Sometimes you're not really worried about a speaker being portable. You need to fill up a room or a party and get the walls shaking, and a 6-inch speaker simply can't cut it. That's exactly what the Tronsmart Bang speaker is designed to do.
Coming in at around $100, Tronsmart is competing in the price range of much smaller speakers, but with a very large speaker with 60W of power, a huge battery, and some LED lights to liven up your party.
Can Tronsmart pull it off without too many cut corners? Let's find out.
Bulky design
The Tronsmart Bang is a large speaker. With 60W of power and a promised 15 hours of battery, there's a lot that they needed to cram into this housing.
It's not extremely heavy, but it's certainly not lightweight. The handle makes it easy to pick up and carry around, and it's portable enough that it won't be a struggle to carry it somewhere or out to a pool. There's an included carrying strap, too, which helps a lot.
You'll get two large passive radiators on the sides of the speaker to drive some extra low end thump, and a plastic flap to cover up all the ports to maintain the IPX6 waterproofing on the entire speaker. The buttons on the top of the chassis are large, easy to press, and easy to see, and there's an LED light strip running along the bottom of the speaker and inside the ends near the passive radiators.
It's a stylish enough speaker that looks like a big, loud party speaker. It blends in enough but looks the part so it won't stick out like a sore thumb when it does get noticed.
Loud sound
If there's one word to describe the Bang's sound profile, it's loud. Just straight up loud.
With a 60W power rating, that's considerably more than the flimsy 2W speakers on your laptop or phone, and three times more oomph than a comparably priced 20W JBL Flip 5 speaker, which is also not a quiet speaker.
If you're looking for power here, you won't be disappointed. This thing can easily fill an entire house with sound and then some, making it ideal for large gatherings or outdoor events. That sound travels, and especially if it gets paired with another speaker you can easily cover a large amount of ground with no effort.
Sometimes these loud speakers struggle at high volumes, however, but the components Tronsmart uses generally have no issues with clipping or distortion even when the sound is booming. With that being said, it's definitely a speaker that wants to be played at high volumes, and struggles a bit to come alive at low volumes.
The speaker itself really isn't as bass heavy as you'd expect, opting instead for a more flat, clear sound profile. But without really turning the volume up, it tends to sound almost muddled from its very rounded midrange. Higher volumes alleviate this and let the speaker open up, but you're still not getting the same kind of low end that you'd expect from speakers even half the Bang's size.
It's not a bad sound profile at all, but it's not typical for a party-oriented speaker like this.
Extra features
Speakers these days are about more than just how they sound, and Tronsmart made sure to include everything else you could want in the Bang speaker.
Like we've mentioned previously, it's IPX6 certified, so it'll survive a pool trip and some light rain, worst case scenario. It also doubles as a power bank for your phone, so if you start to run low on juice you can connect the two together to keep the music going.
You can pair up to 100 of these speakers together with Tronsmart's smart connectivity features, although I'm not sure you'll ever be in a situation to test that, and the LED lights on the bottom stay in rhythm with your music, which is always fun. Battery life is touted at around 15 hours, which seems pretty accurate in our testing, and the Bang speaker works with your favorite voice assistants, including Siri, Google, and Cortana. Yep, Tronsmart still lists Cortana on their website, so even the oddballs are getting a bone here.
You can pair your phone with the speaker through its NFC connection, and the companion app from Tronsmart will allow you to tweak the EQ of the speaker, change light patterns, and control playback if you're playing off a USB drive or SD card, both of which are supported here. The only thing I think this is missing is FM radio playback, but I'm not complaining about that.
Worth it?
At around $100, the Tronsmart Bang is a steal if you're just looking for a speaker that gets loud. It'll almost shake your walls, and sounds pretty good doing it.
But it really does just sound pretty good, not great. It's not the best speaker we've heard in this price range, which is the tradeoff you'll have to make for something with this volume. Aside from that, though, Tronsmart has thrown in everything including the kitchen sink into the feature list, so you'll definitely get your money's worth.
The lights don't hurt, and the extras like doubling as a power bank and including a travel strap are just icing on top.
