Harman/Kardon Go + Play 3 Speaker Review

These days devices tend to be jacks of all trades and masters of none. Many speakers, for example, connect to WiFi, have smart home connectors, and all kinds of other things. For all that tech, they tend to wind up having to make sacrifices in the sound quality area. The Harman/Kardon Go + Play 3 has stripped all that back to focus on its job, being a speaker, and it excels.

What does the Harman/Kardon Go + Play 3 do well?

Speaker things, and that’s about it. Out of the box, it has a simple, elegant look with a massive handle over the top. The top has five buttons: power, Bluetooth, volume up, volume down, and a phone button.

Connect the speaker to your device via Bluetooth and it is good to go. Simple. The back offers two ports other than the power. AUX, of course, lets you connect with AUX cables. The other is a USB-C output port, so you can connect your phone to it to drain some of that battery to keep the tunes humming.

And then of course the sound. The Go + Play 3 has damn exceptional sound. The speaker has a nice sub underneath which creates punchy bass. Then the speaker out the front sounds absolutely fantastic at lower and higher volumes. Seriously, I was consistently blown away by the quality. The speaker has some smarts in it to optimise based on the environment, and that’s hard to test except that it always sounded great. Best of all, it has up to an eight-hour battery life, and when I used it, I got pretty close to that at surprisingly high volumes.

What is it average at?

There are a few drawbacks here. The speaker is designed to go, which is great, but it doesn’t have an app to use to connect it to. That means you can’t customise the sound, connect to WiFi or anything. Despite having a mic, you can’t use it as a smart speaker. Again, this speaker is focused on being an excellent speaker, and so these functions would make it the cream of the crop.

The mic in it is good enough for phone calls, but it is far from great. I would never plan to use this for a phone call, but if your phone is Bluetoothed to it, you can bang out a quick convo without disconnecting your phone from the speaker. 

Also, annoyingly, it isn’t waterproof. A banger of a speaker that has an eight-hour battery life would be better if you could safely take it outside. This is much like an indoor speaker designed to be put in the corner of a room to make some awesome sounds. As all the speakers point out the front, it isn’t great for a speaker in the center of the room either. 

So should you get one?

If you don’t need the waterproofing or the smart features, then the Harman/Kardon Go + Play 3 Speaker is hard to look past. As a speaker, for under $500, this is an exceptional speaker! If you have enough smart speakers in your house, then this may be exactly what you’re looking for.

Even better, heaps of stores have them for $330 right now which is a steal!