The LG FH6 Freestyler is a floor-standing, all-in-one stereo speaker system — it’s basically a modern day boombox. But it’s modern in more than just its looks — it can hook up three phones simultaneously over Bluetooth, it can supercharge your TV sound, and it’s one hell of a karaoke machine. Here are six things that you can try to turn the all-in-one system into a speaker that’s equally good at movies or music.
We really liked the FH6 Freestyler’s sound in our review, but it’s quite complex for what seems on the surface like quite a simple Bluetooth speaker. With that in mind, here’s a very quick guide to some of the things that you can do with the X-Boom that are a little more complex than just pressing play on your smartphone.
Try out different lighting combinations to suit your living space. The LG FH6 has a total of 64 different lighting combinations, all of which can be controlled through the speaker system’s companion app for Android smartphones. Its LED lights can be set to red, green, blue or any mix in between, and there’s also a bright white ‘sparkle strip’ light in the middle. All the lights can pulse when you’re playing music tracks or the audio from a movie, too, and it’s an effect that looks pretty impressive in a dark room, especially with the speakers turned up to full power.
Connect three smartphones simultaneously and mix music between them. As long as your phone uses a newer version of Android than 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (from 2011) or of Apple’s iOS 6.0 (from 2012), then you’re set: you can hook up your phone, and up to two others at the same time, and play music from each without having to re-connect. You can also use the Music Flow Bluetooth app to add songs from multiple phones into a longer playlist. It works seamlessly — even if all three phones are connected at once using the app, each can choose the currently playing track, or skip ahead or back — so all you have to do is play nicely and get along.
Connect it directly to a compatible LG TV for an instant theatre sound system. If you’re not listening to music, you can still use the Freestyler to give your TV a big sound boost. Any modern LG TV supporting Sound Sync, which is a Bluetooth wireless technology, can hook up without wires to the FH6 and play the audio that goes alongside whatever video is playing — regardless of whether you’re watching a movie from a Blu-ray player, games console, or just live TV. You can link two FH6 speakers together, too, if you want a ridiculous amount of power.
Stand it up for maximum party sound, lay it down for surround sound movies. The FH6 can be stood upright or positioned on its side — on its side, it makes for a great sound-bar underneath a big-screen TV, but stood up you can hide it away in the corner of a room and have it fill the space with music. There are eight different equaliser modes that change the clarity of the FH6’s treble and the low-frequency, floor-shaking strength of the bass; try them out and see which sounds best for the music or movies you’re listening to. The maximum volume is seriously loud, too.
Connect a microphone — or two — and go nuts with the karaoke mode. The LG Freestyler has two microphone inputs, which means that you can play a music track and sing over the backing, along with a friend — like Rock Band on steroids. All you need is a music track that you know the words to, and the courage to sing along with it as loud as you can. It’s even possible to use the FH6 without music playing, obviously, as a massively powerful PA system — as long as you have a power plug nearby, you can set up the FH6 as a voice-amplifying loudspeaker.
Scratch away at the turntable on the top to add sound effects to your music. The LG FH6 X-Boom’s distingushing feature is the central turntable-esque control wheel on its top, which can dynamically alter the music you’re listening to. If you’re handy with a beat, try adding some scratch and flange sound effects to your tracks, or add a drum beat in on top of what you’re already listening to. You can even mix in recorded sounds using your smartphone and the LG Musicflow app, which lets you add your own voice into the music.