Released this past summer, the Bose Home 500 is the company’s first Alexa-enabled smart speaker. You can think of it as being very similar to a Sonos One – you can ask Alexa to change songs, turn up the volume, or control your smart home devices – but the Home 500 can play with other Bose speakers instead of Sonos speakers in a multi-room setup.
There are other obvious differences, of course. The Home 500 is more powerful and more expensive than the Sonos One. It’s better at filling a room with sound, thanks to two custom drivers pointing that deliver impressive stereo sound. (The Sonos One, a mono speaker, needs to be paired with another Sonos speaker to play stereo.) It has built-in Bluetooth, so anybody can stream music to the speaker (not just people connected to wi-fi). Finally, the Home 500 has an on-speaker display to show off things like song title and album artwork, which is really nice.
Bose’s Home 500 is a smart speaker that sounds great and can fill a large room. In terms of sound quality, it’s probably on par with Apple’s HomePod or Google’s largest smart speaker, the Home Max. It’s worth mentioning that Bose also promises that the Home 500 will soon work with Google Assistant; and it’ll support AirPlay 2 in the near future as well.
If you want an Alexa-enabled smart speaker that sounds great on its own or can be paired with other Bose speakers, the Home 500 is a great and safe bet. Normally $400, you can get it for $50 less on Amazon today.