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iLive Platinum Wireless Bluetooth Speakers - Reviewed
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May 30, 2025
Can a company get one facet of their product right and completely stumble on another? Our review of the iLive Platinum Wi-Fi Bluetooth wireless speaker demonstrates that's exactly what the company has done, producing a decent little budget wireless speaker, but completely fumbling with the control app. So badly, that we couldn't get bluetooth to work at all! Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ stuck with it, however, and found that the core functionality of the speaker - and its ability to pair with a second speaker for room filling wireless sound - offer a glimpse at what could have been a really great speaker setup. If they can just fix the app... Learn more at https://iliveelectronics.com/
View Video Transcript
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can a speaker get the sound right and
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the software horribly wrong let me tell
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you all about
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[Music]
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it Dave Taylor here and I'm looking at
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the iive Platinum Bluetooth speakers now
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these are two different units each box
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comes with one and I got to tell you I
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really wanted to like these the feature
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set the specs they're all really cool
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but the real reality is is that while
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the company got the the hardware right
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they sound pretty decent their software
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is just a huge mess so let's start with
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the sound though so I have two of these
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units and I have put them into multi
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mode so I'm getting left and right
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automatically they're both Wireless
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nothing up my sleeves here and in the
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app I'm going to go ahead and just push
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play and get some
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music and there's not a huge amount of
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Base but it's certainly quite listenable
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and the fact that you can you know put
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these speakers in opposite sides of the
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room or you can actually have them in
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different rooms or you can even add I
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think you can add more it seems to be
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designed for two but you should double
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check with the vendor um let me pause
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this but here's the problem the problem
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is that it's a nightmare to get it all
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set up it's a nightmare to get it
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configured I never got these into
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Bluetooth mode so I could never try
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Bluetooth so what I have is I have them
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in um Wi-Fi mode so they're on my Wi-Fi
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network and then the app finds the
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speakers and then there are ways you can
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see here for example this is how I
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actually have the two speakers working
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together in multi mode right so there's
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all this there's a ton of different ways
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to get to your music I was impressed
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that it saw my Plex server for music so
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that part of it all works really well
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but boy this setup will have you pulling
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your hair out I actually got to the
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point where on one of the speakers I
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just gave up I just said I know I've
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heard music out of it I can't hear music
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out of it now and I just pushed the
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button down and did a factory reset and
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here's the crazy thing when I did the
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factory reset it actually came back
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online automatically and was ready to
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roll in the app so I don't know what the
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factory reset factory is but be that as
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it may I finally got it to work but boy
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if you're not willing to have some
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patience or you're not willing to use
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the Au cord or something then these
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might drive you a little batty but you
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know tradeoffs they are nice once you
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get them to work they do seem to work
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pretty consistently they do have aux in
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if you don't want to mess with any
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Wireless anything you can just have one
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speaker um it does have as you can see
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on the top there are six preset buttons
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how you set those I don't know there's a
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spot in the app that'll show you what
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they're set to but it doesn't actually
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let you change what they're said to so I
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have visions of push one you're on
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Spotify push two you're on Pandora but I
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have no idea how to actually accomplish
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that I'm sure iive has all this working
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in their own Labs it might be an issue
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of instructions but it also seems to be
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they have a larger version of the
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speaker and I'm wondering if the larger
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version has buttons that this one just
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doesn't have so even as I Was preparing
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for this review I got an update from
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their software it didn't seem to fix
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anything but the company's definitely
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paying
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attention so these are the iive Platinum
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multi-room play built-in Wi-Fi you don't
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need your own Wi-Fi network to use them
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they run 5 hours on battery they come
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with their own charger which you can
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also do with just a micro USB connection
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of any sort on the top you have power
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volume up down next previous track pause
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play all the usual stuff and the they're
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about 9 in by 6 in they weigh about a
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pound each
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and you know I'm just going to let you
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decide how you want to proceed with this
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because they actually sound pretty good
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my daughter's enjoying them but she has
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much more patience than I do in terms of
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fiddling and getting things set up I
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feel like they just need to toss their
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app and start over I understand what
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they're trying to do it's just really
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frustrating there's just a lot of
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frustration around getting this all set
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up but if you're willing to give it a
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Yan's effort then this might be a great
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little pair of speakers or a great
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little speaker for you now on Amazon
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where they don't have very good reviews
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they're 113 bucks a speaker however 15
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seconds online found a place that had
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them for half that price so I will
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encourage you if you are interested to
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do some searches on Amazon no do some
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searches on the internet and see what
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you can find out out or look for a
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different speaker quite honestly there
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are other speakers that might not give
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you this Nifty magic multi-speaker mode
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but are way less complicated to set up
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and way less I don't know way less
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stress inducing in terms of getting it
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all working properly so this is Dave
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Taylor I'm just calling it as it is it's
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a great moment for me to ask you to
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click the Subscribe button so you can
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catch more of my honest candid and
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authentic reviews clearly no one has
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paid me for this
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review so that's what I got so I will
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catch you in my next
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[Music]
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video a