Pretty interesting that their recommended Dot + Speaker combos are more than the cost of the Echo by like...50%.
I got one of the first batch of Echos when they were sort of an invitation-only thing. I wasn't sure how the voice interaction would turn out, but I figured it would at least make a decent streaming music speaker.
Ugh. The sound quality of the Echo was its worst feature for me. Really not what I expected from a speaker, especially after seeing their fancy descriptions of how they worked so hard on the sound quality.
It's boomy and muddy, not at all what I'm looking for in a music speaker. Oddly enough, I didn't see a lot of complaints about it, so I guess that boomy muddy sound is what a lot of people like? In any case it's not for me.
So yeah, having the Alexa functionality but being able to connect higher-quality speakers - and stereo too? That works for me.
Mainly it is the fact that I can make it happen while holding the baby, I'm willing to forgive a lot of the sound issues.
In fact, right now I don't have any really good speakers at home. If I want good sound quality I have to use my Yuin earbuds or maybe the old Sony E888's if I can find them.
Totally off topic, but since the earbuds came to mind I have a great hack for them. One problem with earbuds like the Yuins with a symmetric cord is that it's hard to tell the right from the left without looking closely. So I bought two of those bags of foamy covers that they have on Amazon for like $3-4 for a hundred of them - one bag of white covers and one of black. I put a black foamy on the left earbud and a white one on the right. Now I never get them mixed up!
Back to Echo, I think my disappointment with the sound quality had a bit to do with how they marketed it, claiming excellent sound and showing the cutaway drawings of how they achieved that, or claimed to. And then the actual sound wasn't nearly as good as what I'd expected from the marketing. A case of over-promising and under-delivering.