Review on Audioengine 512 Outdoor Wireless Bluetooth Speaker, 20W Powered Portable Music System, 100 Ft Range, 12 Hour Battery Life (Black) by Ken Coste

This is a hard review to write, I own three other sets of Audioengine speakers and two of their DACs and thought the 512 would be a no-brainer, audio-quality first, no-nonsense purchase. This is the first product I'm not completely impressed with.THE GOOD: This speaker does inherently sound amazing. It sounds like a much larger and more robust speaker and can get very loud. There is a good sense of stereo separation and touches every part of the spectrum in a way that doesn't sound forced. The bass isn't booming but it is present and comes off conservative/balanced, never artificially boosted. This is what it sounds like with a wired connection.THE CATCH: Bluetooth audio is awful on this because it only supports the SBC codec. High frequencies suffer, instruments like cymbal crashes and vocals become distorted by the compression. Because this is a good sounding speaker you hear every imperfection in the compression. Bluetooth does not have to sound like this, and Audioengine knows this. Other Audioengine Bluetooth products support AAC as well as AptX and do not suffer from this same problem. I have a B2 speaker as well and I'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between wired and Bluetooth for a 320 kbps streaming music service. With the 512 it makes me want to stop listening or switch to a wired connection immediately. Both my phone and laptop have a BT 5.0 chipset and I couldn't get a good experience out of either of them.BOTTOM LINE: Amazing speaker hardware held back by poor codec quality, which kind of defeats the purpose. Really surprised given Audioengine's good track record with BT in the past.EDIT: Ended up returning the speaker.