Review: Tunebug Vibe stalks flat surfaces for sweet music

Imagine you’re somewhere fairly quiet. Your den on a Sunday afternoon. A cubicle in an empty office*. A hotel room in a strange city. You only have your phone to play music on, and it’s got a sucky built-in speaker. You don’t want to wear headphones. Plug the Tunebug Vibe into its headphone socket and make its sound output a bazillion times better.

Remembering that this massive, massive number of ‘a bazillion’ is calculated off a low base (phone speakers’ outputs are generally rated at about SFA**) so while the Tunebug is way better, don’t get your hopes up of thumping mids and sweet highs that blow you away.

The sound is useable. I happily listened to the commentary on the video of the first half highlights of the SA vs Wales game from my phone with the Official RWC 2011 app. You can use it to play music in a pinch. But that’s just the start: most of the Tunebug Vibe’s joy lies in its entertainment value. You can spend endless fun-filled hours trying all the different resonant cavities that you have lying around to see what sounds best.

Mass equals intertia equals energy transfer
You see, its corners are rounded and surface polished, but the unit is basically a pretty heavy steel chunk. It has a vibrating plunger on the bottom that touches the surface it’s resting on, transmitting the sound into it. It’s heavy, so it also stretches the surface, a bit like a drum-head. It works best on hard, but thin and springy surfaces that enclose a volume of air. So a thick desk or hard wooden floor tiles will not sound nice. Light. Hard. Hollow.

Experimenting, I found best results from a small, rectangular tupperware container (3”*3”*8”). An old empty ice-cream container was loud, but hollow. A medium sized steel bowl was tinny.

If the little tupperware came first, the hard cardboard box the Vibe is stored in comes second as a sound box — it’s a good default. The box has a graphic design on the top that pretty much says, “Stick the shiny metal thing here, it’s what it was made for.”

It’s cool, it’s not miraculous. It is battery powered (rated at 5 hours), charged through a special cable that has a regular big USB plug on end end and a modified 3.5mm jack on the other that plugs into the Vibe’s single input jack, located on the vertex of the chromed triangular metal puck.

Boo, Tunebug! Standard cables!
This means a special cable to lose: it would have been a much better design if Tunebug had drilled an extra hole below the audio jack to let you charge it with a standard micro USB plug (type AB, if we’re going to get picky). Now that micro USB is a standard connector for most modern mobiles, loads of people have them lying around. That’s designed-in versatility.

Sound is heavily coloured, and it’s probably not as loud as more conventional units with a speaker driver rather than acoustic transducer. Products like the Shox mini are louder, although they also colour the sound a lot. If you find a nice sounding box for the Vibe, or even if you use its carry box (not the retail packaging, dumbass) it’s fine — I listened to a whole Ramones best-of on it, then the Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Show Your Bones’.

It’s pretty small — the Shox mini is 13.5x10x4cm, the Tunebug is 5.9cmx2.5cm — although that is a bit of a gyp, you’re always going to travel with it in its box in case your hotel room or office cubicle has no handy light empty boxes (a closed empty milk carton can do in a pinch). The box is 8.3×8.3×2.8cm. Still smaller than the Shox. But just over double its weight at 150g vs 80g.

Who it’s for:

• Gadget nuts
  
• People that travel a lot and use their mobiles/mp3 players for sound and don’t want to mess with cables and chargers.

• It’s not for people wanting louder speakers for your laptop — only the crappiest of laptops’ built-in speakers would sound worse.
  
• If you’re a bit nuts you can gaffer tape it to the back of your motorbike helmet, the backmost point I found worked best. If you’re a mountain biker you can get the Tunebug Shake which is a helmet with the device built in. Looks rad.

What we liked:

• Looks cool, feels unbreakable
  
• Pretty decent sound quality if you have the right stiff light box
  
• No mess, no fuss convenient

What we didn’t like:

• Because it vibrates it can walk around on your surface, leading to possible wasted minutes or hours building complicated holding-in-place contraptions
  
• It needs a micro USB charger socket to make it genuinely always-there awesome
  
• Tunebug do oversell it a bit, they are a hardcore product-shifting Web 2.0 operation with local affiliates and Facebook groups and everything. Très slick.

* Empty. You use this thing in an occupied office and you will be killed.
** SFA