Powerful, portable, and full of life

Tribit has a new speaker joining the party. The Tribit XSound Plus 2 is a new model in the XSound family, and it looks to take the crown. Packing a pair of speaker drivers, passive radiators to boost the bass, and 24-hour battery life all into a compact unit that’s easy to take anywhere, the Tribit XSound Plus 2 is a threat to the rest of the sub-$100 portable Bluetooth speakers. At $70, it’s an enticing option, and Tribit often has discounts, so this speaker is well worth a look for anyone on the market.

Price and availability

No color options, but coupon options

The Tribit XSound Plus 2 is available on Tribit’s website and Amazon for $70. At present, there are no alternate colors, with black as the only option. While $70 is the retail price, Tribit often has discounts, and the speaker has a 10% off coupon available on Amazon.

Design, hardware, and what’s in the box

A simple but effective package

The Tribit XSound Plus 2 is no huge detour from most portable Bluetooth speakers and really only a small visual revision to the XSound Go and MaxSound Plus speakers that preceded it. It’s a small, oblong unit that fits into just about any space that a 16-ounce soda can would. That makes it easy to drop into a cup holder, slip into a backpack pocket, or carry in your hand. A long tether on one end of the speaker also provides a means to loosely attach the speaker to objects, though I found it swings wildly if that object is a bike.

Most of the Tribit XSound Plus 2 is wrapped in hard plastic with a slight rubberization outside to give it a grippy and softer feel. It sits on four tiny rubber feet that do a good enough job of holding it in place and keeping its vibrations from causing it to dance along the floor—something the Sony SRS-XB100 liked to do.

Atop the Tribit XSound Plus 2, you’ll find a single row of controls with power, Bluetooth pairing, volume, playback/voice assistant, a quick EQ adjustment button, and one final button that can pair multiple Tribit XSound Plus 2 units into a Party mode to play synchronized audio from both. While these rubber-covered buttons feel nice enough for one press at a time, they’re not so good for repeated presses, as you might do trying to quickly lower the volume.

The front of the speaker is covered in a tight mesh grille that effectively hides the two 15-watt speakers and passive radiator. A second radiator is behind a small plastic grille on the back of the unit. That’s also where you’ll find a covered 3.5mm jack and USB-C port for charging.

These are protected by a rubber gasket cover that you’ll want to keep closed most of the time to maintain the speaker’s IPX7 water resistance. Though most people will probably use the Tribit XSound Plus 2 exclusively as a Bluetooth speaker, it never hurts to have a 3.5mm jack as a backup, as it can provide lower-latency audio that can be crucial if you’re using the speaker for sound to go along with video playback on another device.

Sound and battery life

Rockin’ tunes you can play all day

The Tribit XSound Plus 2 is a straightforward upgrade of its predecessors, packing in higher-wattage speakers and a longer-lasting battery. Even for its small footprint, the Tribit XSound Plus 2 can easily pump out some seriously loud audio to get a little party started in a 200-square-foot space.

With XBass inactive, the speaker emphasizes mids and treble with just faint bass in the mix. It’s still good for some baritone vocals. But if you want your music to pump, the XBass EQ setting is a good option. It promptly turns up the low end, making kick drums and bass lines sound out more clearly. All told, it puts out very satisfying sound for an affordable speaker. Its frequency range is broad enough to hear most of what’s going on, and it’s balanced enough that no bass, mid, or treble energy is lost.

That said, deep, rumbling sub-bass isn’t something the Tribit XSound Plus 2 can achieve. Some of the deeper notes common in hip-hop and electronic music, like the classic 808 kick, can simply vanish into the ether. This can make for some mangled tunes, as the sub-bass can dip in and out if it moves between pitches. Still, this alone isn’t enough to make the Tribit XSound Plus 2 a disappointing speaker.

A single speaker on its own might play out stereo sound, but it’s not easy to pick out because of how close the two drivers are to one another. Splitting two speakers into the stereo mode makes a huge difference (of course, doubling your cost in the process). The speakers announce which is the left channel and which is the right, and with them spaced out, they create a much more dynamic listening experience, bringing out more of the subtlety in tracks that take advantage of stereo panning.

This little speaker packs in a lot of battery. The Tribit XSound Plus 2 is rated to last for up to 24 hours, and that’s with the speaker set to 60% volume. In daily listening, I rarely felt the need to go that high, and so despite extensive use in my testing, I still haven’t managed to fully drain the battery out of either unit Tribit sent over for testing. These little speakers just keep on chugging. If you drain them, the USB-C port in the back can top them up in 4 hours.

While battery life at low volume levels is great, naturally, that’s a favorable scenario. The XBass feature increases power use, and so do high volume levels. If you’re pumping tracks at full volume with XBass on, don’t expect 24 hours of runtime from the Tribit XSound Plus 2. Though it’s safe to say you’ll still get a pretty good party’s worth of runtime.

Features and app

Simple, no-fuss features

The Tribit XSound Plus 2 works with Tribit’s app, which provides just a few simple controls and doesn’t require an account. You can control playback and volume within the app, though these controls are largely unnecessary since they’d also be available through your phone even without the app. The same goes for the battery-level display.

More useful, the app provides access to a few different EQ settings and the ability to create your own EQ preset with a 5-band equalizer. The speaker will save three EQ presets on the device, letting you use the hardware EQ button to cycle through them, and you can set which presets these are and which indicator light color they’ll correspond to. By default, these are XBass off, XBass on, and Audiobook. Beyond these features, the only major utility of the app is installing firmware updates, which you could probably use the speaker for its entire lifespan without ever needing to do.

Outside of the app, the key feature of the Tribit XSound Plus 2 is its Party Mode. With two units handy, you just have to press the Party Mode button, giving them a moment to find each other, and then they’ll link up. They can play in stereo to provide more immersive listening or double up the sound by playing the same thing.

One thing you might miss out on with the Tribit XSound Plus 2 is high-fidelity audio. Audiophile sound is kind of out the window from a small speaker like this, as it simply doesn’t have the range to present deep sub-bass, and Tribit doesn’t even hide that fact with 50Hz listed as the low end of the speaker’s frequency response range.

But if you were hoping for at least high-end codec support, you might be disappointed to find just AAC. The speaker does support Bluetooth Multipoint, however. The first time I set it up, it resulted in a sputtering connection to both paired devices. But after a reset, it handled the Multipoint connection smoothly.

Competition

Not alone, but a battery apart

The Tribit XSound Plus 2 has its work cut out for it. There’s no shortage of capable speakers in the space; plenty come in at under $100 like it does. The $60 Anker Soundcore Motion 100 I recently tested is a memorable rival. It may not boast as high a volume or as much battery life, but it’s cute, portable, comes in more fun colors, and is a little cheaper, though ultimately, Tribit can serve as an upgrade pick for situations where you need more volume.

Of course, the $80 Anker Soundcore Motion 300 just steps that up, albeit still with a shorter battery life than the Tribit XSound Plus 2, no support for voice assistance, and no AUX port.

The Tribit StormBox Flow also sits in a similar space. It’s $80 at full price (but there’s always some kind of deal on it), and it steps up the battery life to 30 hours. Part of that comes from its larger design. It’s also not as cute as the Tribit XSound Plus 2, and it only features a single speaker to the Tribit XSound Plus 2’s two.

Should you buy it?

Yes, the Tribit XSound Plus 2 is a potent portable Bluetooth speaker. At $70, it’s not the cheapest Bluetooth speaker out there, and it has plenty of competition, but it has more than respectable sound for the price, and it’s all packed into a convenient design. It’s easy to bring along and tuck it into a bag, slip it into a water bottle sleeve, or even just tethered to something.

The Tribit XSound Plus 2 has some serious oomph for such a little speaker, and it can run for a full day at a decent volume. It provides adjustable EQ settings that can help it serve more roles, like pumping up the tunes with extra bass or flattening out the EQ and emphasizing voices for audiobooks and podcasts. Its ability to pair with a second speaker for stereo sound provides even more utility and enjoyable listening. With so much you can get out of it, the Tribit XSound Plus 2 makes a lot of sense.