A client called yesterday: can't connect to Bluetooth at our event location. The receiver is a Denon DN-200BR — pro gear, professionally installed. Known problem, known fix: pull the plug, put it back in. My cheap workshop receiver needs the same ritual daily, plus a press-and-hold-for-four-seconds prayer. And this is the technology deemed good enough to kill the headphone jack. I'm not complaining out of nostalgia — I'm complaining about usability.

The one exception: my Milwaukee M12 jobsite speaker just works. And it has a feature called audio-link that supposedly daisychains over 200 of those little speakers together, wirelessly. What is audio-link? No idea. The product page names no standard, no protocol, nothing — one line of marketing and that's the entire documentation. There's even an open Bluetooth standard for exactly this, Auracast, but Milwaukee doesn't say whether audio-link is that or something homegrown. It's the one Bluetooth feature that would actually be worth something, and it exists only as an undocumented extra from a power tool company.

I only own one speaker, so I can't test it. But the thought of 200 little Krawallschachteln spread across a jobsite, all singing "Ga Ga, oh la laha" in sync — that's the future the headphone-jack killers promised me. Every jobsite speaker manufacturer should build this.