Portable Bluetooth speakers have become commonplace on the market today. The TRIBIT StormBox Blast 2 can truly fill a room with sound.
What is the TRIBIT StormBox Blast 2
The TRIBIT StormBox Blast 2. Image by Rob Huddleston.The TRIBIT StormBox Blast 2 is a portable Bluetooth speaker, built for those who want to be able to listen to music practically anywhere.
This isn’t the most portable of Bluetooth speakers. It’s about 19 inches long, 7 inches wide, and about 10 inches tall, and weighs aout 16 pounds. It also isn’t cheap, selling for around $250.
But the tradeoff for that is in its sound quality, which is the best I’ve heard in similar Bluetooth speakers.
The Specs
According to the documentation, the TRIBIT StormBox Lava provides 200W of sound through two 15W tweeters, two 45W drivers, and an 80W woofer. I don’t have a testing lab to confirm those numbers, but I can confirm that the speaker does provide deep bass, crisp highs, and nice mids. Music sounded as good through this as through my higher-end home entertainment speakers.
The speaker is both IP67 dust and waterproof, meaning that it will be fine if it isn’t protected immediately if it starts to rain.
The speaker does charge fairly quickly. The specs claim it can last 30 hours on a single charge, and while I again didn’t directly test that, I can say that I used it all day during a Scout training session, then used it for sound to watch a movie that night, and there was still power to spare when I got home.
Pairing with my phone was absolutely effortless.
Unlike a lot of devices that seem to want to hide their controls, the buttons on the speaker are right on top. They’re all nice and big, and all white, so there’s no hunting for them even in the dark.
The speaker has a USB-C input and USB-A output port, an aux port, a charging port, and two posrts for microphones insde the protected area on the back. It also has individual dials for the two mic inputs, and a dial to control reverb. The USB-A port allows you to use the StormBox to charge your phone or other device.
Karaoke mode
Just what are those mic inputs for? Well, the StormBox Blast 2 features a Karaoke mode that lets you and a backup singer belt out your favorite tunes along to the music. I don’t actually have a decent microphone (or the voice) to really test this feature, but given the high quality of everything else that this speaker does, I have no doubt it would make for quite the shindig.
Pairing
Two StormBox Blast 2 speakers can be paired to provide immersive surround-sound.
Custom Lights
You can pair the speaker with the Tribit app on your phone and use it to customize and control the lighting effects. The lights can also synchronize with the sound being played on the speaker.
Final Verdict
As I mentioned above, I was recently helping run a Scout training event. It was being held in a large, open room with about 50 people. We needed sound to play with some videos, and also wanted to show a movie in the evening. As the person in charge of the technology for the event, and knowing that the training room did not have sound and that the sound coming out of the TV’s built-in speakers wouldn’t be sufficient, I brought the Blast 2 with me. Again, I was able to effortlessly connect it with the other equipment we were using, and discovered very quickly that I had to turn the volume down quite a bit in order to not blow out everyone’s eardrums. I was very pleasantly surprised not just by the volume the speaker was able to project, but by the quality of the sound. Everyone in the room was used to pretty bad, tinny sound we usually get either from listening to the TV directly, or else using someone’s computer speakers. The depth of the sound we got from the Blast 2 was truly impressive.
I definitely wish I had had this speaker back in the days when I was coaching Little League. It was always fun to have music going during practices, and the portable Bluetooth speakers that existed at the time didn’t really work. While not truly portable, the Blast 2 is far easier to transport than the larger Karaoke-style speakers I see a lot of coaches lugging around, and it certainly rivals those in their sound output.
If you’re looking for high-end speaker that will deliver the sound quality you’d expect to get out of something far larger, the Blast 2 won’t disappoint. It’s a bit of an investment to be sure, but well worth it in the end.
