Tronsmart Element Groove — Force Mini bluetooth speaker review

Unboxing

The page of the online store with the Ele­ment Groove for sale is not impres­sive at first: “well, what can a small box with a larg­er side of only 10 cm offer?”. But no — the box imme­di­ate­ly meets with a pleas­ant hefti­ness for its dimen­sions. Here it is worth men­tion­ing that some things, even with the years and the evo­lu­tion of tech­nol­o­gy, must remain heavy in order to remain real­ly high qual­i­ty. Acoustics are among them: vol­ume is need­ed for high-qual­i­ty sound, and weight gives the struc­ture reli­a­bil­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, rat­tling at high vol­umes is elim­i­nat­ed.

So half a kilo of the weight of a mod­est box with the nec­es­sary min­i­mum of print­ing was imme­di­ate­ly set up in a pos­i­tive way. In addi­tion to demon­strat­ing the appear­ance and a small “excur­sion” into the future, the box reports the pow­er of the device at 10W and the pres­ence of water and dust pro­tec­tion accord­ing to the IPX7 stan­dard (tight­ness and the abil­i­ty to sur­vive a fall into water at a depth of up to 1 meter for 30 min­utes).

We tear the pack­ag­ing poly­eth­yl­ene, look inside …

Equipment

And inside — a rather con­cise, but rather pleas­ant set:

• the col­umn itself in an anti­sta­t­ic bag
• instruc­tions in 6 lan­guages ​​(there is no Euro­pean there)
• war­ran­ty card
• box with two cables (pow­er with Type‑C con­nec­tor and AUX cable) and one cord

For the lat­ter — a small minus to the man­u­fac­tur­er: not every­one knows how to knit beau­ti­ful knots, it would be more log­i­cal to put a lace with a ready-made cara­bin­er.

Consideration

And if cords-cables are all sec­ondary, then the main thing for which a blue­tooth speak­er is bought is, of course, for the sake of the speak­er itself and its sound. The lat­ter will be reviewed lat­er, for now — to the appear­ance of the device and its char­ac­ter­is­tics.

The pass­port details of Tron­s­mart Ele­ment Groove are as fol­lows:

• blue­tooth ver­sion 4.2 tech­nol­o­gy with a range of up to 30 meters (in the line of sight of open space)
• dust and mois­ture pro­tec­tion accord­ing to IPX7 pro­to­col
• pow­er: 10W
• oper­at­ing time: about 24 hours in medi­um vol­ume mode
• charg­ing time: about 2.5 hours, charg­ing cur­rent 5V 1A
• built-in bat­tery: 3.7V, 2500 mAh
• main speak­er size: 58mm
• oper­at­ing fre­quen­cies: 115 Hz — 15 kHz
• dimen­sions: 103×57×103 mm
• weight: 463 gr.

At the same time, the char­ac­ter­is­tics do not indi­cate the pres­ence of TWS tech­nol­o­gy (pair­ing two wire­less devices to cre­ate stereo sound) and a built-in micro­phone, thanks to which the speak­er can well act as a full-fledged “head­set” in the open air.

The col­umn is made of rub­ber­ized plas­tic that is very pleas­ant to the touch: it does not slip in the hand, it is pleas­ant to hold, it does not col­lect prints, and dust and oth­er debris can be eas­i­ly wiped off. On the front pan­el there is a nec­es­sary min­i­mum: a pro­tec­tive mesh bolt­ed through a plas­tic spac­er in front of the front speak­er, high­er in the cen­ter is a hole for the built-in micro­phone.

The side faces are emp­ty, except for the loops for the lace

Behind — a low-fre­quen­cy speak­er, above which, behind a rub­ber plug, are locat­ed:

• USB Type‑C port
• slot for microSD mem­o­ry cards (accord­ing to the pass­port — up to 64 GB)
• AUX input for con­nect­ing a phone, play­er or any oth­er device equipped with a stan­dard 3.5 mm mini-jack

All con­trol is con­cen­trat­ed on the upper edge of the Tron­s­mart Ele­ment Groove — these are four large + / — but­tons, pause and the actu­al pow­er. Each has its own addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty:

• the pow­er but­ton not only turns the device on/off, but also switch­es between play­back sources (via cable, via blue­tooth and from a mem­o­ry card), and also search­es for addi­tion­al speak­ers for pair­ing via TWS;
• pause / play, includ­ing allows you to pick up / hang up the “hook” (when paired with a phone), reject a call (hold the but­ton for 2 sec­onds) and dial the last dialed num­ber (press 2 times)
• the “-” but­ton, in addi­tion to reduc­ing the sound, allows you to turn on the pre­vi­ous track (hold­ing the but­ton for 2 sec­onds)
• the “+” but­ton, respec­tive­ly, allows you to addi­tion­al­ly switch to the next track

In addi­tion, LED indi­ca­tors are built into the but­tons:

• blue in vari­a­tions of its oper­a­tion (blink­ing — wait­ing for con­nec­tion, oper­at­ing mode via blue­tooth — con­stant glow, slow flick­er — work from oth­er sound sources)
• yel­low — TWS mode
• red — charg­ing (if the indi­ca­tor is off, then charg­ing is com­plete)

By the way, only in blue­tooth mode you can see the cur­rent bat­tery bal­ance in real time. You can view it in the Blue­tooth menu of the phone itself.

Sound test

Of course, the sound of a par­tic­u­lar acoustic is often a very sub­jec­tive mat­ter. But in our opin­ion, for the mon­ey, Ele­ment Groove is a very pleas­ant can­di­date for pur­chase: thanks to two inde­pen­dent speak­ers, both high and low fre­quen­cies are well real­ized, with­out leav­ing the mid­dle range behind the scenes.

More­over, in terms of sound, the speak­er was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by the juici­ness and elas­tic­i­ty of the bass through­out the entire vol­ume range, con­fi­dent­ly “beat­ing” com­peti­tors in the face of a reg­u­lar smart­phone (pre­vi­ous­ly good-sound­ing Xiao­mi Mi8 Lite), TV acoustics and even 2.1 acoustics of a home com­put­er.

As a con­clu­sion, the Tron­s­mart Ele­ment Groove is test­ed for water resis­tance. As not­ed above, the IPX7 stan­dard involves immer­sion of the device to a depth of up to a meter for up to half an hour with­out loss of per­for­mance. Let’s be hon­est, we did­n’t heat it on pur­pose — how­ev­er, we checked the col­umn in the bath­room, where it passed the test with hon­or.

Results

For your mon­ey (on Aliex­press, exclud­ing dis­counts and spe­cial con­di­tions — $ 27) Tron­s­mart Ele­ment Groove is a very wor­thy can­di­date for pur­chase.

Not the most obvi­ous dis­ad­van­tages include:

• a sim­ple draw­string rather than a more fash­ion­able strap
• the lack of syn­chro­niza­tion of the sound vol­ume of the phone and the speak­er: to get the max­i­mum, you will have to turn the vol­ume up both there and there.

In turn, the advan­tages are a mod­est and not flashy no-frills design, high-qual­i­ty assem­bly and plas­tic that is pleas­ant to the touch. And, of course, juicy bass from such a mod­est lit­tle device. And among water­proof wire­less speak­ers, this is one of the most afford­able options.