Rocksteady Stadium 2-Pack: You could fill an arena with these portable Bluetooth speakers

They sound great, but “AI-powered” audio smells like hype to us.

CHRISTOPHER NULL

Rocksteady Audio aims for the higher end of the inexpensive Bluetooth speaker market with its new Stadium line. This speaker doesn’t compete with high-fidelity multiroom audio systems such as the Sonos Move or the Bluesound Pulse Mini 2i, but it mostly hits its mark.

The all-black mini towers are deceptively demure, each measuring 6 inches tall with a 4.25-inch square base. Designed with Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, each 30-watt speaker contains two drivers: a 28mm tweeter that gets 10 watts of power, and a 70mm mid/bass driven by 20 watts of amplification. These active drivers are augmented by a pair of 72mm passive bass radiators. The specified frequency response is 60Hz to 20kHz (no tolerance given).

The bigger story, Rocksteady says, is that the Stadium is “powered by Bambu Tech’s AWSM (fave.co/37itum0), an AI-powered audio authoring platform,” a platform said to be so amazing you’ll be able to “hear your favorite music again as if for the first time.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but the Rocksteady Stadium speakers were indeed loud, clear, and clean in my testing, with plenty of bass and some juicy mids and trebles. While the clarity of sound was excellent, I found the speakers more attuned to pumping out bigger, busier party-style jams than delicate classical piano. When I bumped up the volume, I found that just about everything sounded great.