The Box and Goodies -
Even though the box is no longer a major selling point, it is still nice to get a new product in something that shows the manufacturer put effort into their product. It can also be an indication of the quality you should expect (although that is not always the case). So with that in mind let’s see what kind of effort LUXA2 put into the box the GroovyW comes in.

LUXA2 ships the GroovyW to you in a fairly stylish box. It features a “wrap around” style lid instead of the more box opening. On the front you have a double image of the GroovyW which is intended to show off as much of the wireless charger as possible. LUXA2 has also loaded you up with icons to ensure you know about all of the many features the GroovyW is packed with.

The back of the box is more of the same, with some highlighted features instead of the full list. Under the lid we found an interesting image. You have a picture of an iPhone plugged into the power bank with the GroovyW on top. Now considering the wireless charging aspect of the product we thought that an image of a phone charging wirelessly while the GroovyW was next to it would be more appropriate, but perhaps LUXA2 did not want the iPhone guys to feel too left out. You will understand why we say that in a little bit.
Moving on to much more important things, LUXA2 puts everything you need to get started in the box. You get the GroovyW, a nice carrying pouch, a quick start guide, USB cable, AUX-in adapter cable, and of course the wireless charging unit.

The GroovyW  -
The GroovyW is actually two products in one, you get a Bluetooth/NFC enabled speaker along with a 4000mAh li-polymer wireless power bank. LUXA2 simply designed the speaker to fit perfectly on the wireless power bank so that you can use the two together (for extended play times) or break the two up and use the power bank to charge your mobile device while still listening to your media.

The speaker portion of the GroovyW is a little larger than some of the competition at 180mm x 82mm x 66mm. However, this allows LUXA2 to pack in two 40mm drivers a 7Watt amp, 2200mAh battery, NFC components, Bluetooth, Mic and all the rest of the trimmings inside.

The two 40mm speakers are placed in the front, as you would expect, with enough distance to give them the impression of stereo separation. The black mess grill that surrounds the middle hides the speakers and gives the GroovyW a nice clean appearance. At the bottom and top we find a thin silver colored strip that gives the unit its edges.

The front bears the LUXA2 logo at the bottom while the back features the power button, micro-USB charging port and the Aux-In port. Looking at the very top of the GroovyW we find a cluster of touch controls and an NFC pad. The NNFC pad allows you to control the GroovyW by simply placing an NFC enabled device that has the Groovy Audio App on the pad and you are good to go. The option is really only for Android users as Apple has not added in NFC to the iPhone yet. Still it is a nice feature for Android users. The primary means of connectivity is Bluetooth. The GroovyW uses Bluetooth CSR v3.0 + EDR for its connections. However, if you do not have Bluetooth or NFC you can always go with that AUX-in port.

Next to the NFC pad you have a battery indicator, a microphone hole, Bluetooth indicator light, pause/play/answer button, and volume controls. These are lit by Blue LEDs and, as we mentioned above, are touch controls.

Flipping things over to the bottom we find a wireless charging pad in the center. This is not surprising as the GroovyW comes with a Qi compatible wireless charging power bank. The GroovyW has a 2200mAh battery inside which should keep the music going, but you can always place it on the 4000mAh power bank for longer usage.

Speaking of the power bank, we should probably show that off to you as well. According to the documentation the power bank component of the GroovyW is 194mm x 17mm x 69mm. This makes it a little larger than the speaker section, but it does help give it a sturdy base.

The wireless power bank is a little larger than some of the others we have seen, but that is be design so it mates up with the GroovyW cleanly. On the upper surface we find the charging pad right in the middle with a rubber bumper around it. This is a nice touch that will save your phone (or other device) some scratches and also keep the GroovyW looking clean.

The controls here are very simple: you have a power button… yup that is about it. If you want to charge wirelessly simply drop a wireless charging enabled device (LUXA2 sells a few of these for Android Phones), turn the power on and you are charging. If you are not lucky enough to have a wireless charging option you can still use you can always use the traditional USB port located on the side. In the same location is another micro-USB port witch you can use to charge the power bank. Right above this are four LED lights that indicate the battery level and when they flash in series it indicates that you are charging a device.

LUXA2 GroovyW Audio Center -
There are two very different versions of this app; one for Android and one for iOS. As you can see below you are getting very different things with each. Sorry Windows Phone guys; you are out of luck for now.

In the Android flavor you get an equalizer, Bluetooth control API, playlist and internet radio. These are pretty self-explanatory from the images below and the video we have explaining the feature of the GroovyW.

Sadly the iPhone crew do not get all of the options. For Apple you only get the playlist and radio app. There is no equalizer or Bluetooth controls. You can still use the app over Bluetooth, but you will have to manually connect using the phones normal Bluetooth controls.

Performance -
With audio gear it is hard to be objective. After all different people like different music and even people that like the same music might like to listen to it in different ways. To make sure that I cover the audio products that we get here at DecryptedTech I like to have more than one opinion. Usually I gather 5 other people to listen to different audio types (gaming, movies, MP3 and CD-Audio). I then ask for a rating of one to five with one being the worst and 5 being the best for each category. I then follow up with my personal feelings and observations.

With the GroovyW we had other items that we needed to take a look at during our performance testing. These were portability, power usage, charging times and ease of use.

Gaming -
Gaming was the easiest one test and also the easiest one to observe. When the audio quality is good you can see people register it in the way they react to what is happening in the game. We used Modern Warfare 3 and also Bioshock Infinite for the audio comparison. Of course as the GroovyW is aimed at portable devices we wanted to add some of those games in too. For this test we connected our Android Note III and also our Samsung Series 7 Chronos Laptop to the GroovyW just to make sure we were getting as many audio types as possible.

Gaming on a mobile device is not a great test of audio. Most of the sounds are fairly simple in nature. However this does not mean that the GroovyW was not more than up to the task. We had very good audio performance for the sounds that were present in our mobile games.

Using the Aux-in port and our laptop we found the gaming audio to be pretty solid. Again there was some expected mud in the mid-range frequencies, but not enough to make it a bad experience.

Movies/Video -
For movies we followed a similar pattern as how we tested gaming performance except this time there were three mobile devices and then we finished things off with our laptop. For conformity we tried to use the same app on each device, but as the ZuneHD we use for testing does not have Netflix support, we simply bought the same movie for that device. So let’s take a look at each of these devices in turn.

Samsung Galaxy Note III -
Once again the audio quality coming from this phone was very good even without the assistance of the Equalizer that you get in the Audio App. One thing that we have always found annoying with mobile speakers is an inability to project all of the sounds coming from a movie. You end only hearing sounds that are loud. With the GroovyW we found that you do get a full range of audio and that it is capable of push sound around a room. This makes it a good choice for watching a movie when you might not have “normal” TV options.

iPhone 5 -
Oddly enough the iPhone 5 did much better when using Netflix than it did listening to audio. The sounds were much cleaner and defined in our movie choice. As with the Note III the GroovyW was had enough volume and separation to reproduce movie audio properly over Bluetooth.

ZuneHD –
Our trusty old ZuneHD actually has some of the best audio reproduction we have heard in a mobile device. With the GroovyW this level of performance was still present, but due to the high quality audio we started to note some items that we missed in our gaming tests. Although the range is excellent, we found that some sounds were reedy with a tinny edge to them. We heard this most often when reproducing female voices. Even with this issue the GroovyW performance was great.

The Series 7 Chronos -
As with the ZuneHD we connected our laptop to the GroovyW using the aux-in port and checked to see how well it handled the playing a movie back on a larger device. As with all of the other we had a very good experience with very little mud or audio anomalies.

Music (MP3 and CD-Audio) -
For Music I have a few favorite tracks that I like to use. These are not always other people’s favorites but they serve as a baseline and have some impressive audio features to them that can distinguish between good audio and bad. One of them is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing. It is an amazing track. Other are A Day in the Life by the Beetles, Are you Experienced by Jimi Hendrix, and Cage the Elephant’s Ain’t no Rest for the Wicked. The numbers for this along with their corresponding one word comments are below.

Ok, so there are certainly some differences in the audio from different products. When we tested from the Note III we had very full sounding audio with only a small amount of tin (to be expected from the smaller enclosure and speakers), but none the less the audio was clean and had a wide range even without the use of an equalizer profile. When we dropped one in we were able to pull the tin out and increase the vibrance of the audio playing through the app.

When attached to the iPhone, the audio was very different. The audio was tinny and had considerably more mud in the mid-range. It was interesting to see this difference between two major phone brands over a set of speakers.

Our testing with the Aux-in port using our old ZuneHD showed that the GroovyW can handle audio reproduction even from a high quality audio source. As with movies, we did here some tin in certain voices.

On the laptop we had a similar experience to what we saw with the ZuneHD and Note III. Very solid audio performance.

Power -
The GroovyW has a listed charge time of 4.5 hours. In our lab this actually took a little over 5 hours to charge. This is still not bad considering how long it can take to charge a few other devices and the operational time that you get with the GroovyW. We found that we could play audio for a little more than 10 hours with a single charge. This is a tad short of the listed 15 hours, but we were also listening at a higher volume.

The wireless charging pad can go from drained to full in around 6 hours (listed time is 5.5 hours). Once charged it allowed us to recharge our Note III and iPhone 5 three times each (from around 10% to full) when using the USB port. When using the wireless charging feature the number of recharges for the Note III dropped to around 2.5. This is due to some inefficiencies in the way power is pushed over wireless and also due to the fact that we had an Otterbox protective case on the phone. The separation of the tow contact points lowered the efficiency even more.

Portability and Ease of Use –
The GroovyW weighs in at 596g while the charging station is 192g. This makes a combined weight of 788 grams. This means that the two weigh less than two pounds. This is a great carry weight and something that is not going to drag you down if you need to toss the pair into your bag.

As we mentioned in the video setting up the GroovyW is very simple and straight forward. There is not much to get you messed up.

Value -
Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item.  We found the GroovyW for sale online at around $110. This is a pretty nice price to pay for a wireless speaker let alone a wireless speaker AND wireless charging pad. Most of the speakers in this quality / feature range were right at $100 and did not include many of the things you get with the GroovyW (not to mention the charging pad). So for $10 extra you get a ton more, I would call that a pretty good value.

Conclusion -
I am not sure what else we can say about the GroovyW. It is not the best speaker on the planet, but it certainly does an outstanding job at reproducing audio from your mobile (and not so mobile devices). It has solid battery life and a feature set that is rather impressive. LUXA2 has given the GroovyW a great price point that is sure to have an impact on the big guys in the market. With its combination of performance, features and price the choice to give the GroovyW an editor’s choice award was a no brainer.

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