A nice mix of the old and the new, courtesy of the Klipsch The Three vintage-style speaker with Google Assistant.
Yes, this is a modern-day speaker, but I’m guessing you worked that out with the words ‘Google Assistant’ in the title. Saying that Klipsch has been making speakers since the 1940s, so it could have been a vintage design.
In a way, it is, with the look of this speaker very much in the midcentury era. It looks like a speaker used with a record player from the 1950s or 1960s. But the devil is in the detail here. The look is what catches your eye, but it’s the functionality that will sell this speaker.
But the looks are worth dwelling on, with luxury materials used, such as a real wood veneer and tactile metal switches and knobs, along with the vintage weave for the speaker cloth and the vintage-style Klipsch badge topping things off.
On the technical side, this is a standalone speaker with ‘room-filling acoustics’. This is a premium speaker with deep bass and a clear dynamic range within that modest-sized box. It’s also multi-room ready if you want more than one to hook up together. It also features 92kHz / 24-bit decoding for ‘flawless reproduction of high-resolution audio tracks’ on services that support high-res audio.
So where does Google come in? Well, that’s how you control it. With Google Assistant built-in you can play music, find answers on Google Search, manage everyday tasks, and easily control smart devices around your home with your voice.
Plenty of services and compatible with it and with Chromecast built into the unit, there are bags of streaming options here. On top of that, you can also stream to the speaker via Bluetooth. You can set everything up via your phone and the Google Home app.
So you have a speaker with a midcentury modern look packing all the latest tech. You really can’t go far wrong with that concept, especially when the build quality is so impressive.
It does come at a price though. In the US (and I know a lot of readers are in the US) it’s probably a case of hunting around for a good deal, as there are plenty of outlets selling this.
But in the UK, it is harder to find The Three speaker with Google Assistant. But it is available, with Premium Sound selling it for £445 (which is about as cheap as I can find it here).
