All in all, we’d call SoundRing a “pretty good” speaker system—an option for users who value distinctive industrial design enough to sacrifice sonic performance in its service.

Sadly, while the general quality of AirPlay audio might be very good, it suffered from reliability problems, dropping out at least once every time we used the speaker. When watching films or TV, you're left to desperately try to lip read until the audio kicks back in, a few seconds later.