Review: Soundboks Mix

The Soundboks 4 has become something of a benchmark among party speakers. It delivers extreme volume and solid sound quality, but it is also so large and heavy that you nearly need a roadie to move it. The speaker has neither wheels nor a telescopic handle, unlike its competitors from JBL, Sony and others.

That’s why the smaller Soundboks Go was introduced as a more compact alternative.

Now, the new Soundboks Mix sits right in between the two. It looks like a scaled-down Soundboks 4, but is both more portable and significantly more powerful than the little Go. You can really tell the difference.

Soundboks Mix

The Mix uses the same rechargeable battery as the Soundboks 4 and can play for up to 40 hours, or around 5 to 8 hours if played at full volume. That’s a deafening 121 decibels, so take care of your hearing.

What it doesn’t offer is a smoke machine, strobe lights or coloured disco lights. Nor does it have built-in DJ or karaoke functions, but there is a 3.5 mm mini-jack input for external audio sources, such as a small DJ setup.

You can connect two Mix speakers in stereo or up to five Soundboks speakers when you need to fill a large area with sound. And if you want to add lighting to the party, there’s the Soundboks Lightboks, which connects wirelessly to the speaker and fills the room with light in time with the music.

Like all proper party speakers, it can withstand being left outdoors in the rain, and with a large, easy-to-grip handle, it’s easy to move it indoors if necessary.

Weighing just under 10 kg and standing just under 50 cm tall, the Mix is a speaker that’s easy to take to the park, the beach or a garden party. If you forget to charge the battery, you can quickly swap it for one that’s charged and recharge the other using a standard USB charger.

Loud and powerful

As the speaker is relatively compact, there are limits to how many speaker units it can accommodate. A 25 cm woofer with a bass reflex port delivers rich bass, whilst a 30 mm tweeter handles the sound above the bass range. Together, they manage to create a sound pressure we’ve never heard before from a speaker of this size.

You can play at dizzying volumes without the sound distorting so much that it feels like someone’s pouring gravel into your ears. There’s a bit too much bass here, but fortunately you can adjust this in the Soundboks app. There you’ll find three preset sound profiles, tailored for indoor, outdoor or extra bass: Bass+.

Soundboks has helpfully indicated the battery life for each profile if you turn the volume up to maximum.

Which I recommend you don’t do. The volume button on the side has blue LEDs that show how loud you’ve set it. And even though it goes up to 11, you don’t want to go there. At that level, it’s too loud for the bass to still sound tight and controlled.

Sound profiles

I found that all the sound profiles gave me too much bass for the music to sound balanced enough to my taste. The solution, therefore, is to adjust the sound yourself using the app’s five-band EQ. That way, it’s actually possible to make the piano tones and strings in classical music sound airy and pleasant. If you switch from Mozart to Kygo, you’ll naturally want more emphasis on the bass. It would have been handy to be able to save an alternative EQ setting, but instead you have to go back to the preset profiles.

One could argue that no one buys a party speaker to play Mozart, but party music comes in many forms. It’s not just Kygo, David Guetta and the like that need to work on a party speaker. But the Soundboks Mix is among the better ones. However, it isn’t the most balanced all-round speaker.

Balance

It creates a fantastic atmosphere on Bruno Mars’ Something Serious with a crisp rhythmic response that would make even the dead dance. And Arlo Parks’ gentle Nothing I Could Hide demonstrates that the Mix speaker has excellent control over dynamic contrast and effortlessly highlights subtle details in the soundscape.

On the other hand, it isn’t refined enough to reproduce the full depth of the piano from bottom to top on, for example, Jan Gunnar Hoff’s Adventure. There’s a gap in the midrange, which makes the piano sound a bit hollow.

But this is certainly of secondary importance to 90 per cent of those looking for a compact alternative to the large Soundboks 4. It offers virtually the same performance here in a more compact and sleeker package, which is guaranteed to help set the mood for all summer parties for many years to come.

Conclusion

The Soundboks Mix is a compact and portable party speaker with a powerful sound pressure level of 121 dB. You can both hear and feel the sound pressure. It has a rechargeable battery with up to 40 hours of playtime and can be connected to other Soundboks speakers. The sound quality is among the best in its class for a party speaker, and it can be further enhanced by adjusting the sound via the Soundboks app.