The Bluesound Pulse M wireless speaker presents a glass-half-full versus glass-half-empty predicament. The BluOS multi-room audio platform it runs on is capable of transmitting sizzling ultra-high-res performances, as evidenced by such hardware as the $599 Bluesound Node Audio player and the $1,499 NAD C700 Streaming Amplifier. The good news is that the $399 Pulse M not only costs less than either of those components, but it also has integrated speakers—you don’t need to buy anything else. The bad news is that its audio performance doesn’t come anywhere close to those components when they’re paired with speakers of comparable quality.
On the other hand, listeners looking to add BluOS components to rooms where space is at a premium and background music is valued over critical listening sessions—in the kitchen or the home office, for example—The Pulse—as it is to look at.
