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Pure opens Jongo speakers to Pandora, Spotify, Rdio and others

Pure’s Jongo range of wireless speakers will be able to work with other audio streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, Rdio and Deezer, thanks to the release of an app developer kit. 

Previously, only subscribers to the Pure Music service would be able to stream music, stored either on their phones or from the 15 million strong Pure library, to the speakers. 

The release of the new developer kit means that thousands of radio apps and services could soon be winging their way to the Jongo system. 

Pure opens Jongo speakers to Pandora, Spotify, Rdio and others
Welcome to the Jongo: Pure takes a leaf out of Sonos’s audio book

Read Recombu Digital’s review of the Pure Jongo A2 and S3 portable speakers Nick Hucker, Pure’s marketing director says: “We are not in the business of picking a winning music streaming service or radio app – different services are right for different audiences – but we want to give our customers the most choice.” 

Rival wireless HiFi makers Sonos already lets owners of its products stream audio from Spotify, Deezer and Rdio as well as other services including 7digital, Amazon Cloud Player, Last.fm, Audible and more. 

One area where Pure, a brand perhaps better known for its DAB radios, hopes to differentiate is in terms of stereo performance. As well as letting Spotify users stream to Jongo speakers, those with a stereo set up could also benefit from the Caskeid technology present in Pure’s speakers. 

Caskeid, developed by Pure’s parent company Imagination Technologies, allows for more accurate synchronisation between speakers when listening in stereo. Pure claims that listeners will be able to clearly pick out individual instruments and vocals in the mix with no drift in the stereo landscape. 

Pure claims that the human ear can detect any deviation of around 50 milliseconds between speakers, which can ruin the enjoyment of music with stereo mixes. Caskeid reportedly guarantees deviation of less than 25 milliseconds. 

In layman’s terms, this means that Dark Side of the Moon will sound pretty amazing through Jongo speakers. 

Caskeid technology also delivers app content to multiple speakers using a combination of Bluetooth and WiFi. 

Through the Pure Connect app, you’d pick your music or radio service app and send it via Bluetooth to a single Jongo speaker in a group. The Caskeid technology integrated into the  speakers ensures that music is seamlessly sent to all the speakers in the group. 

“Jongo was designed with flexibility in mind, which is why all Jongo speakers come with both Bluetooth and WiFi,” adds Hucker. “We’ve always used this flexibility to make sure all services can be played to a single Jongo speaker but now we are making the major step of extending this flexibility, via Bluetooth, to enable streaming of any music service or radio app to multiple Jongo speakers.” 

Pure will be demonstrating this new feature at CES 2014. The iOS and Android Pure Connect apps, letting people benefit from the new stereo feature over the next three months. The developer kit will also be released within the first quarter of 2014, meaning compatibility with Spotify and others won’t likely be available until Summer. 

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