Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System – An unpolished diamond

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Decent build, decent sound, but not enough app integration. The all3 is basically a sleek looking, well-constructed, internet enabled speaker, which puts out a pretty decent sound. On unboxing the all3, i was met with a set of fairly straightforward-seeming instructions in order to get the device set up and registered on my network. Other reviews mentioned having serious issues doing this, so my expectations of success were fairly low. That said, it seemed fairly straightforward; i plugged in the all3, which started flashing, then connected my phone to the all3 via the all3’s own wifi network, gave all3 a name (presumably to distinguish it from any other all-3/all8 devices you might have) and entered my router password to give the all3 access to my network. At this point i was expecting disaster, but it all worked – and promptly downloaded a firmware update to the speaker. At this point, i had an internet connected speaker – the issue became getting any sound out of it. The speaker allows for wireless playback of your own music, from a device visible on your network (for example, a network enabled hard drive), and also has some app integration to existing services. Linking the all3 to network devices has to be done via the panasonic app, which you can download to your phone or tablet via the relevant app store. But eh panasonic app is, frankly, shocking.

Panasonic all3 wireless speaker review. I decided to buy this product as wanted to listen to different music across the house. When it arrived i had it setup and working in less than a few minutes. It was very easy to connect to the wi-fi and once connected, i could stream my playlists on spotify and also listen to my stored music on my pc. The app is simple to use and navigate. I couldn’t believe the sound quality from such a compact speaker, it was great. I love the finish too, feels and look’s really premium. Would definitely recommend for anyone looking for multi-room speakers.

Excellent speaker-perfect for streaming music-but no bluetooth. Out of the box, first impressions are that it is a well built, attractive product. It is about the size of a large loaf. It comes with a power lead, which is all you need to set it up plus the all important instructions on the process of connectivity. Setting it up, is relatively easy, following the guide which you are provided with. Ensure you update the product when prompted to do so. The sound is particularly good. Rich and can be loud without distortion. The operating buttons are discreet on the speaker, which is a plus, making it’s appearance smooth and sleek, but they are sensitive. I linked it with spotify, as i am already a premium member and it worked a treat-no problem at all.

You now have a very wide range of wireless speaker systems to choose from, possibly the crown belongs to sonos – in terms of integration, sound quality and design. Personally, i find the sonos units rather clunky to look at but the sound quality is very high and the sonos app is superb integrating a wide range of music sources. That said, we tend to find here that we feed our sonos pretty much exclusively spotify. The panasonic all3 also relies pretty heavily on spotify as a primary online streaming source though it is also possible to get it to work with google music and a selection of others. It’s also capable of streaming from home servers but the interface for that is quite awkward. That’s a bit of a theme through the panasonic and qualcomm apps, both of which serve as interfaces for the speaker system. Panasonic updated their app this week (april 28th 2015), it looks a little nicer and has a load of tutorials built in and easily accessible but it’s still some distance off sonos quality. In both the panasonic and sonos cases, you will need spotify premium, which isn’t cheap but certainly the additional features and access to higher quality streams represent good value even without the wireless speaker system hook up. So, sound quality – i like the smooth, crisp sonos sound very much and i wasn’t expecting much from the panasonic rival.

  • Great alternative to the Sonos Play 3
  • High Resolution Audio, but poor bundled app and some absent services.
  • Really good, just make sure you know what you’re buying!
  • Nice speaker let down by poor app
  • Brilliant sounding wireless speaker
  • Much more powerful than bluetooth, and lots of fun.

Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System (White)

  • The Panasonic Music Streaming App makes it easy to send music wirelessly from your portable device to your speakers. This free app for Android and IOS devices simply asks you to choose your music source, choose your speaker and away you go.
  • The 4 speaker system within the ALL 3, uses 2 x bass drivers and 2 x tweeters. This means that from a small spaeker unit, the audio signal is divided into acoustic ranges extending from bass to treble so providing the richest, purest possible sound from a spaeker of its size.
  • The ALL 3 allows you to access music subscription services( including Spotify), your iTunes library or Internet radio stations via the system App, when connected to a wifi router. This means the user has access to millions of muscic tracks 24 hours a day.
  • The ALL 3 speaker systems lets listeners easily configure music play over multiple rooms from multiple digital music sources, all over an existing Wi-Fi network. This is controlled wirelessly via a smartphone or tablet so that different music can be enjoyed in any room of the houseor the same song can be simultaneously played over multiple speakers.

Deserves almost all the stars. Six long hours it took to get this set up and i was almost at the point of throwing stuff at the wall. Now that it’s (finally) working and i’ve had a chance to play about with it the rage has faded and i’m starting to develop a fondness for the speaker. I actually like it a lot, but oh my goodness what a carry on to get it working. When the tunes eventually started coming out of it i had a hallelujah momentout of the box it’s a really substantial unit. My experience with portable speakers up to now has been with mostly bluetooth, pocket sized ones at fifty quid and under and nothing close to the quality of this one. It looks nice, in an understated kind of way, nothing fancy really but i like how it looks. After reading the one page setup sheet i anticipated a ten minute job at most as it’s really straightforward but it just wouldn’t co-operate. My phone initially recognised the device as a wifi spot but by the time i had upgraded the firmware it had dropped out and nothing would convince the phone to find it again.

Good way to fill your home with music. The speaker has a no-nonsense industrial aesthetic that appeals to me. The heavy black plastic and metal grille lend it a feel of quality and solidity. That’s fine by me, but i could understand someone expecting a little more of a luxury feel for this price. The speaker itself has no display to indicate the track its playing, and the only visual indicators are some leds behind the grille that represent power and connection. Soft-touch buttons on the top of the speaker for volume and power lack visibility and feedback. If a device has physical controls, i’d prefer them to have more tactile response. Set-up was very quick and easy via wireless on my xperia z3c. The manual recommends installing the panasonic music streaming app, but i found i was able to use the speaker through spotify without it. You’ll need the app if you want to stream using other sources and to update firmware on the device, however.

The liam neeson of stand-alone speakers. The panasonic speaker follows the industrial style aesthetic. It has style for its very lack of pretention to be anything other than a monolithic object – it is the wireless speaker from 2001 a space odyssey. The perfect object for a loft apartment or back to basics type of surroundings. The box yields a speaker, power lead and guide; keep the latter safe as you will need it. I found the set-up instructions were easy to follow, including connecting to wi-fi (not bluetooth), i even found the app straight away. The software needed to be updated and the unit switched off for three minutes before i was ready to play my first track – no problem and everything is controlled from my iphone and the room soon filled with music. Sound quality is superb, beautifully clear bass with no distortion whatever i played (and i do abuse speakers with some of my choices). I didn’t find the panasonic music streaming app particularly intuitive to use and realised that skipping the tutorials had been a mistake. The tutorials are all within the app and make the whole thing a bit clearer.

One thought on “Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System – An unpolished diamond”

  1. This review is from : Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System (White)

    Really good, just make sure you know what you’re buying. Before buying something like this, it’s important to: – understand the difference between wireless (connects to your home wifi) and bluetooth (connects to your mobile phone) speakers – check that your favourite music application or service is compatiblethe same goes for similar products, such as those from sonos. I knew what i was buying when i bought this, therefore knew what to expect. The all3 is a wireless (“wifi”) speaker. It is not a bluetooth speaker (like a bose soundlink). Panasonic do offer one that does both – the all2 – this one, however, does not. When i use the term ‘wireless’, i’m not simply referring to the fact that you don’t need to connect a physical cable (which would be an accurate description of bluetooth or wireless), i mean “wifi”. That’s crucial to note, because whilst bluetooth acts just like a cabled connection; wireless does not. Think of bluetooth as direct, a one-to-one connection between source (e.
    • Great sound, but a pain to use. . It can be stood vertically and horizontally or even wall mounted. There are very few buttons, so it looks simple to operate. However, after much head scratching and wondering why it was not just picking up my bluetooth i went back to the instructions on the amazon site and realised that i needed to download a special panasonic app to use it. The app downloaded easily enough but was not itself easy to use. It is clunky and not at all intuitive. I just about figured it out by trial and error. When i had finally managed to begin playing an album from my iphone i was very impressed with the quality of sound, especially for a small speaker. However, the software doesn’t allow continuous play between the tracks on an album, as it kept pausing between songs, which i found very annoying.

  2. This review is from : Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System (White)

    Great sound – very reliable connection. A little fiddly to set up. . The setup was easy but not quick. Instructions easy to follow though. My only gripe is that you can’t create custom groups for speakers. For example, you can have “kitchen” or “kitchen & living room” but not just “living room”, unless you delete the group “kitchen & living room” in the allshare app. Sound is really good – better than my 5. 1 onkyo surround system, which seems amazing for the price and size of the speakers. They look and sound great and power down onto standby by themselves with no buzz and no crackle or boom on power up.
    • Great sound and easy setup. . This speaker is so easy to set up, as long as you have a modern smart phone. The sound is great, this is especially true at high volumes. I have tried many types of music from modern pop, rock to jazz and classical. Spotify premium is the perfect partner to these and in my opinion they look better than the lg, samsung and even the sonos options. I now have two all8’s and two all3’s setup around the house and recently bought a new vdsl modem/router to replace my talktalk/bt setup and it was just as easy to reconfigure all the speakers to work on my new 5ghz wireless network.
      • Good sound, but problems connecting to existing wifi network. First things first, the priority for a speaker is of course sound quality – i was impressed by the sound from this device, both its quality and volume; it was enough to fill my admittedly small living room with reasonable sound. It’s not going to deafen you or shake your walls with bass at a party, but it’s more than enough for use in the kitchen or out in the garden, say; the volume and bass level for a small unit is impressive – the bass port at the rear does expel a fair amount of air when it’s cranked up. No distortion at higher volumes was noticed – i backed off before annoying the neighbours before reaching the limit of the speaker. It has an aux input to which you can plug any device using a standard 3. 5mm audio cable, which is trouble-free and easy to use. However, the appeal of the speaker is the networking abilities, to allow you to play music to it wirelessly from a phone/tablet etc, and to take part in a multi-room audio setup (a feature i wasn’t able to test, as i have no other allplay compatible devices). The main way to do this is using panasonic’s music stream app, which i tested out on my android phone – it allows you to stream music from a variety of sources to one or more speakers – including media on the phone itself, from a media server/nas via dlna, and spotify/somafm/rhapsody and others. Connecting to my existing network via ethernet just worked – plugged the device in, it got an ip via dhcp and was then reachable by my phone which was on the network via wifi just fine. To connect via wifi, the device creates an open wifi network automatically, no security by default – so you can find the network named, for instance, “allplay 4db847_aj” and connect to it, then you can control it – but of course whilst your phone is connected in this way, you have no internet access.
  3. So wireless things need to be nice and easy for me to get on well with. I’m not particularly tech-savvy, so wireless things need to be nice and easy for me to get on well with them. Unfortunately, this speaker system isn’t all that friendly to folk like me – it looks as though it should be simple enough, plug it in, connect to your wifi, name the speaker and put in your router password. I got stuck at this first hurdle – my iphone couldn’t find the speaker at all. After some jiggery-pokery, and downloading the update for the speaker, it did connect, i named the speaker, downloaded the app, got it connected and it started playing music, and this is where it earns its stars. The sound quality is very good indeed, lovely rich sound with good bass and plenty of volume. . Or at least it was until i went off to do something, came back and decided to listen to some music again. I had to go through the entire process again, find the speaker, put in wireless password, try to get the app to actually connect. This happened every time i switched it off and on again, and a fair amount of the time it just flat refused to register as being there to connect to at all.

  4. This review is from : Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System (White)

    This has excellent sound quality, with real clarity. Setup was straightforward using an android tablet. The panasonic app required to operate it is a bit basic, and not especially intuitive, but it does what’s needed. This is an excellent product if you use online music sources like spotify (you’ll need premium), and radio apps like allradio and aupeo are also available to use with it, but other things like bbc iplayer aren’t currently compatible.

  5. This review is from : Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System (White)

    High resolution audio, but poor bundled app and some absent services. . ===setup===setup was mostly painless, connect to it’s wifi, open up the web based configuration page, set the device name and configure the connection to your router. ===hardware===the hardware itself is quite good, it has a solid feel, and a lan connection if you want to connected it wired. ===sound quality===i sent a high quality flac file to the unit and it sounded very good indeed. This is where allplay clearly comes into it’s own. Because it’s wifi based, it can handle far bigger, less compressed files than the regular common or garden bluetooth streaming solutions. High resolution audio is where this product really comes into it’s own. Allplay is currently the only streaming solution that supports it. If you want the best possible music quality, allplay should be seriously considered over more well known systems (not mentioning any names. I streamed a high resolution audio (96 khz/24-bit) flac version of led zeppelin ii and sounded amazing, and i then tried to compare it whilst connected locally to my xperia z3 tablet (which also plays high resolution audio natively without down-sampling) and i couldn’t notice any perceivable difference in sound quality.
    • Great sounding speaker let down by poor software. This is panasonic’s mid size wifi speaker a direct equivalent to the sonos play 3. On the hardware front they are comparable. Both have a good build quality, and both sound excellent for their relatively small size. I have heavily invested in the sonos brand and have been using their products for the last five years. However i got this speaker for my father to compliment his panasonic all8. ( which i have previously reviewed )the setup on the all3 was a little easier than it was with all8 but that may be because i had done it before with its larger brother. It was easier but its still more complicated and clumsy than it needs to be. The main issue with these panasonic speakers is the panasonic music stream app that you use to control them. It is in a word awfulit is not intuitive at all, it is laggy and to play radio you need to install another radio app then control it through that.
      • Great sound, easy to set up, works perfectly with iphone and allplay radio. The panasonic all 3 is a standalone wireless speaker system that has excellent sound quality and can be expanded to fill your whole house with music by linking other all3 or all8 units. The box contains the unit and a quick set up guide, and loose pages about registering the product, using with spotify, wifi security and firmware updates. When i saw that i figured it must be pretty easy to set up. Simply plug in and switch on. Connect to it via its wifi – select your home broadband connection, enter in your password and you’re done. Now just download the app – i downloaded the panasonic app and the allplay radio app. Fire up the panasonic app and you can instantly stream any music on your iphone to the speaker. If you open the allplay radio app you can stream 1000s of radio stations from all over the world. Pros:solid build – looks like it can survive a few knocksexcellent sound quality – crystal clear with nice bass and treble. Very easy to set up and control from iphone – got it going in minutesstreaming radio is controlled by your iphone but streams directly to the device so if you leave the room with your phone in your pocket and enter a wifi dead spot in the garden the unit will continue playing and will seamlessly reconnect with your phone when you’re back in rangeability to expand with multiple speakerscons:not the most attractive speaker in the world – looks a bit brutishexpensive if you were going to invest in several unitsa bit more tricky to get to work with music sharing on my pc but that’s probably just my lack of experience in this regardall in all- an excellent speaker system. I am very pleased with this. It’s the perfect replacement to my previous medium sized kitchen speaker system that connected to my old iphone via the standard apple connector.

  6. This review is from : Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System (White)

    On it’s end the panasonic all3 is slightly taller than the similarly priced sonos play 1 and looks nice in white and aluminium effect finish. Set-up, while not quite as slick as the sonos, is painless with the easy to follow quick start guide. The app (on an ipad) works well enough and is pretty easy to follow if you have used any competing products – newbies may find it a little confusing to start with, but a built guide should get them up and running. With medialink upnp software installed on my mac i could access all of my mac’s music from the ipad. In use the all3 sounds good once the speakers have settled in a bit, and i have not suffered and drop outs so far. Summing up, the hardware is nice, it sounds good, but the app couple with a polish to make a bit more user friendly (but that’s true of most of its rivals too).
    • Great addition to the allplay family. The panasonic allplay system works quite well. The main advantage of using such a system is that you can play to multiple speakers whilst retaining a good level of synchronisation. If you are looking to only have the one speaker, or in only one room, there is not much advantage to buying this set; you could just as easily make use of a bluetooth speaker instead. If, however, you wish to be able to wakl around your house, and enjoy perfect synchronisation of sound, then the allplay system definitely offers that. We have set our all3 up in the kitchen, with the all1 situated upstairs playing through our bose soundbar. The synchronisation is perfect, and you can walk around the house without finding what you are listening to is in any way disjointed. The panasonic all3 speaker, itself, feels sturdy and well-made. The controls are capacitive touch buttons, and are quite responsive. It does have an on/off button, but the speaker also turns on when you send a command, from the app, telling it to do so.

  7. This review is from : Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System (White)

    A frustrating product with the potential for greatness. This panasonic wireless speaker system is a high-quality product made from high-end materials that delivers excellent sound quality. Unfortunately, the method of operation via a smartphone app makes it a complete nightmare to operatewhile i am not a technological whizz by any stretch of the imagination, i would say that i am confident with using and getting to grips with new technology, including apps. That said, i felt it took an excessively long time to get the device set up and working properly, largely due to the app. The app isn’t very stable and is extremely temperamental. I have installed it on two separate devices and encountered the same problems on both. It should also be noted that the app does not support the most recent iphones, which may be show-stopping for some usersa little more work on the app would transform this from an average and frustrating product into a great one. At the moment, the temptation to simply plug the device in and operate it directly from the pc is too great (even though this defeats the object of it being wireless).

  8. This review is from : Panasonic ALL3 Wireless Speaker System (White)

    Love it, easy to set up, excellent audio, looks great. Easy to set up and use via the app and sound quality is excellent for a wireless system.

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