The Lowdown
The Party Bag Mini is a backpack with a speaker built-in. Costing around half the price of the original Party Bag, this version of the “backpack amplifier” has the speaker sitting in the bottom part, leaving ample space for you to carry other DJ stuff. The speaker works via Bluetooth or line input and it has a decent battery life. We think it’s cool, especially for backpacking DJs and portablists, but there are better options out there from separate portable speaker and DJ bag manufacturers.
First Impressions / Setting up
The Party Bag Mini is a portable PA system enclosed in a backpack. It is the more compact version of the regular Party Bag which features a lot more power and extra bells and whistles.
The Party Bag Mini’s speaker runs on rechargeable Lithium batteries with 50W of power behind it with some extra digital processing such as limiting to make sure that the amplifier does not get pushed too hard.
You can connect your devices using an 1/8″ jack, Bluetooth and USB.
The backpack itself is made out of a nice material, but we would’ve wanted more pocket options and space – you can definitely fit a small DJ controller in there though.
In Use
The Party Bag Mini is light and can be brought to parties or hikes without a problem. Aside from portability, the aforementioned 50W speaker sounds impressive enough if you just want to jam to some tunes. It has a strong enough bass response and detail where you cannot really pass it off as just a gimmick.
As we’ve mentioned, connectivity is pretty easy with the Party Bag Mini: you either connect via bluetooth just like many other portable devices and the wired connections are pretty straightforward operations.
Some YouTube reviewers we came across said that the Party Bag Mini has a nice concept but will probably not see much use since you may want to carry a more secure bag for your gear and not let it act as a portable PA system.
Conclusion
The Party Bag Mini is a nice concept and a very functional product. However, there are better portable speaker options right now like the Minirig and, at the same time, better bags out there from UDG and Magma.
