I've recently played around with Bluetooth speakers paired in stereo setup for near-field listening.
This is really enjoyable for podcasts which are often mono and can give a very listenable phantom center image floating in space. Even if the podcast isn't mono, the speakers are often centered, and it's a lot nicer to hear the voices floating in space in front of me with a good stereo near-field image. My main system is setup for a big soundstage 10 feet away. For podcasts the near-field setup is a real treat.
I started with a pair of JBL Go 4 speakers for about $100 (depending on Amazon sales). For the size and cost they are good, but they have two huge, interrelated issues: they power off after ~10 minutes when there is no sound, and then you have to go back into the phone app to re-establish the stereo pairing. This gets old very very quickly, and there is no way to adjust or turn off the auto-shutoff in the JBL app.
So, I tried the JBL Flip 6, which uses a different version of their firmware. These glitched in stereo every couple of minutes. Unstable stereo pairing is even worse than auto-shutoff pairing amnesia. I did not even get to the point of seeing if auto-shutoff was an issue with these.
I've settled on the Soundcore X600. They've been on sale for $150 each, so a stereo pair is $300. They let me disable the auto-shutoff (or set it to 60 or 30 minutes), so I don't have to worry about pausing and coming back whenever. They also have peer-to-peer stereo pairing not mediated by the app. You press the Bluetooth buttons on two of them for a few seconds and they lock themselves into being left and right channels. I have not tested whether this survives a power off, however. I have them setup with a USB-C cable to each, so I can leave them on 24/7.
Obviously this is possible with cheap wired speakers, but I wanted something that I could take outside as well.
I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but I had not thought of it and the listening with podcasts has been really enjoyable.
