Sengled Pulse review: You got your speaker in my lightbulb!

6 smart LED bulbs tested

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Now heres a truly genius idea: Take a Bluetooth speaker and embed it inside an LED light bulb. Screw it into any available socket and youve got an instant in-ceiling audio system that also lights up the room.

The Sengled Pulse in kit form ships with two bulbs, one denoted the master and the other a satellite. These are straight Bluetooth products, so your audio source will need to be fairly close to the master bulb to operate. The master bulb also relays music to the satellite via Bluetooth, so they will also need to be in range of each other.

You can add additional satellites to the mix as needed, but given the range limitations, I cant see a typical home supporting more than three or four bulbs total. (Alternately, you could configure separate Pulse setups in different parts of the house, but these wouldnt communicate with the others.)

Installation is ultra-simpleprovided you can find a suitable place to screw the bulbs in. Never mind the LIFX monster reviewed elsewhere in this roundup, the Pulse bulb is so large I had trouble finding a fixture it would fit into. Ultimately I installed the bulbs in in-ceiling canisters designed for PAR30-sized, floodlight-style bulbsand this is probably the intended idea. Smaller bulbs might not make sense anyway, as Im not sure theres much of a way to shrink the speaker elements down without severely compromising sound quality.

The oversized form factor is needed to accomodate the presence of the speaker, but it does limit where you can install the Pulse.

Each Pulse bulb provides 600 lumens of brightness and contains a 1.75-inch JBL loudspeaker driven by a 13-watt amplifier. These speakers wont fill a room with sound, especially when theyre mounted in the ceiling, but the quality of the sound is surprisingly good, with good clarity and a modest bass response.

You can use the audio features on the Sengled Pulse without a mobile app, but thats the only way to control the brightness of the lights. The app is simple, with just two primary functions: One lets you turn the speakers on and off and control their volume, the other controls the brightness of the bulbs. Note that color temperature cant be changedits locked at a nicely warm 2700K. Bulb brightness can also be individually controlled.

The app also gives you more fine-grained control over audio than youll get from simply using your phones media player. If you have have two speaker-lights, for example, you can set one as the left and one as the right channel, or you can have both speakers play both left and right channels. A rudimentary equalizer is also included if you want to fine-tune your music.

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Sengled Pulse review: You got your speaker in my lightbulb!