Bottom Line The JBL OnBeat Air, despite being slightly overpriced, is still one of the more affordable AirPlay docks that offers reasonable audio performance.
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71
Conclusion: We're mixed
The JBL OnBeat Air combines a speaker dock for iOS devices with wireless access to iTunes music over AirPlay, making it something of a jack-of-all-trades for content in the Apple ecosystem. While its $199 price tag might be reasonable for all that it does, and it may be useful when paired with in iPhone or iPod touch, you may want to skip it if you're looking for an iPad dock, since it doesn't allow you to rotate your iPad to use it in landscape mode (to get that feature, you'll need JBL's $499 OnBeat Xtreme). For a speaker dock that is designed to let you enjoy audio and video content, that seems like a glaring omission.
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Critic reviews
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The JBL OnBeat Air is a decent (though not great) compact speaker dock for iOS devices that's currently one of the more affordable AirPlay speakers on the market.
Read the full review →The OnBeat Air sounds fine played at lower volume levels, and would make a perfect companion for late night, chilled-out listening. Turn it up, though, and the dock is disappointing – the bass sounding muddy and distorted, and beats crunchy rather than crisp.
Read the full review →$249 retail buys you more than just the convenience of “AirPlay” and an Apple dock with the JBL OnBeat Air. There’s a real quality to the audio being outputted — one significantly worth listening to when digital music’s less than stellar resolution is being played.
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How it stacks up
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