Skip to main content
Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2024
I’ve been wanting to upgrade my Alexa devices, and have been looking at purchasing new Dots for a long time. When I saw these Dots on sale, I purchased three of them: two to use with my relatively new Fire TV for the home theater feature (more on that in a second), and the third to replace an old Dot that died a while ago.
I have a family member who’s a bit hard of hearing, and he kept jacking up the TV volume so that he could hear it. This meant that the rest of us were being blasted with audio that was too loud for our comfort. When I saw that the Echo Dots could be paired with my Fire TV for stereo sound, I thought, hey - I can put one of them right next to our favorite hearing impaired person and everyone wins! BUT NO.
Straight out of the box, they were easy to set up - home theater was easy to navigate for set up, my third Dot - which I’ve only ever intended to use for podcasts, smart home tasks, purchases, etc, was also incredibly easy to get up and running (SIDEBAR: Do the remote early set up via the email that Amazon sends you because then it’s virtually plug-and-play when they arrive). For the first few hours, my home theater Dots connected to my Fire TV sounded pretty good. Mind you, this is stereo, not surround sound, but it definitely solved our problem and seemed like a fantastic solution. However, it was all down hill from there. The Dots continually fell out of sync. One was always playing like you’d expect, the other was at least a second behind. Talk about irritating. The only thing that would resolve this was turning the TV off and back on. We’d have to do that several times an hour. Not cool when you’ve just gotten to the best part of whatever you’re viewing. Other times, one or the other would go static-y. And at other times, the sound would stop playing entirely on one or the other Dot. GRRRRRRRRR. The room this is in isn’t big - the Dots are both within about 10-12 feet of the television. I scoured Amazon and the Internet looking for a solution. I even turned to Reddit. I couldn’t find anything from anyone that was helpful or useful for resolving this, but I did find other people complaining about similar issues, so I’m not the only one who’s experienced it. I really wanted this to work because it truly would have addressed a need that we have. However, as of 15 minutes ago, after two weeks of trying to get this to work, we were all so fed up and over this that we all decided collectively that having our eardrums blasted out was a far better option than the hassle of trying to get something Amazon hasn’t worked the bugs out of to work.
(Amazon, if you’re reading this: I’m into tech. I’ve done more troubleshooting on this than anyone on your payroll. Fix this, please.)
If you’re purchasing a Dot to use as a standard Dot, it works as intended for that and you won’t be disappointed. It’s responsive when using it to control smart home functions, it sounds okay (not fantastic) for podcasts and low key/casual background music. I cannot recommend these to anyone for the home theater feature, because it just doesn’t work. Invest in a soundbar or surround sound system instead.
I have a family member who’s a bit hard of hearing, and he kept jacking up the TV volume so that he could hear it. This meant that the rest of us were being blasted with audio that was too loud for our comfort. When I saw that the Echo Dots could be paired with my Fire TV for stereo sound, I thought, hey - I can put one of them right next to our favorite hearing impaired person and everyone wins! BUT NO.
Straight out of the box, they were easy to set up - home theater was easy to navigate for set up, my third Dot - which I’ve only ever intended to use for podcasts, smart home tasks, purchases, etc, was also incredibly easy to get up and running (SIDEBAR: Do the remote early set up via the email that Amazon sends you because then it’s virtually plug-and-play when they arrive). For the first few hours, my home theater Dots connected to my Fire TV sounded pretty good. Mind you, this is stereo, not surround sound, but it definitely solved our problem and seemed like a fantastic solution. However, it was all down hill from there. The Dots continually fell out of sync. One was always playing like you’d expect, the other was at least a second behind. Talk about irritating. The only thing that would resolve this was turning the TV off and back on. We’d have to do that several times an hour. Not cool when you’ve just gotten to the best part of whatever you’re viewing. Other times, one or the other would go static-y. And at other times, the sound would stop playing entirely on one or the other Dot. GRRRRRRRRR. The room this is in isn’t big - the Dots are both within about 10-12 feet of the television. I scoured Amazon and the Internet looking for a solution. I even turned to Reddit. I couldn’t find anything from anyone that was helpful or useful for resolving this, but I did find other people complaining about similar issues, so I’m not the only one who’s experienced it. I really wanted this to work because it truly would have addressed a need that we have. However, as of 15 minutes ago, after two weeks of trying to get this to work, we were all so fed up and over this that we all decided collectively that having our eardrums blasted out was a far better option than the hassle of trying to get something Amazon hasn’t worked the bugs out of to work.
(Amazon, if you’re reading this: I’m into tech. I’ve done more troubleshooting on this than anyone on your payroll. Fix this, please.)
If you’re purchasing a Dot to use as a standard Dot, it works as intended for that and you won’t be disappointed. It’s responsive when using it to control smart home functions, it sounds okay (not fantastic) for podcasts and low key/casual background music. I cannot recommend these to anyone for the home theater feature, because it just doesn’t work. Invest in a soundbar or surround sound system instead.
