Last summer we reviewed Bluetooth aficionado Parrot's excellent Boombox and were impressed enough to assume that this form of wireless audio streaming had finally been cracked.

Gear4 recently announced two similar solutions in the Blackbox and Blackbox mini; we have the larger of the two on test here but it's still substantially smaller than Parrot's offering and just about squeezes into the ‘portable' market.

The main highlight of the unit is its appealing design. A sleek gloss black finish covers the top and front, and when you turn the thing on you'll find a range of controls that light up with a cool blue hue at the top and a dynamic LED-based equalizer at the front.

You're also supplied with a remote control that apes the on-board controls, which comprise volume, play/pause, track skip and pairing functions, along with an LED control that cycles between three different display modes. To add a bit more adaptability to the device there's a 3.5mm line-in jack at the back so you can wire any audio player in directly if you don't want to go the Bluetooth route, but after playing with the device for a while we'd guess that most people would want to choose this option wherever possible.

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You'll find an alleged 24W of power from the two speakers, which is pretty good on a device this size, and when we wired up an MP3 player directly the results were pretty impressive. Although there's no provision here for adjusting treble or bass via the speakers themselves, if you have a decent player that includes a custom equalizer or allows for audio adjustments you can achieve some pretty impressive sound. Bass isn't exactly thumping but mid- and high-range tones are well balanced and audio is clean and crisp, even at high volumes.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for Bluetooth connections. The pairing process was fairly straightforward but the unit has a tendency to switch itself from auxiliary to wireless if your audio player goes into standby, which became quite frustrating.

We played some audio tracks through a couple of mobile phones and a PC using a Bluetooth dongle and encountered results that ranged from passable to poor. The PC was the better of the two options, but in both cases sound was very muffled, high tones appeared to get lost in a wall of noise and the mid-range was rather understated. This got noticeably worse when we hooked up a mobile phone; we wouldn't be happy to listen to anything for long under these conditions.

If you're looking to pick up a speaker solution for Bluetooth support you'll be disappointed by the performance of the Blackbox, and if you're not bothered about wireless there are comparable solutions around for a lot less. If portability isn't a concern you'd do well do shell out an extra 50 percent on Parrot's Boombox, which although larger has the Blackbox beat on all other fronts.