The Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 4 is one of the most popular Bluetooth speakers that you can buy. However, the Tribit Stormbox Mini looks similar, and is 70% cheaper! So, can Tribit win the crown as best compact bluetooth speaker? Time to find out!
Tribit Stormbox Mini
UE Wonderboom 4
The Design
It’s not hard to see where Tribit got the inspiration from for the design of the Stormbox Mini as it looks VERY similar to the Wonderboom 4. Bar the Stormbox Mini being slightly taller and the Wonderboom 4 slightly wider, they are both almost identical in size at around 10 cm tall and wide.
There’s little difference in the weight too with the Wonderboom 4 weighing 420g vs the 545g of the Stormbox Mini. Neither are particularly heavy speakers.
One very visual difference that the Stormbox Mini has is it’s LED light ring that encircles the top of the speaker. It adds an element of flair that makes it look more premium than it’s price would suggest. You can choose between multicolored or white pulsing, or turn it off entirely if you’d rather. It certainly adds a ‘cool’ factor to the speaker when it’s on and I’m sure it makes the speaker sound better!
Fabric loops on the back of both speakers allow them both to be either hooked onto things, or paired up with a carabiner to clip it onto items such as your bag for on-the-go listening.
The Controls
Both speakers have similar physical controls, with the most notable being the large plus and minus icons on the front of both that control volume. Aside from that both speakers have buttons for powering on/off, bluetooth pairing, and also playing and pausing your music as well as skipping tracks. You can only skip tracks forwards on the Wonderboom 4 though, whilst the Stormbox Mini lets you skip tracks backwards too.
Weatherproof
Both speakers have an IP67 rating making them not only dust proof but also waterproof such that they can be immersed in a meter of water for up to 30 minutes without an issue. Not that it’s really needed as both speakers float. So if you happen to lose either over the edge of a boat, or it ends up being knocked into the pool, you can just fish either out quite easily.
Connectivity
Both speakers have a good solid connection to your phone when playing music, with no dropouts or quality issues when testing. They also both support pairing with another similar speaker for stereo sound.
The Wonderboom 4 also supports multi-point. So it can be connected to multiple devices at the same time. That’s something that the Stormbox Mini doesn’t do.
The Stormbox Mini can however play music from a wired audio source as it comes with a aux-in input. That’s something the Wonderboom 4 doesn’t have.
Battery Life
Whilst the Stormbox Mini does have a good 12 hours of battery life from a full charge, the Wonderboom 4 beats it with up to 14 hours of playtime. Both speakers then charge back up to full in around 2.5 hours using the USB-C port on the backs of both speakers.
The Sound
The Wonderboom 4 continues on from the highly successful Wonderboom 3 with the same two 40mm drivers and two passive radiators. The Stormbox Mini ups the ante with two larger 48mm drivers and a passive radiator on the top, Size isn’t everything though, and that showed in the sound test.
Both speakers can go respectively loud, for their size, and can easily fill a room. However I wouldn’t push either speaker to high volumes as the sound starts to compress, the bass drops off, and the treble can get quite shrill. The drop in quality is more noticable on the Stormbox Mini than the Wonderboom 4. However it’s a criticism of, not just of these speakers, but most speakers at high volumes. If you want loud sound, get a bigger speaker.
What both of these speakers do well though is 360° sound. The orientiation of the drivers in these speakers means that no matter where you sit in relation to the speaker, music is going to sound exactly the same. So if you want to listen to music in a group, and not worry about positioning your speaker for the best sound, it’s a great feature.
In the sound tests, the Wonderboom 4 had good tight control over its sound. Even at higher volumes the bass was present but not out of control, and there was plenty of warmth to the mids and the highs. It was a pleasant speaker to listen to. It sounds very similar to the previous Wonderboom 3 with just a little more clarity in vocals and instruments.
There is an EQ button on the Wonderboom 4 that enables either outdoor mode, which drops the bass and boosts the treble to make it sound better for outside listening, or podcast mode, which is supposed to enhance voice clarity. The outdoor mode does make a slight difference outside, but not much, and I didn’t find the podcast mode particularly useful either though.
The Stormbox Mini, despite having the larger drivers, really struggled controlling its sound. At higher volumes the bass was quite loose and there was a thinness to the mids and the highs. Reign it back to lower volumes though and it was quite pleasant to listen to for background listening, although it still doesn’t have the tightness in the bass and clarity in the mids and highs that the Wonderboom 4 has. Still, for a $30 speaker, it’s good for it’s price point.
Verdict
So the Wonderboom 4 succeeds the Wonderboom 3 as one of the best compact bluetooth speakers that you can buy for $100.
The Stormbox Mini on the other hand might look like the Wonderboom 4 but it can’t compete on sound quality. The Wonderboom 4 is definitely the better sounding speaker. Still, if you’ve only got $30 to spend, and you’re not going to push it super loud, then I don’t think the Stormbox Mini is a bad option. Plus you can’t ignore that the LED ring on the top looks cool!
