So I’ve now had the JBL “Onbeat Air” going for over 24 hours and its been playing music to the delight of my ears and accepting the streams from computers and IOS devices alike without any complaint whatever, I’ve experienced 2 dropouts of a second or so in the time I’ve been testing and at those times my Wi-Fi network was being put to heavy use so no complaints there whatever as these hitches are to be expected when Wi-Fi networks are under strain. The “Onbeat Air” would appear to sound best in a room placed on an open surfice, say a desk with plenty of space round the unit, this gives plenty of space for the sound to be dispersed and believe me, this little beauty can certainly disperse sound! Whilst we’re not talking a hi-fi grade product when it comes to the “Onbeat Air” we are speaking of a very decent sounding product for its size. Gone are the days of transmitting audio around your house with FM transmitters which are subject to noise, questionable audio quality and so on, with an “Airplay” compatible device you enjoy a digital audio stream, no background noise and music as its meant to be heard. To the “Onbeat Air” itself, well it looks like an overgrown egg with an interesting styling, the unit has ridges around it which give the appearance that the unit has been chopped in half and roughly glued back to together, each half is one speaker section. The whole thing is enclosed by a light wire mesh grill, nice and smooth. Very few controls are to be found on the “Onbeat Air”, just up and down volume with a “Connect” button in the middle of these on the right-hand side and an “on/off/standby” button on the rear next to the connecting sockets which I’ll talk about later. As I mentiond in my first notes on this device earlier on this week, I thought I may require sighted assistance to get the speaker connected to the wi-fi network, thankfully this isn’t the case as other list members pointed out. The “Onbeat Air” contains its own wi-fi network and accessible HTML setup page so the trick is to get your computer or smart phone to connect to this in a similar way as you would with a rooter for example and that’s where the “Onbeat Air’s” wireless network comes into play, when you hold down the “Connect” button for a few seconds the “Onbeat Air” is ready to join other wireless networks thus if you do a scan for wi-fi networks with your computer at this point you should see the “Onbeat” air” listed as a network. Once joined you can type in an IP address into your browser and access the “Onbeat Air” setup which contains all the settings required to connect to a home wireless network. The page is pretty straight forward and extremely accessible and the “Onbeat air” connected to my wi-fi network straight away after I’d filled in the appropriate details for my network and clicked on the “Connect” button. So for some final things to mention, the “Onbeat Air” comes with a small remote control unit. Connections are on the rear of the set for line-in, video composit out, USB port for IOS device sync with and iTunes library on a computer and the AC in socket. the “Onbeat Air” is a mians powered unit only and I’m not surprised, wi-fi can really drain batteries. “Onbeat Air” has an iPhone/iPod/iPad dock which can be set to either portrait or landscape orientation. If I were to rate this product then I’d have no problem in giving it a top rating, yes there are better models around but you’ll pay considerably more, I paid $299.00 Australian dollars at my local Apple Store and I probably could have purchased the same unit for a cheaper price but I’m all for convenience here <smile>.
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