Sound quality: JBL's Authentics L8 had good sound quality overall. Bass has good impact and goes fairly deep but is a bit pronounced and tubby, and midrange is a bit nasal, constricted, and uneven. Low and mid-treble is a bit pronounced, and upper treble is rolled off. The L8 does a decent job of recovering room ambience--a sense of the acoustic space in which the recording was made--but the over-resonant bass creates a false reverberance effect. Treble, though dry with some program material, has decent lower and mid-level detail. We found no significant difference in sound quality whether we used optical, Bluetooth, and line-in sound quality. [What about WiFi?]. This model can provide a decent volume level in a small to medium sized room. Provides a decent volume in a medium sized room.
Ease of use: We found the system's ease of use to be good overall. Bluetooth pairing was fairly easy, and connecting to a WiFi network was very easy if you have a router with WPS capability. (You push the WPS buttons on the speaker and the router and it will connect in about two minutes.) Setting up the initial WiFi connection for AirPlay was easy to do when using an iOS device, but the WiFi setup for DLNA was tedious and took many steps. The speaker had easy-to-use controls for volume and source selection but lacked a mute control. There is no physical remote, but the free JBL remote control AirPlay app for Apple iOS devices functions as a fairly full-featured remote control. However, it can be a bit hard to navigate until you get used to it.
