There’s no shortage of wireless speakers, and it seems like everyone has one, but a new arrival from Denmark aims to boost the volume significantly, provided you can pay.
Competition is always good, but sometimes it’s all too easily to get a little lost in what’s out there.
Take trying to find a wireless speaker if you’re after one: between the almost endless supply of cylindrical Bluetooth speakers offering wireless sound with water resistance to the short pudgy ones, the flat ones, the cubic or rectangular ones, and then the ones that do something different and include some cute design angles, well, it’s pretty easy to get lost. We’d totally understand if you simply opted for a speaker with a name you already knew and trusted because there’s just so much out there.
But new players are arriving all the time, and some of them aim to do things a little bit differently.
Take a Danish sound company launching in Australia known as Soundboks. It’s a fairly new company, one that we’ve not heard of, started by a group of friends looking for a party speaker that could be loud, proud, and survive what life could throw at it.
The company has been around since 2015, but you’d be excused for not hearing about it, given it has focused pretty much entirely on one style of speaker: the party speaker.
Granted, parties have changed a bit in the past couple of years — thanks, coronavirus — but once we’re over this, you can expect some sense of partying to keep on keepin’ on (maybe with social distancing), and for that, Soundboks has been rebuilding its take on the tech.
The result is a speaker that features the name of the company, and is known simply as the Soundboks Bluetooth Performance Speaker, with the result being a large speaker that wouldn’t be out of kilter at a gig or concert, but being built a little differently.
Featuring handles on the side to help you carry it, the Soundboks is made to be splash resistant and features silicon balls on the corners to absorb impacts, while the grill of the speaker is made from a steel that’s hard to make a dent on, so much the company calls it “dent proof”.
While Arthur Dent mightn’t approve, it’s a design feature meant to make you feel more confident that your speaker won’t meet an untimely death of carried poorly or accidentally kicked or dropped.
That’s important, because it’s a $1599 speaker packing in the power, supporting up to staggering 126 decibels (126dB) of volume with over 200 watts of power into a 15 kilogram box, and can work over standard XLR and stereo cable connections, plus the all important Bluetooth. Use the latter, and you’ll find the Soundboks can talk to as much as five other Soundboks speakers wirelessly, operating with as much as 40 hours of battery life independently.
“We were very focused on creating an unmatched sound experience, wireless connectivity and battery life were critical for that,” said Jesper Thiel Thomson, CEO of Soundboks.
“We are really excited to bring this to our community and lead a new category of Bluetooth performance speakers,” he said.
That price is a bit of an eye-watering moment, for sure, but at $1599, the target clearly isn’t to take on the smaller Bluetooth speakers on the market. Rather, it’s to focus on the big boxes of sound, the likes of which allows the Danish brand to look at Sony’s Muteki range, plus the Panasonic and LG equivalents.
In Australia, you’ll find the Soundboks speaker at JB HiFi for its $1599.95 price tag, though you might need to bring your own pool party for full effect.
