I get offered a lot of Bluetooth speakers for review, and turn down most of them because I’ve experienced <insert company name here>’s prior offerings and have been left decidedly unimpressed. But the Tribit Stormbox Flow made it through, because my last experience left me very pleasantly surprised.
I wrote last year that the Tribit StormBox Micro 2 had absolutely no right to be as good as it was, for both size and price reasons – and the same is true of the company’s latest offering …
Tribit Stormbox Flow: Look and feel
The Stormbox Flow is a little bigger, and 10 bucks more expensive at $80 – but it’s still very much in the category of the kind of speaker you casually throw in a bag when you want something better and louder than laptop speakers without the size and weight penalty of a more serious speaker.
The speaker measures a touch over 200mm long by 90mm tall and 50mm thick, and weighs 660g. It’s as anonymous-looking as they come, in a matte, dark gray finish, with a discreet logo on the front.
The top has seven flushmount buttons, with the main three larger and in contrasting color:
- Play/pause
- Volume up
- Volume down
The others are smaller and match the color of the casing:
- Power
- Bluetooth pairing
- EQ adjustment
- Stereo pairing
Specifications
The speaker is 25W with a frequency response range of 50-20KHz, running Bluetooth 5.3 with a claimed range of 40 meters (around 120 feet).
The battery is a 4800mAH 17.52Wh one, with a claimed life of 30 hours (at 60% volume with bass boost off), and a recharge time of four hours.
Waterproofing is certified to IP67, which means it withstands immersion in water of up to one meter for up to 30 minutes – which ought to be good enough to cope with even torrential rain.
You can stereo-pair two of them.
Setup
I mean, it’s a Bluetooth speaker, so setup is the same for almost everything. Power it on, hit the Bluetooth button, connect to it, done.
Where the Flow does score highly is the ease of stereo pairing. Connect to one speaker, then press the stereo pair button on each speaker and wait. After around five seconds, the pairing is confirmed by a voice message, which tells you which speaker is left and which is right.
My only comment here is to recommend you space them some distance apart before pairing, to clearly hear which is which.
Performance
As I said with the Micro I tested before, this is a small, inexpensive Bluetooth speaker, and nothing in this category is going to leave your home hifi system in a sweat.
But once again, I was both surprised and impressed by the audio quality and volume delivered from such a small speaker. Indeed, I waited until the middle of the day to (briefly!) carry out the maximum volume test to avoid disturbing my neighbours.
In Music mode, I found the sound quality impressive for the size. I also tested the stereo pairing, with exactly the result you’d expect: same quality, twice the volume. This would be overkill for any indoor use, but does create a very credible pool party setup.
Some will want more bass, and to cater to those tastes, the Tribit companion app lets you switch on a boosted bass mode.
XBass mode does definitely transform the sound of the speaker, and works well at moderate volume levels, but on some tracks I found that it can give a very unpleasant distortion at higher volumes. It was present in both the speakers I tested, and was bad enough that I’m pretty sure it’s a tuning error that the company ought to be able to fix through the app.
Personally, I prefer the sound without it, and was then able to boost to high volumes without distortion, even when boosting bass through the EQ settings – which reinforces the idea that this is a bug in the specific XBass tuning in the app.
Conclusions
First, if you love heavy bass, then I’d recommend waiting to see whether the XBass issue is fixed before buying. I’ll update if I hear more on this.
But that aside, I’m impressed with the performance for both the size and the money. This will be the speaker that will travel with me for use in hotel rooms and holiday apartments, and in neither space do I expect to get beyond about 50% volume.
The Tribit StormBox Flow is available from the company’s website for $79.99.
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