In the past, I've never been much of a Bluetooth speaker guy. For a while there, it seemed like all the Bluetooth speakers that were cheap enough to buy were not good, and all the ones good enough to buy were too expensive. That has changed over the last few years, which is why, when JLab reached out about a new series of speakers it was launching, I wanted to try it out. JLab sent me the least expensive one in its lineup – the JLab Pop Party speaker, for less than $20, it's a steal.
Starting with a bit of a hardware tour, my review unit is a teal color with orange accents. There's a woven fabric speaker grille on the front and a speaker diaphragm on the back. In addition to the JLab branding, the other orange accents are a loop band on the left and a power button/USB-C port cover on the right. The front half of the speaker is a translucent plastic through which RGB lights shine when music is playing.
All of the speakers are IPX6, save this one, which is IPX5. That's a bit confusing since one of the press images JLab sent includes people at the beach using the speaker, so if you try to emulate that, tread carefully.
I've had the speaker for about 24 hours as of this writing. I paired the Pop Party speaker to my iPhone 16 Pro Max and used it to listen to music for half of an 8-hour shift. Then, I hopped on my bike and listened for another hour at a higher volume. When I finished that, the speaker was still at 50%, which, considering its size, isn't bad. JLab estimates over eight hours of listening, so that tracks with my experience.
As for the sound, it's pretty good. I listened to a range of music from heavy metal to rock n' roll, and even some dub-step violin. At lower volumes, you get a nice range of tones. You miss out on super-low, dubstep-type bass, but everything else is crisp and even. Keep in mind, that's at lower volumes while sitting at my work-from-home desk, trying not to irritate my family. If you crank up the volume in an otherwise quiet environment, things fall off quickly. You lose a lot of the bass, and the midrange tones start to drown everything else out.
As mentioned, the speaker comes with a silicon loop band on one side that you can use to attach it to your bag or (in my case) a bike's handlebar. The latter is where I actually enjoyed the speaker the most. In a noisy environment like on a bike ride, you can turn the volume up, and while you run into the same problems with lost bass, they're less pronounced.
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You can also pair the speaker with the JLab app. The app offers three different presets for the 10-band EQ, with my favorite being the JLab signature sound. Additionally, you can turn the RGB lights off to conserve battery and configure the power button to perform actions, such as pause/play, volume up/down, skip forward/back, and more. It's actually a robust feature set for such a cheap speaker.
To be clear, you'll never get studio-quality audio from JLab’s Pop Party speaker, but for $19.99, it’s a very good value proposition. If you're in the market for a speaker that punches above its weight class, this is a great option.
[Image credit: Adam Doud/Techlicious]
