Announced at CES in January but only now hitting stores, the Pulse 3 is JBL's latest Bluetooth speaker that produces an LED light show to go along with your music. Unlike the Pulse 2, which delivered colorful dancing LEDs across a mesh-like grid, the $199.95 Pulse 3 has a smooth, cloud-like lighting effect over its surface. Despite the lighting, the Pulse 3 is waterproof, and from an audio perspective, it delivers a strong output. But it sounds more like a speaker in the $100 to $150 range, so you're paying a bit of a premium for the (admittedly cool) lighting.

Design and Lighting

Measuring 8.7 by 3.6 inches (HW), the 2.1-pound cylindrical Pulse 3 stands upright, with most of its outer panel serving as the LED lighting panel. At the bottom of the outer panel, speaker grille houses the three 40mm drivers firing in all directions, and at the top, facing up, is a passive radiator that improves bass response. A second, down-firing passive radiator is hidden by rubberized feet that keep the speaker stable. The Pulse 3's IPX7 rating means it can withstand immersion in water up to one meter for 30 minutes, provided its snap-shut connection panel cover is securely closed.

At the bottom of the back panel there is a power button with a battery life LED above it. This area also houses a play/pause button (that also skips tracks with multiple taps, answers or ends incoming calls, or can be programmed in an app to summon Google or Siri voice controls), plus/minus volume buttons, and controls for Bluetooth pairing, speaker linking, and switching the various light modes. The volume controls in conjunction with, not independently of, your device's master volume levels.

The Pulse 3 can be linked with a number of other JBL Connect speakers using the JBL Connect app, and if you can link another Pulse 3, you can sync their lights or keep them intentionally varied. Even on its own, the lights are quite entertaining.

The app allows you to control the brightness, as well as choose between various patterns, including Wave (simple ripples), Jet (which looks as if several flashlights of varying colors are shining from inside the speaker), Explosion (a more sporadic version of Jet, with larger bursts), Equaliser (which more or less syncs up with your music), Rave (a spotlight-inspired effect that also appears to sync to music), Rainbow (a simple ROYGBIV scrolling effect), Fire (a noble attempt to recreate the movement of flames), or a custom setting that allows you to mix together various parameters. The LEDs also give a cool visual indicator, like a cup filling up with glowing vapors, when you raise or lower the volume

All of these patterns can vary in color based on whatever hue you select in the app, or the color can be based on a photo you take using your paired phone's camera. Brighter colors seem to work better with the camera trick, like oranges or blues. Taking a picture of my iced coffee or a green glass bottle didn't net the most accurate or compelling results. Regardless, the light show is very cool, and even smoother than on the previous Pulse 2, rippling like alien clouds. You can also turn it off if desired.

The mic offers average intelligibility. Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone 6s, we could understand every word we recorded, but there were some audio artifacts that made things sound a little fuzzy, which is typical for most mics on Bluetooth speakers.

JBL estimates the Pulse 3 gets roughly 12 hours of battery life, but your results will vary with your mix of wired and wireless play, your volume levels, and your use of the LEDs.

Performance

On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," the Pulse 3 delivers a solid thump, and doesn't distort at top volumes, though you can definitely hear the DSP (digital signal processing) thinning out the deep bass at higher volumes to avoid distortion. At more moderate volume levels, the lows sound thicker and more intense, but it should be noted that this is neither a subwoofer-level bass experience, nor is it a speaker that gets exceptionally loud for its high price.

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Bill Callahan's "Drover," a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the Pulse 3's overall sound signature. Bass-forward speakers can often make the drums on this track sound overly thunderous and unnatural; through the Pulse 3, the drums are neither thunderous nor thin. But they do take a backseat to Callahan's baritone vocals as one of the more prominent forces in the mix—the vocals get a strong, rich low-mid presence that jumps out at you far more than the drums do. There's plenty of high-mid presence to give the vocals some treble edge and clarity. The guitar strums get some added punchiness in their attack from the high-mid sculpting, as well.

On Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild," the kick drum loop receives an ideal level of high-mid presence, making its attack sharp and allowing it to cut through the layers of the beat as one of the prominent sounds in the mix. The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat are more implied than delivered—the sustain of the drum hits pack more thump than the synth does, and we hear the synth's raspy top notes but nothing like the sub-bass depth that some speakers can conjure. The vocals on this track get solid clarity, though sometimes it sounds like they have a little added sibilance and that the force of the drum loop might overpower them.

Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene in John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary, receive a modest boosting in the lows and low-mids that pushes the lower register instrumentation forward in the mix a bit, but the spotlight still belongs to the higher register brass, strings, and vocals. The overall sound signature here is balanced, with some prominent high-mid crispness matched by rich lows—but there's no sub-bass depth to speak of, regardless of the genre.

Conclusions

The JBL Pulse 3 is priced like a speaker that might have some sub-bass power to it, but it sounds more like a speaker that costs about $50 less in that regard. That extra cost money goes into the design—those dancing LEDs aren't free, and neither is the waterproof housing. So it's only fair to call this speaker overpriced if you don't care about the LEDs and the outdoor-friendly design. If those factors are important to you, then the Pulse 3 actually sounds quite good, all things considered. If you prefer sub-bass to lights, check out the Marshall Kilburn. For less, the EcoXGear EcoSlate is a solid outdoor-friendly option, and the Sony SRS-XB3 and Bose SoundLink Color II deliver comparable audio for less money.

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