PURE DiscovR Smart Speaker

The Pure DiscovR portable smart speaker is a cute wee item of industrial design has a little brother called StreamR. While that is a Bluetooth speaker that can summon Alexa as an adjunct to your phone, the DiscovR is a Bluetooth speaker that has Wifi built-in too and has more muscle and smarts than StreamR. You set it up with your phone but do not absolutely require your phone to get music or chat up Alexa once it is on your Wifi.

Also, while the StreamR plays a single 2in speaker and one 0.75in tweeter, running on a 30w RMS amplifier to make your tunes, the DiscovR has a 45w RMS amp in its guts and shoves a 3in speaker and two tiny 0.25in tweeters about for your entertainment.

The unit is packed up to make getting one the sort of thing you want to make a YouTube video of. It is the loveliest box I ever saw a thing arrive in, ever. Opening one is an experience.

The product has a high Donald Gennaro rating: (name that film.. clue: RARRRRRRR!)

Gennaro: “Hey, where did you find those?”
Tim: “In a box under my seat!”
Gennaro: “Are they heavy?”
Tim: “yeah.”
Gennaro: “ Then they’re expensive, put ‘em back..” 

Yep, it actually weighs enough (0.97kg) so that a cat is unable to bat it away like an annoying toy. The capacitative touch input area on the top has some clever features and zones, and is lit like a whizzy Christmas ornament, with colours of corners and rotating patterns of colours and illuminations being used to convey what it is doing. Kinda reminded me of the first generation computer that you talk to in the Star Trek series. This is part of the Quick Corners feature, where you can set a thing or thing that you do regularly, like an alarm and then put on the breakfast radio station of your choice, as one button- tickle. You could ask it to do a slew of Internet of Things stuff, like opening your cunning powered curtains downstairs and firing up this! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Coffee-2nd-Generation-UK/dp/B06WD633RS

I was shown DiscovR in use at head office when I popped in (I am local) and was impressed by the output as well as what it could do. Thus, when I got it home, I was looking forward to enjoying it. So far, I have had to add the Spotify app of course, the Pure DiscovR app, the Pure Home app and I will have to, as well as opening up an Amazon account, also have the Alexa app on my phone too. Since despite telling Amazon my main address, the Alexa account cannot know where I am without the app being told. It is entirely symbiotic with this brace of eco-systems to set it apart from say the Scosche Boom Bottle or Kicker portable offerings https://www.adamrayner.net/kicker-kpw2-portable-waterproof-bluetooth-speaker/

So far, I have had epic struggles with simply getting it set up. Bluetooth pairing was idiot proof but I found that once at least connected to the internet via wifi, no single music command worked for me except for repeated attempts to get me to sign up for premium. So, £120 a year, plus £79 for Amazon prime or you cannot really choose your music and must endure adverts of course.

This is not PURE stuff, it is Amazon and Spotify stuff but it made me seek help from someone less dinosaurian and thus hopelessly biased. I have a friend who has always enjoyed tech and was the first person I knew to stream internet radio to play in her car by USB connection, years back. She has a brood of kids and also uses the Amazon Dot and Echo.

DiscovR is amazingly high quality and answers an awful lot of questions, yet for me I think I would still prefer to listen to music rather than have it on as background, like most people seem to. I hurt for wide stereo. That makes me old fashioned.. and yes, biased.

Realising that the job of checking this sort of thing out is about the device itself and that the reader couldn’t care less about the writer, unless they think they are dishonest, I thus delivered DiscovR to those friends who run their world by Alexa.

A husband and wife and horde of kids from four years old and up (bless wee Spud, he has just learned to say ‘AH-Lexxaaa’, rather than just ‘Lexxaa” so he too can now demand tunes.) One kid uses his speaker as an alarm clock and mum has an app that allows her to see EXACTLY what is said and done by her kids via the speaker. Dad has a Spotify Subscription but mum uses Apple Music.

Here they are fully five years back, proving that I have exploited her leading edge attitude to use of new technology, before, as Fiona was streaming from a DAB app on her iPhone and then playing tunes in her car via Bluetooth. 

The DiscovR is to be their new device. These folks know about audio, too. So what did the Durward-Browns think of DiscovR? I took it along and made some video. I start at my house, ably demonstrating why I need their help.

So what did they think? Deeply impressed. The sound quality was described as “way, way ahead of the Amazon Echo” but most of all the ability of the microphone array within DiscovR to actually hear you when it is pumping out sound itself, is just miraculous. How it does not ‘hear itself’ and can still pick out the human voice telling it to turn itself down in the midst of Baby Shark rocking the living room absolutely delighted Fiona. It means going to physically touch the thing to turn it down was no longer needful. A genuine little kaizen-grade actual life enhancement in that. Physics and sound are unforgiving and the microphone system in the DiscovR is just incredibly clever.

They were also impressed by the battery power as it is now part of their care system for two small dogs at times when they get left with music radio in the kitchen. The main plot is that the PURE DiscovR is true evolution in quality and functionality. It is almost as if Amazon needed their ecosystem to exist with barely-functionable-for-cheapest-price products to get Alexa really cooking, before better, more potent and simply nicer items of industrial design could be developed to serve its more discerning customers.

DiscovR is that smart speaker.
Better, smarter, higher quality by far in every way.

Performance: 10
Design: 10
Features 10
Overall:  10

VERDICT
PURE DiscovR portable smart speaker

Price £229.99 SRP Silver or Black
TWO YEAR WARRANTY

www.pure.com/discovr

HIGHS: Beautiful industrial design that sounds muscular. A definite latest generation concept, well executed.
LOWS: That beautiful, luxurious purest white rubbery base, will go grubby eventually, I think.

SPECS
Drive Units:1x 3in midwoofer, 2 x 0.25in tweeters
Mic: Far-field array for voice recognition
Enclosure:Single piece aluminium, non-slip polymer base, ABS polymer top, perforated steel grille
Frequency Response: Not Quoted
On-Board Power: 45W RMS
Battery: 7.4V 2,500 mAh Li-Ion non-user replaceable battery = up to 15 hours run time
Dimensions (WHD): 110(w) x 140(h) x 110(d) )mm when in open state, 105mm high when closed state
Weight:0.97Kg
Connections: 3.5mm Auxiliary audio input, USB-C power port (up to 3A charging)
Included: Main DiscovR unit, high quality USB-C to USB charge cord, poly-lingual quick start guides