McIntosh RS150 Wireless Loudspeaker

The McIntosh RS150 is a single wireless loudspeaker with the amplification, conversion and streaming built in, wearing the black glass fascia and the green McIntosh logo of the company’s much larger separates.

It is the smaller of the company’s two wireless speakers, aimed at a room where a full McIntosh system would be excessive but the family look is still wanted.

What Apple Home actually does with it

This is an AirPlay 2 speaker rather than a HomeKit accessory.

• It appears in the Home app as a speaker you can play to, and as an AirPlay target in Control Centre.
• You can assign it to a room and group it with HomePods for synchronised multi-room audio.
• Siri can send music to it by room name.
• It can be the audio output in a scene or an automation.

You cannot switch it on or set its volume from the Home app the way you would a light. Those stay with the speaker itself and its own app.

Before you buy

A single speaker plays mono. Two RS150s can be paired for stereo, which doubles the cost, and that is worth deciding before you buy one.

McIntosh charges for its identity as well as its engineering. On sound per pound a specialist active speaker will win; on looking like a McIntosh, nothing else does.

The RS250 is the larger model.

Specifications