(Special Contribution by Kesi Olafimihan)
My summers are usually full of road trips for birthday and anniversary celebrations. This annual sequence of events usually includes a suite at a nice hotel downtown in the destination city, some pre-drinking games and dancing followed by a night out at the club with good friends and family, and a late night/early morning dinner/breakfast at a fine 24-hr diner. Repeat this formula as needed.
One thing I really despise, though, is using my phone or laptop speakers to host a fun pre-drinking soirée at the hotel suite. With our music selection centering around house, hip hop and dancehall, the bass is usually not powerful enough, and the overall sound levels can barely get over the chatter of the crowd. In order to solve this problem, I have tried a variety of solutions. My first attempt was to carry some portable laptop speakers. These raised two problems; the sound quality wasn’t great and with USB connection we were limited to songs on a laptop, and as you probably know, the best songs were on iPods and Phones. After a few flop attempts, I started carrying an extra suitcase to log around my sub woofer sound system for my desktop computer. Now the sound on this was awesome, the night was great, but carrying 2 suitcases for a weekend trip to Montreal started to become somewhat of a hassle. And if we are talking about a destination that required getting on a plane, then that became a lot more painful, considering free checked bags are a thing of the past in today’s airline industry. Well, last summer as we celebrated my sister’s birthday in Montreal, a friend of mine who works for a tech company brought out this sleek black box that produced amazing sound and connected via Bluetooth to her Samsung galaxy s2. Needless to say, we had a good time. A little worried that this newcomer was about to steal my role as honorable sound producer of our getaway pre-clubbing parties, I decided to inquire about the gadget. It was a Jambox by Jawbone that she had been given by her company to test drive for a few weeks. Well, how much is this fine piece of technology? Her answer was simple. “Trust me, you don’t want to know; if I didn’t get it for free, I probably wouldn’t have one”. Well at least her reign as sound producer was limited to this weekend. That made me happy. After some quick research, I found out the Jambox at the time would run me a cool $300 if I included shipping. And with that revelation, the idea was swiftly tossed into the “maybe – one – day “ pile. I had since been relegated back to my second suitcase logging duties, until recently when during a school project, I had a chance to work with the Boombotix Boombot. Little did I know of this quirky looking gadget. It is smaller and lighter than the Jambox, and the sound quality is just as good. With my experience last summer I said yeah that’s great but how much is it? $75!!!! So for half the price of a Jambox, I could pick up two of these bad boys and connect wirelessly to my Itouch, covering the room from 2 sides! I think I’d get a black Robocop looking one, and a cute bright colored one for the ladies…what do you think?
