Review: Tribit XSound Mega portable wireless outdoor speaker

When the weather warms up we all want to get outside. And when we do it’s nice to have a little ambient music. Portable Bluetooth speakers are a great way to bring your own personal soundtrack along, and Tribit’s XSound Mega wireless speaker is one of the newer options that’s made for both indoor and outdoor use. I recently got a sample of this speaker, and in this review I’ll take a look at what it’s special features are, how it sounds, and if I think it’s a good pick for you.

Tribit XSound Mega BTS35 review

Speaker is what I would call a small to medium size portable wireless speaker. It is IPX7 waterproof rated meaning it can be submerged up to 1 meter in water for 30 minutes, but since the manual advises against dropping this one, I’ll say it’s not a rugged speaker option. There’s an array of controls along the top including power, Bluetooth pairing, play/pause, volume as well as lighting and EQ controls. (More on some of these in a minute.)

You can also use the speaker as a power bank to charge your devices by connecting the USB end into the port in the back.

The speaker is kind of pill shaped, and has a front grill with integrated LED lighting underneath. With private broadcast feature, you can link up to 100 of their speakers for all over sound. Not that you’d probably want to do that… But it is possible.

App or no app?

There’s no app required to use this speaker, and Tribit doesn’t say this on the box or in the manual, but you can download the Tribit app for additional features and function. The app will tell you it’s used for the XSound Mega, but I was unable to connect with it using my iPhone 13. After about half a dozen connection attempts, I gave up.

What’s in the box?

In the package you get the Tribit XSound Mega speaker, a USB-C charging cable, aux cable for wired connections to your phone or tablet, plus a carrying strap.

Sound quality

A speaker you want to bring everywhere will be all about the sound quality. When it comes to audio, this speaker is actually pretty good.

It’s not the calibre of speaker that will make you drop your martini on the bearskin rug in awe, but it’s powerful, it gets loud and it has a decent range of sound. The bass is vibrant if missing a bit of resonance, but it actually sounds quite well balanced.

Outdoor range/sound

Key in an outdoor speaker is the ability to fill your listening area. Normally it can be tough to keep the sound from escaping into the ether, and contain it where you are. IN my testing with the XSound Mega I was shocked at how far I could get from the speaker while still hearing things clearly on just a mid-level volume. Even looping around behind the rear of the sspeaker I was still able to hear clearly and the bass stayed thumpin’ the shole time.

Connectivity

I was impressed at the Bluetooth range of this speaker. I left the Tribit XSound Mega in my office and walked all over the house trying to put as much space and walls between me and the speaker as I could. I heard no blips or signal breakup.

Multiple connections?

Unfortunately, you can only have one phone or device connected to the Tribit XSound Mega at one time. It will default to the last connection or once paired initially you can just tap in your Bluetooth settings menu to reconnect any time.

Battery Life

Tribit says the battery on this speaker should last up to 20 hours. That’s pretty decent battery life when it comes to portable wireless speakers today. Some do offer 24 or up to 30 hours, but those speakers tend to come at a much higher price.

How do you tell the battery level?

There’s really no way I can see to determine the battery level. While the power button will turn red when you get low, there’s no way to understand what “low” is; do you have a couple hours remaining or just minutes? Perhaps this is supposed to be visible in the Tribit app, but since I couldn’t connect, I can’t say for sure.

Lighting & Music Sync

One of the cool features of this speaker is the reading of rainbow coloured LED lighting that wraps around the front grill. The lighting is a nice added touch, and while it’s bright and multicoloured it’s not blinding or overly distracting. You can use the button on top of the speaker to switch between different lighting notes; some of them revolve around the face, others flash or twinkle and the colours morph and change.

The lights will kind of pulse to the music. I say “kind of” because it doesn’t really look like they’re reacting to specific music as much as they operate on some kind of regular beat. I’m probably nitpicking, but it’s a cool effect that I enjoy.

The volume buttons have kind of a big step up between them so it was hard to find just the right setting sometimes.

You can also turn the lights right off if you’d rather go incognito.

EQ Mode

Tribit has what it calls EQ mode. To my mind this would allow fine tuning of bass or treble levels. In this case, however there are really just three settings. Extra bass, regular music, or audiobook. The audiobook setting sounds very tiny and hollow and appears definitely tuned for simple voice on the audio files, stripping every ounce of bass from the music.

The XBass mode does indeed pump up the low end to give you a lot more rumble and thump.

Broadcast Mode/Multi-speaker pairing

As I touched on earlier, it’s possible to connect this speaker to up to 100 others to create multi speaker, multi room sound. Since I only had the single speaker, I was not able to test this feature out.

Overall review: Tribit XSound Mega

Overall, this is a refreshingly no-nonsense speaker that still gives you a bit of extra value with the addition of the lighting. The speaker is easy to operate, it sounds good, it’s got great outdoor range, the battery will carry you through a weekend and it’s waterproof.
Downsides? You Can only connect one phone/device, the App connection didn’t;’t work for me and Can’t view detailed battery life. If you can live with those cons then I think you’ll really like the Tribit Xsound Mega.

It sells for about $109 and you can get it from Amazon.

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