Sound quality: Harman Kardon's Onyx had good overall sound quality. Bass has good impact and goes fairly deep but is a little pronounced and boomy. Midrange is somewhat even but a bit muffled and grainy, and treble is a bit recessed and upper treble is rolled off. This model does a decent job recovering room ambience--the sense of an acoustic space, such as the hall or room in which a recording was made--but the overall sound is somewhat hazy and lacks some detail. We found no significant difference in sound quality whether we used WiFi, Bluetooth, or a wired connection. With the Stereo Widening feature on (which is only available in WiFi mode), sound gets a bit bright; lower and mid-treble are a bit pronounced, while upper treble remains rolled off. The room ambience is somewhat improved, losing haziness and adding some reverberance and enhanced high frequencies. The overall sound is somewhat improved, but still scores in the good range. The speaker can provide a decent volume level in a small to medium-sized room.
Ease of use: We found the system's ease of use to be good overall. Bluetooth pairing was very easy. WiFi Direct pairing was a tedious process. Setting up the initial WiFi connection for AirPlay was easy to do it when using an iOS device, but WiFi setup for DLNA was poor, not because it was difficult but because no instructions were provided with the unit. The speaker had easy-to-use touch controls for volume but lacked a mute control. There is a clear touch control selector for Bluetooth and WiFi sources but no selector for the Aux input; if a wireless source is playing and a wired source is connected, both will play simultaneously. There is no physical remote control, but the free Harman Kardon AirPlay app for Apple iOS devices functions as a fairly full-featured remote control. It can be a bit hard to navigate until you get familiar with it.
