JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, Good Guys and Betta stores from mid-October with speakers starting at $249.
With Music Flow, LG joins big name players Sonos and Samsung in the market (along with a few others), and it brings three speaker products (H3, H5 and H7), a sound bar with a subwoofer and a network bridge that brings everything together and allows you to stream music to every room in the house, or select different music for each room. LG’s also added Bluetooth into the mix, and their Bluetooth.Link technology lets you stream Bluetooth audio from your device to all speakers in the network.
You can choose the speakers that fit your space, starting with the 30W H3 at $249, ranging through the 40W H5 at $399 up to the 50W H7 at $549. Finally, at $799 there’s the HS6 Sound Bar that sports 320W output – LG says it’s best suited for large screen TVs at over a metre long, and can decode Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound. It can also send its input audio to other speakers in the network, so you can send TV audio throughout the house.
It’s all controlled by LG’s Music Flow Player app, which can be installed on your phone or tablet and lets you stream music from Spotify premium, Deezer premium, and TuneIn Radio.
LG’s gone for a more traditional stand-up speaker design in the Music Flow range than Samsung’s triangular-shaped wireless multiroom audio range, and it’s interesting to see they’ve also gone with the “bridge” model which uses a network-connected box (in this case, the R1 Bridge at $79) to establish the network between all the speakers. It’s similar to Samsung’s approach, but contrasts with the new approach taken by Sonos, who recently delivered a software update that does away with the need for the Bridge in most situations.
We’re looking forward to taking a look at LG’s Music Flow system in the coming weeks to see how it stacks up against the competition!
What do you think of Music Flow? Let us know in the comments!
Are the speaker output figures quote RMS or PMPO?
No Google Play Music support?
I suppose you could do it via the Bluetooth pairing…
Got really exited, then realized that my current L.G sound bar, does exactly the same thing, except it doesn’t connect to wifi, but does Bluetooth to my phone, which is…. so…… no better than old tec
Didn’t know you could bridge the old ones?
Lol, as an audiophile I would not consider Samsung or LG big names. It’s great to have some more variety but those names are in the same league as Sonos.