So you’re on the hunt for a portable speaker. In the world of high-end audio, this usually means something that slots neatly into a pocket in your rucksack but has about as much oomph as a phone speaker. Sure, it might look great on a bookshelf, but try to use it outside and you’ll realise that "portable" meant INDOORS ONLY, DUMMY. But that’s not the whole truth, because SOUNDBOKS exists, offering speakers that look like flight cases and sound like a festival system.
As the Danish brand moves into its second decade, it’s shifting its gaze from the mud-soaked fields of Roskilde to our homes (and beyond). Enter the Soundboks Mix: a smaller, more agile sibling to the Soundboks 4. To understand the latest development, we sat down with CEO Jesper Thiel Thomsen to discuss how you shrink a cult icon without ending the party.
“SOUNDBOKS began as a quest to build the perfect speaker for the festival campgrounds,” Thomsen tells us, reflecting on the brand’s utilitarian roots. “In short, it needed to be crazy powerful, but still portable—durable enough to be practically made for mistreatment—and have a long-lasting and swappable battery. That didn’t exist, so we built it.”
The origin story is now the stuff of hardware legend: a 16-year-old Thomsen building a DIY rig for Roskilde Festival, only to see it fizzle away in twenty minutes. “I spent hours and hours on it, and I remember I was quite proud of it. I thought it would make me the king of the campsite, but someone spilled a beer into it. It died and never came back to life,” he laughs. “That was what inspired the product.”
But if the original SOUNDBOKS was a response to an unfortunate festival spill, the Mix is a response to a shifting social landscape. During the pandemic, the brand became a lifeline for communal connection. “When the younger generations had their communities taken away from them when the clubs and bars went into lockdown, SOUNDBOKS became instrumental in allowing people to get together and build communities in a new way,” explains Thomsen. Now, the goal is to weave that same communal energy into the fabric of daily life.
“For us, it’s really about making a product that also works in the everyday space instead of just at big, specific occasions,” says Thomsen. “In short, Mix isn’t just focused on making your existing parties better, it’s focused on amplifying your everyday life. It’s about turning a dinner party with friends into a house party.”
The result is a piece of kit that balances a crystal clear indoor mode with the raw power required in outdoor settings. It retains the rugged, industrial DNA that has made SOUNDBOKS a badge of honor among the creators, initiators, and leaders that use it. Few other audio brands have built as much of a IYKYK aura, especially not in such a short time. “The SOUNDBOKS is a pretty big statement; it’s a big investment, it takes up a lot of space, and it takes up a lot of attention,” Thomsen says, explaining how SOUNDBOKS has built such a cult community. “I think there’s something to it requiring a bit of confidence to be a host, but also really being a product that empowers you to bring people together in an awesome way.”
With the release of Soundboks Mix, the brand takes yet another big step forward, but the mission remains surprisingly romantic for a company that builds speakers hard enough to survive a riot. For Thomsen, the speaker is just a medium for the most human experience.
“We believe that parties are one of the world's most undervalued cultural institutions,” he concludes. “It’s where we make new friends, fall in love, and celebrate life... We’re here to bring more of that. For the last 11 years, and for the next 11 years as well.”
