Philips Bookshelf Speakers with Bluetooth
- Two Philips bookshelf speakers that look like speakers
- Aux-in or Bluetooth v3.0, spending on your wire tolerance
- Each speaker is about 10" tall, 5" wide, 6" deep, with a 3" woofer and a 0.5" top-mounted soft dome tweeter, about the size of a gallon of milk
- 20W RMS total power, which makes it louder than anything else on your bookshelf
- Model: SPA4270BT/37 (Philips puts “/37” at the end of a lot of model numbers - why? Because it’s the atomic number of rubidium? Casey Stengel’s uniform number? The number people are most likely to blurt out when asked to choose a random number between 1 and 100? What secret does 37 hold, Philips?)
Speakers should be heard and not seen.
Get a load of these speakers. Look pretty boring, don’t they? Indistinguishable from countless other speakers you’ve seen over the years. No outward sign of their space age Bluetooth guts. They could mug you in broad daylight and you’d have trouble picking them out of a police lineup.
Which is exactly the point.
You know how we describe a piece of technology that strains too hard to match its advanced function with equally futuristic form? Dated.
By now, we’ve pretty much figured out what a speaker should look like. Most people want familiar shapes and unobtrusive colors. Like “rectangular” and “black”. How the speaker connects to the music source - be it Bluetooth, aux-in, or any older or newer way - doesn’t change that.
Sorry, aspiring sculptors working in the speaker-design field. You’re not going to improve on the black box. You can round a corner here, bulge out a dome there, maybe even get triangular, if you’re really daring. Speakers that look like pink clouds, or plaid kidneys, or space urchins are always going to be a minority taste, no matter how advanced the innards are.
No, you could slide these right into any bookshelf, right onto any PC desk, and hardly even notice anything had changed. So bland. So anonymous. So right.
