Sounder Honeycomb 2S+ Bluetooth Speaker: First Thoughts

My father said he wanted a Bluetooth speaker, to pair with his phone and listen to music.

Sure, when he’s home he blasts music from his phone at some ungodly hour every morning and wakes me up with all that boom-tss boom-tss, but since it’s my tsundere old man asking, and he’s wearing that face of “if it’s convenient for you you can just casually buy me one, of course if you don’t I can buy it myself, it’s not like I’m asking you to buy it or anything”—no reason not to buy it. Money spent on your parents is money well spent.

But since this was my first time buying one of these, I didn’t want to go too expensive. Buying a Bose felt like a bit much for him—start with something with good value for money, so it won’t hurt if Dad accidentally loses it.

After looking around, I settled on the Sounder Honeycomb 2S+. It happened to be on special at JD, 299 - 100, and with a BaiTiao savings coupon it came to 169 in the end.

Pairing was ridiculously easy, and the build quality was much better than I expected. Didn’t run into the build issues people talk about on Quora—it’s heavy, and it even comes with a simple pouch.

Paired it with the Walkman A35 and listened to a few songs.

I was pretty blown away. The three frequency ranges are fairly balanced, maybe a touch lacking in clarity, but for a Bluetooth speaker the sound quality is already good enough. At least it’s moved past pure boom-tss, and it doesn’t completely sacrifice the lows in pursuit of so-called highs.

Tried a few devices I had on hand, and all connected without issues. The FiiO X7 recently got APTX support in an update, so it connects too—though I can’t hear the difference between APTX and non-APTX anyway. Gave it to my father for a few days and the old man was very satisfied.

Guess this counts as a satisfying purchase. I also compared it with a colleague’s Xiaomi Bluetooth speaker—frankly, that Xiaomi one is a pile of crap.