Sometimes you just need more power than the Bluetooth speaker dangling from your backpack can muster. You still need it to be portable so that you can bring it to the patio, but it needs to withstand the raucous chitter chatter of a crowd.
The Tribit StormBox Blast was my first purchase after a party at a new apartment convinced me I needed sweet, sweet power. But at a reasonable price. Like, say, under $200? Not easy to find in Bluetooth boomboxes, but the Tribit was a total score.
Tribit
StormBox Blast (opens in a new window)
$160.00 at Amazon
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
$160.00 at Walmart
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
a name you might not have heard of
Tribit is a budget brand you might not have heard of. It doesn’t have the flashy television ads of Beats or Apple. And it doesn’t have the years of brand recognition like Bose and JBL. But it produces a few speakers that sound a lot better than their budget prices should allow them to.
Like the smaller, cheaper, and more portable (but quieter) Tribit StormBox 2, the StormBox Blast sounds surprisingly good for a budget brand, and its low frequencies don’t sound muddy.
I didn’t get to test its claimed 150 feet of Bluetooth range, but it didn’t drop out when I left the speaker outside and went into my apartment to grab more ice. There was a lot of wall between the speaker and the phone I was carrying, which was streaming music to it.
XBass is Tribit’s name for a setting you can toggle to ramp up the bass. Turning it on drains the battery faster, but it does produce a noticeably more bass-heavy sound. For large, loud parties I turn it on to help cut through the noise of the crowd. Elsewhere, I just leave it off.
Tribit says you can get up to 30 hours of playtime between charges, but like any speaker, that depends on the StormBox Blast’s volume during that time. Engaging the RGB lighting, which syncs to the beat, theoretically draws more juice from the battery, although it didn’t make a noticeable difference in my experience.
I had no trouble getting a day’s worth of life from one charge, even with XBass and the 32 RGB lights activated. It would’ve never made it to 30 hours, but who cares? You have to sleep sometime.
Tribit
StormBox Blast (opens in a new window)
$160.00 at Amazon
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
$160.00 at Walmart
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
The post Deafen Your Neighbors With the Tribit StormBox Blast. I Did. appeared first on VICE.
