Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shaddox | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I'm nostalgic for these at all.

Near my office, kids gather all the time and play music really loudly on small Bluetooth speakers. I don't even dare to imagine the experience if they had one of these bad boys.

View on HN

The new thing is big portable, backpack format speakers, which give off quite some sound: https://www.soundboks.com/

People just set up in the park or on a street and start blasting club volume music. It's getting harder to not be the grumpy old guy.

Depends - loads of those Blutooth speakers have 2" bass drivers, so the best they'll ever do is sound crap. Now granted plenty of cheapie boomboxes had lots of rattly plastic around the 8" woofer, and given a bit of volume sound like they're falling apart, or there's a bag of bolts in a washing machine.

Yet there was a decent selection from the likes of Hitachi, Sony and Grundig and possibly others that were more mini hifi with handle and detachable hifi(ish) speakers you could separate properly. It's where the whole bookshelf hifi thing started as far as I can tell.

Course you may still hate the kid's music taste. :)

I found that quite interesting: After the boomboxes went away, "outdoors" music got more personal, less communal. You had your CD/MD/MP3 players and listened with headphones.

Now common/cheap BT speakers made public music listening en vogue again. Just right for me to enter my grumpy old man phase, but interesting nonetheless. (And to be honest, it beats the sheer cringe level of someone carrying around a vintage portable record player)

This also seems to make it more acceptable to listen to music/videos on your smartphones external speakers, so I'm willing to bet that having better ones will be a factor for current/future development.

Not sure everyone blaring his own music is a good thing. Doubly true in the era where lots of music has cusses and otherwise age-inappropriate content; I can't imagine people with little kids appreciate it. Besides, it's just rude for one to force his personal tastes on another. Headphones are cheap; no one likes the guy blaring tacky rap music and forcing everyone else to hear it.

Because of Class D amplification and advanced DSP techniques some of those small speakers can get a lot louder than the medium boomboxes of yore.

There's lots and lots of larger bluetooth speakers on the market. They tend to cost $150+ instead of $30 though.

The ones that are sort of sold for use as a PA speaker have much larger speakers than most boomboxes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com