Sharp GX-BT7 Review

The amount of wireless speakers is growing so fast that even we find it hard to keep up. When the spectacular Sharp speaker showed up we did, on the other hand, take notice. The odd design and the strong blue light was impossible to ignore. It needs to be tested.

Because there is nothing that says great sound can only come from a square box, it is permissible to use your imagination when designing a speaker. And it can safely be said that Sharp has done just that. The speaker, that uses Bluetooth to stream music wirelessly from your mobile phone, looks like a cylinder that someone has pressed together in the middle. It does not run on batteries, but is supposed to be placed on the kitchen counter or on a shelf, and when you turn it on it shows it's first party trick.

​It emits a loud swooshing sound and starts the show with the speakers sliding apart, and two bright LEDs in the middle lights up.

​Quite fun. Pairing it with your mobile - or tablet - is even more fun. It includes: two small NFC "tags", as Sharp calls them. They can be as far away from the speaker as 30 feet and they act like little near field satellites and makes it easier to pair the speaker with mobiles. One can for example be put on the shelf, another at the entrance door. Then pair them by just swiping the mobile over the tag.

​You can also connect a USB cable or standard 3.5-mm mini jack if it is not practical to stream music wirelessly. Then you can get better sound as well, the USB port supports PCM audio (same as CD) when you connect the mobile with the cable.

​The blue light pumping in time with the music can not be turned off, not the startup sound either, but you can lower the sound of the music. Either from the mobile or from the remote control.

The Sharp speaker doesn´t play particularly loud compared with the Sonos Play:1 or Bose SoundLink.

​After a little fine tuning of the bass and treble, I got a decent result. The soundstage need some extra fullness in the bass, but no matter how much one dials up or down the midrange lags compared with the overall sound. It sounds rough, almost distorted, even if you´re not playing violently loud.

​Although the strings of Beethoven sounded fairly good, it simply drowned much of the pianos timbres and made it sound muddy. This sounded all the better with Jimi Hendrix, and Dave Matthews, where I managed to get more dynamics out of the speaker.