Tronsmart Bang Max

Verdict

It’s a big speaker made to beat its rivals on pricing, but cut corners lead to surprisingly poor results when playing music at lower volumes.

Introduction

The Tronsmart Bang Max is a large portable Bluetooth speaker that takes inspiration from the JBL Xtreme series. You could call it a clone if you were to be kind. But the Bang Max has a lot more weird things going for it. 

As well as all the usual wireless speaker stuff, the Tronsmart Bang Max has a microphone input, letting it become a roving karaoke box.

There’s also a separate guitar input. And as this does not cut out audio streamed over Bluetooth, you can jam along to your tunes with a guitar. 

Get this: there’s even reverb you can apply to the mic and guitar inputs. Oh, and multi-colour LED ring on each end of the Tronsmart Bang Max. 

Much as the scattershot style of this speaker makes it fun to review, its technical issues make it hard to recommend over the JBL Xtreme 3 or JBL Xtreme 2. While the Tronsmart Bang Max sounds pretty good, its noisy amplification circuit makes it borderline unusable at low volumes. Well, if your ears are remotely picky.

Design

• Chunky plastic carry handle
• Multi-colour light rings
• Nylon weave outer

The Tronsmart Bang Max is a big speaker you can lug around using its carry handle. But you may not want to do that too often as it weighs just under 6kg. 

Its design comes across a copy of the JBL Xtreme series. But this sausage or conga drum shape ends up pretty effective, as giant passive radiators can be placed on each end. 

The Tronsmart Bang Max is a noticeably cheaper-made design than the JBL Xtreme 3, though. Its chunky handle is plastic rather than metal, and there’s a certain pragmatic clunkiness to the row of controls along its front. I do love that easy-to-see battery indicator, though.

And, well, just look at it. This is not a sophisticated-looking speaker. While I think the JBL Xtreme 2 was one of the better portable speakers of its generation, I’ve never been a fan of how these things look. 

It’s also not all cheap and cheerful for the Tronsmart Bang Max. The Tronsmart logo plate on the front is metal, for example, and the lettering has a sort of finely corrugated texture to it. 

The speaker is also sturdy. It has a big rubber foot on the bottom, rubber grip pieces inlaid into the handle, and a massive rubber bung that blocks the ports on the back. 

This enables the Tronsmart Bang Max’s IPX6 water resistance, a rating that suggests the speaker can take “strong water jets” but not full submersion. It’s a great feature, just make sure that bung is securely in place.

Features

• Multi-colour LED rings
• App support
• Microphone input

The LED rings are the bit you’re liable to notice when first turning the Bang Max on. A translucent silicone (or similar) ring that keeps the passive radiators in place acts as a light diffuser.

Behind it are multi-colour LEDs. In the Tronsmart app you can choose from three profiles, the names of which bear almost no relation to what they actually do (Carousel, Deep Breath, Fashion Party) as Fashion Party seems to be the least hyperactive of the lot. The first two certainly are, and there’s a degree of music reactivity here. 

However, I remember there being much more control in the Tronsmart Halo 100. There’s no option to display a solid colour, and barely any control over the colours used in the light show. 

The exuberant design makes more sense when you pull off the rubber bung on the back and are greeted not just by the usual connectors but also two volume knobs and 6.35mm sockets. You plug a microphone into one, a guitar into the other. 

The two can be used at the same time, alongside your music. Suddenly this party speaker turns into a karaoke speaker, and more. 

In the Tronsmart app you’ll also find an Echo control, which is applied to these two inputs. But it’s not actually echo (delay), it’s reverb, which is a good thing. There’s a basic control for this on the front control panel too. 

I tried plugging my guitar in, without any form of amp in-between, and it sound just fine. Not great, but fine. However there is enough of a fractional latency delay that I would not suggest using the Tronsmart Bang Max as a practice amp. The delay is noticeable.

You’ll find another three inputs around the back. There’s an 1.3mm aux input, a USB and microSD card slot. As is quite common in cheaper audio electronics, features are bunged in that almost never appear in the gear from high-end brands. 

There’s more. Using the “TuneConn” button the Bang Max can control up to 100 Bang Maxes, to get them to play in sync. That’s surely not going to get much use outside of Tronsmart’s offices. Stereo pairing might. You can turn a couple of these into a stereo pair as well. 

Sound Quality

• Deep bass
• Poor sound at lower volumes

The Tronsmart Bang Max is jam-packed with speaker drivers, and the only ones we actually get to see are the outer quasi-speaker passive radiators. These react to the air moved by the active speakers inside. 

There are two woofers, two midrange units and two tweeters under the grille. This forms a three way pair stereo pair, with those passive radiators on the sides to help reinforce the lower-frequency bass. 

The Tronsmart Bang Max sound is a real patchwork, and your impression will rest on how hard you are listening. This is a great party speaker. But for actually listening to music day-to-day, it’s a bit of a dud. 

This speaker is going to match, and maybe exceed, most people’s expectations on the macro front. It has very powerful, deep bass that sounds confident. And, just like the Halo 100, I’m pretty pleased with how Tronsmart has approached tuning. 

While deep bass is the whole point here, it’s actually not brazenly domineering or boomy. Tronsmart relies on the drivers to deliver the goods, not a super-juiced up bass equalisation. 

The JBL Xtreme 3 has much better detail in the upper mids, superior separation, dynamics and an altogether more three-dimensional sound. However, the standard tuning of the Bang Max also has a bit more bulk in the low-mids making it sound a bit warmer, which can work well with relaxed, vocal-led music. 

There’s a bit of distortion at close to maximum volume, but so far it’s all pretty good for what is, relatively, a budget speaker. 

However, the Tronsmart Bang Max falls apart at low volumes thanks to its (I presume) noisy amplifier circuitry. There’s a significant noise bed here that sounds like a fizzy fuzz. It’s a bit like a record player left spinning, minus the charm. 

Tronsmart uses a noise gate to try to minimise its effect, but this might actually make matters worse (although who knows how bad the noise bed would be without it). At close to the minimum volume, music can even be swallowed up entirely, the noise gate deciding it’s unwanted noise rather than audio. 

The noise can also audibly lurk in the empty spaces of quieter music, hanging off singer-songwriter types like loose threads blowing around their tweed jackets. There’s none of this audible noise in a JBL Xtreme units. 

I’ve seen other people suggest this is fine because the Tronsmart Bang Max is a party speaker. But those categories melt away when you consider the Bang Max being given to, say, a 16-year-old for Christmas or as a Birthday gift. It’s an “everything” speaker, to be used at all volumes, all year long. And I just don’t think it works well enough at the kind of volumes I used when, say, working, to hold up when it can cost up to £222.

That it has all that guitar and mic circuitry bunged into a possibly poorly shielded enclosure probably doesn’t help. Too much focus on features, not enough on the essentials? Maybe.

Latest deals