Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twelve months, you’ve probably seen ECOXGEAR pop up in your socials. They’ve created a range of rugged, waterproof speakers and accessories that have almost revolutionised camping in Australia.
We noticed these guys early on while browsing the aisles at autObarn. Soon enough, we found ourselves fitting up a shiny new SE26 soundbar speaker. If you ask us, the retirement of the dodgy old Bluetooth speaker from 2007 was long overdue.
Why should I get one?
The speaker system consists of 8 marine grade speakers offering 500 watts of power. The unit is completely waterproof, dustproof and dirtproof, and offers excellent sound quality. It even has a feature that allows you to connect up to 50 SoundExtreme units at a time. Never before have we experienced surround sound at a campsite, but when connecting a few units together you get almost a concert experience.
We’d be lying if we said the RGB party lights weren’t a guilty pleasure. That’s the beauty of these units; they can be all-out party with lights ablaze, or you can play some nice slow music over a glass of wine and just relax without all the party light fuss.
Light it up
The SE26 soundbar offers not only the obvious speaker capability, but also three colours of LED lighting on the rear of the unit, with three levels of brightness up to 280 lumens on the regular white light. We found this feature particularly handy, and a welcome surprise as it was entirely unexpected. We were definitely sold on the features on the front of the unit rather than those on the rear.
It can withstand the elements
Our SE26 is mounted on the side of a tub rack out in the elements. This car gets absolutely filthy weekly, and lives in the driveway, rain, hail or shine. The car is washed often with high pressure hoses, which pose no issue for the ECOXGEAR range, as they’re IP66 rated. I hear you ask, what does an IP66 rating mean? Well, IP is simply the ingress protection rating. The first digit is to do with solids: 6 is full protection against dust and other similar particles. The second digit relates to water: 6 is protection against strong water jets at a rate of 100 litres per minute.
Add in a subwoofer
Not long ago, ECOXGEAR released a separate subwoofer to accompany their soundbar range. You better believe we got our hands on one as soon as we could. The SoundExtreme ES08 Subwoofer offers the same RGB party light set up as the soundbar, along with the same IP66 waterproof rating. Adding 500 watts of bass produced by a pair of 8 inch subwoofers enhanced the sound quality hugely.
The SE26 connects to the ES08 using ECOXGEAR’s proprietary ECOCAST protocol, which is incredibly easy to use. To date, we’ve experienced no issues at all with either unit, or the wireless connection between them. We’d highly recommend adding an ECOXGEAR set up to your 4×4, boat, camper, or anything else you’ve got with a 12v battery in it. They’re great fun!
For more information on the range, visit www.ecoxgear.com.au.
