JLab JBuds Party Review

Design

• Vertical orientation
• Ring of RGB light
• Carry loop

The JBuds Party is a tower speaker – tall, vertical and not much thicker than the water bottle you take with you to work.

The build quality makes a good first impression with its heft and solidness – an IP56 rating protects it from both water and dust, though the website also mentions IPX6 – while it gives the impression that it’ll be able to survive a few falls, though excuse me for not being brave enough to put this to the test.

Up top is an RGB ring of LED lights that almost encircles the speaker if it weren’t for the flap on the back that conceals the 3.5mm jack and USB-C port. Up top is a volume wheel (or the JLab media knob, as it’s called) which offers smooth control over the volume, though perhaps strangely, you don’t see the results of the volume changes on your mobile device.

Tap down on it and you can play and pause, hold and it’ll put it into LabSync mode to connect to other JLab wireless speakers.

Dotted it around it track skip buttons, power and an EQ button. These all offer a nice ‘click’ to sound off when they’ve been pressed, the buttons all responsive.

There’s a strap/carry loop, which does feel necessary given the 1+ kg weight. The midriff has a nice enough wraparound fabric, slightly coarse to the touch but hopefully not something your pet will devour to bits. The JBuds Party comes in black, cyan, mulberry, navy, pink colourways for some variety.

Features

• Bluetooth 5.3
• LabSync party function
• JLab app

Bluetooth 5.3 is the main means of connecting between your mobile device and the JBuds Party, and with that comes SBC and AAC streaming.

The are microphones built-in so you could use this speaker for taking calls but it’s the app where you’ll find most of the functionality.

Tucked inside the JLab, you’ve got lots of room to customise the performance of the JBuds Party. You can change the RGB lighting, from the colours, to the speed to the pulsing and brightness; with different options for how the colours mix. There’s a fair of bit of experimentation and customisation that I remember on the LG Xboom speakers, for example.

You’ve got three EQ options: Signature, Balanced, and Bass Boost, with a custom option that includes a 10-band EQ to switch up the sound. It’s slightly disappointing that when using the EQ button on the speaker, there’s no voice prompt for the mode you’re in, meaning you’ll need to check the app to see which one the speaker is in. At least it has EQ presets, something the Sony ULT Field 1 discards with.

There’s no room to customise the controls, but why would you for a wireless speaker? There is LabSync which can either cast audio to another speaker or receive. JLab says it can support up to 100 speakers but that seems overkill, and a feature that’s more a marketing ploy than something you’d have real-world use for.

LabSync keeps it within the JLab ecosystem for sharing audio but that’s starting to feel outdated with the advent of Auracast. JBL and Marshall have abandoned their own options for Auracast and it feels like a slightly missed opportunity for JLab to include it – having it means speakers of all types play nice with each other rather than tying you down to only JLab’s speakers.

Battery Life

• 12 hours total
• Battery Saver feature

Right, JLab is saying you can get 12 hours in total, 10 hours with the RGB lighting turned on. One claim is true and the other is not.

With the RGB settings on, the JBuds Party fell to 80% in an hour, which is closer to five hours overall, not ten. It was streaming in SBC so it’s not as if the audio was impacting the audio life as much.

With the RGB lighting turned off, the speaker – at 50% volume with music played from a Spotify playlist – got to three hours and was still at 100%. Considering it’s a party speaker, you won’t be enjoying much of it with the RGB lights sucking up all the battery life.

Also, you can’t read the battery level in the app – it’s just a green bar with no percentage level which is not too helpful in reading the situation. There isn’t any fast-charging support for this speaker (a full recharge takes about three hours); though there’s room to use it as a powerbank to charge other devices.

The Battery Saver features amount to turning off the RGB lights when the battery is below a certain level. That’s not so much power saving than trying to extend the battery when in use. This isn’t like Sony ULT or Marshall speakers, whereby you can limit the rate at which the battery charges to preserve the life of the battery so its lifespan lasts for longer. This is a feature the JBuds Party doesn’t have.

Sound Quality

• Lacks bass weight
• Unbalanced sound
• Spacious sound

This is the third wireless speaker this site has tested from JLab’s current crop and it’s safe to say that the tuning has been very consistent – to the detriment of the sound quality.

I might normally think that while you have a consistent tuning experience across your range of speakers, you take advantage of form factor there is, as well as the size of the speakers and amplification. It feels as if you get the same sound, which is highs that feel a little bit off, a thin-sounding midrange and bass that’s undercooked.

With Doja Cat’s Attention, there isn’t much bass at all, the overall sound comes in on the thinnish side. The vocal performance edges to the sharp side, verging on sibilance in moments, with a lean and crisp tone that’s not the most detailed – it’s as if the speaker’s sense of detail has been sanded off in places

Tonally, there’s something amiss with the highs, which sound slightly recessed. They’re not to clear, too detailed and particularly sharp.

There’s something unbalanced and ungainly about how the JBuds Party sound, as if either the timing is slightly off or what parts of a track the speaker chooses to focus on makes for a slightly jumbled performance. The rhythm of GoGo Penguin’s Erased by Sunlight is a bit out of step, the way the snares are emphsised in Gerald Clayton’s Rejuvenation Agenda focuses on the wrong aspect of the track, obscuring other instruments.

And while the speaker sounds spacious despite its vertical orientation, at the very least you can hear all the instruments in a track even if sometimes the speakers focuses on the wrong one, with a track that suits it, it’s sense of separation can be good, which makes it odd when it gets itself into a bit of jumble.

Which tracks suit it more than others? It does seem like the JBuds Party favours rock n roll, The Who’s Baba O Riley lacks the detail and clarity I’ve highlighted, but there’s a dynamism and energy that gets my toes tapping. A play of Natalia Imbruglia’s Torn and it’s the same positive effect, though considering this is a party speaker, this doesn’t feel like a party sound.

Switch up the EQ? It turns out the other options make the JBuds Party sound worse not better; with Balance even thinner and makes Signature sound weightier by comparison (even though it’s not). Bass Boost emphasises the lows but there’s a lack of clarity and the midrange is recessed.

You’ll need to play around with the volume – louder is better in the case of the JBuds Party – and mind the bass performance. The lows are less a Haymaker, more a jab in force; and with tracks that require punch and power, the JBuds Party can come across as hollow.

Should you buy it?