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Smart lights were there at the beginning of the smart home tech revolution, and over the years, these clever bulbs and LED strips have gradually evolved to offer more by way of both features and form factors—so much so that you might not be aware of everything you can do with smart lights, even if you’ve been using them for years.

If your own smart light setup is mostly limited to switching your bedside lamp off with a voice command, controlling them remotely from your phone, or perhaps changing up the colors or adding an automation or two, then you’re not taking advantage of everything these lights can do for you. These are some of the best smart light tricks you can try.

Sync your lights with your TV

Having your smart lights change color and flash in time to action happening on your television can really add to the experience of watching movies and shows—and a number of smart light manufacturers now offer the necessary kit and apps to easily make this happen.

For Philips Hue lights, for example, you need either a syncing box or a native app, depending on your TV model. It’s also something you can do with Nanoleaf lights, via a system called Screen Mirror that uses a small camera to see what’s on your television.

Nanoleaf Essentials Smart Multicolor HD Lightstrip

$69.99
at Amazon

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$69.99
at Amazon

Set up random schedules

One of the ways that smart lights can be useful when you’re away from home is giving potential robbers the idea that you haven’t gone away at all. You can almost always control your smart lights remotely, as long as your home wifi is still running.

If you don’t want to have to remember to turn your lights on at home every evening while you’re at the beach or in the mountains, Philips Hue has a randomize timings setting available when you set up an automation, which will automatically vary when the lights turn on each day.

You can randomize timings in the Philips Hue app.
Credit: Lifehacker

Get notifications via your lights

Add some third-party services to the mix and the list of possibilities grows even more. IFTTT (If This Then That), for example, can set up routines based on specific triggers that lead to specific actions—and smart light brands including Philips Hue and Lifx support the protocol.

Because IFTTT can plug into a variety of social media, mobile, and app systems, you can have events on these platforms trigger a flash or a change in color for your lights. One idea would be to turn a desk lamp blue when the weather forecast is predicting rain.

Group your lights into scenes

You can do even more with your smart lights by grouping them together and setting specific scenes you can switch between. Most platforms let you do this fairly easily, so all the lights in a certain room can be managed together, and changed over time.

You could set up scenes for early morning or late at night, for example, or for movie nights or for studying—the Nanoleaf app can even creates scenes for you based on a keyword or two. Check inside your smart light companion app to see what you’ve got available, or explore your customization options.

Wake up with a “sunrise”

Ease yourself more gently into the day by having your smart lights turn on gradually in the mornings, mimicking an actual sunrise. You could even use this trick to replace your alarm clock.

This works for a wide variety of smart lights, and some can even sync the feature to your local sunrise times. You can use this with any smart light connected to Google Home, for example, by saying “hey Google, wake my lights at…” and adding a time to Google Assistant.

The Nanoleaf app can create Magic Scenes for you.
Credit: Nanoleaf

Add a motion sensor

Combine a compatible smart motion sensor with your smart lights and you don’t even need to go to the trouble of tapping on your phone or speaking out a voice command to activate your smart lights—they’ll come on as soon as there’s movement in a room.

A few smart light platforms offer this functionality, including Philips Hue. You’re able to set the brightness of the lights—so you’re not suddenly dazzled as you stumble to the bathroom, for example—and you can have the lights turn off after a certain time as well.

Philips Hue Motion Sensor

$44.99
at Amazon

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$44.99
at Amazon

Set up automated routines

Your smart lights are even more useful when you combine them with other devices. For example, you can set the lights to dim as a chill out mix begins to play on your smart speaker at a certain time of night. Or you can set your lights and smart thermostat to all turn off together when you leave the house.

These tricks are known as routines or automations, and you can set them up in Google Home (via the Automations tab), in the Amazon Alexa app (via More > Routines), and in other smart home hub platforms (including Samsung SmartThings and Apple Homekit).

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Before this review, I had never heard of Brane, but now, it’s all I want to hear when I play my music. The Brane X is many things, but cheap isn’t one of them. But for $499, you get a multi-use premium speaker that can handle itself underwater, has Alexa voice assistant, connects through wifi for better audio, has the best bass of any wifi speaker, and can be used as a soundbar and subwoofer combo. The Brane X is a great wifi speaker for someone who values bass, would like to take their speaker outdoors, and needs a soundbar and subwoofer combo for their home theater. However, it isn’t perfect and at its price, it competes with the best. The Sonos Move 2 is slightly cheaper, offers a replaceable battery with 24 hours of juice, and better treble and mids (but nowhere near the same range or bass power fo the Brane X).

Brane reached out to me to review the Brane X and sent me the speaker for my honest thoughts, which is exactly what you’ll get in this review.

Brane X Smart Speaker

$499.00
at Amazon

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$499.00
at Amazon

Brane X speaker pros, cons, and specs

Pros

• Best-in-class bass and sub-bass for smart speakers

• Wifi streaming over Spotify and AirPlay 2

• Compact and portable

• Powerful 98dB stereo speaker

• IP57 dust and waterproof

• Doubles as a soundbar and subwoofer combo in one with an AUX connection

• Companion app with EQ

Cons

• Expensive

• Upper registers sound compressed at max volume when using Bluetooth

• No Chromecast support

• No speakerphone function

• Some features make a whirring noise

• No USB-C charging (only DC)

Specs

• Battery Life: About six hours of battery at a moderately high volume (about 12 hours at a moderate level, according to Brane).

• Connectivity: Wifi supports 802.11a/b/g/n/ac standards, Bluetooth version 5.1, streaming services compatible with AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, and Amazon Alexa.

• Inputs: Auxiliary input 3.5 mm jack for wired connections.

• App: Brane companion app for fine-tuning bass, customizing EQ settings, managing speaker groups, and adjusting various settings.

• Drivers: One 6.5″ by 9″ Repel-Attract-Driver (RAD) subwoofer, two 2.5″ midrange drivers, two 0.75″ dome tweeters.

• Power Output: Four Class-D digital amplifiers delivering a combined output of over 200 watts (98dB).

• Water Resistance: Rated IP57, making it fully waterproof and dust-protected.

• Size: 6.1 inches x 9.3 inches x 7 inches (H × W × D)

• Weight: 7.7 lbs

First impressions of the Brane X speaker

Credit: Daniel Oropeza

I have to be honest: First impressions of the Brane X weren’t good. Turning it on wasn’t intuitive, since the power button doesn’t provide any feedback that I pressed it properly. The same can be said about the media controls on top, but I’ll get more into those details later. There is also a weird whirring sound that the speaker makes once you turn it on that made me think my speaker was defective (it goes away after a few seconds). The sound is actually an air pump equalizing the air pressure inside the speaker, which is a patent technology that Brane called Repel-Attract-Driver (RAD). RAD is what makes this speaker unique, giving it the best bass range output I’ve heard on any speaker. Try this frequency range test on your wifi or Bluetooth speaker and see how it performs. The Brane X didn’t just play through the whole range but vibrated my entire office with its powerful bass. And because of that, I’m willing to put up with the humming sound it makes when it’s turned on.

Design

The Brane X uses touch controls for media.
Credit: Daniel Oropeza

The design is, well, boring. All black is a safe option and with no color variations, it leaves me wanting to fill it with stickers to give it some personality. But that leads to my next issue: touch controls. To control the speaker you have a few options on top of the speaker, none of which provide haptic feedback. And since their touch controls, you don’t really know if your command when though unless you hear the speaker. There is also no play/pause button, so I can only control it with my phone (or Alexa if using it to play music).

Considering this is also an outdoor speaker with an IP57 rating that can be completely submerged underwater, physical buttons could’ve come in handy. The handle on the top is useful considering the speaker almost weighs eight pounds.

The Brane X charger is DC, so no USB-C.
Credit: Daniel Oropeza

The charger is DC, so no USB-C for fast universal charging, unfortunately. The battery is marketed as 20 hours of battery life at a moderate volume, but I only got around six hours of juice at around 75% volume (which to be fair, is very loud indoors unless you’re having a house party). It’ll take about three hours to fully charge it once it is drained.

Sound

Credit: Daniel Oropeza

The sound is where the Brane X blows away the competition and really shines, especially if you love bass (and I do). As I explained earlier, the RAD technology really pumps out incredible power out of this small speaker. Considering this is less than 10% the size of JBL’s PartyBox Stage 320 (my favorite party speaker), it’s impressive that it nearly matches its 240 W of output power (the Brane X gets to 200 W), only about a 2dB difference in volume to my favorite party speaker. I will caveat that this isn’t a party speaker, and you can really hear it struggle on upper registers when getting it to its max volume.

Unless I’m blasting the Brane X, though, the sound quality is pristine. Because the frequency range of the bass is so wide, you can really hear and feel the lower registers, giving it a full sound without needing to get too loud. It makes for a fun sound that is distinctive to the Brane X. I listened to MONACO by Bad Bunny and could hear the sub-bass parts of the bass clearly. The sensation of feeling the bass at this level usually means blasting the music on regular speakers or headphones, but the Brane X manages to provide that feeling without scaring my neighbors.

Features of the Brane X speaker

Credit: Daniel Oropeza

The Brane X is a wifi speaker first, meaning it performs better than Bluetooth speakers in terms of connectivity with a wider range, better sound quality by streaming higher bitrate audio, and other features. Instead of connecting to the speaker over Bluetooth, you can play music directly into it through Spotify Connect, so you’ll get a better connection and sound quality. You can also connect via AirPlay 2 and Amazon Alexa. The Amazon smart assistant performs as well as any Alexa device.

The Brane app

Left: Main screen. Middle: EQ. Right: The AUX Pass-Through feature to minimize delay with the TV.
Credit: Daniel Oropeza

My experience with the companion app was like most speaker apps: It does its simple job well, but it can disconnect on occasion and can be slow at times. The main things I used the app were to check the battery life, mess with the EQ (you get a five-band equalizer) which adjusts your changes in real time, and setting the AUX Pass-Through feature when setting it up as a soundbar. The app gives you the option to link up groups if you have more than one Brane X speaker. As I only have one speaker, I wasn’t able to try this feature.

The Brane X as an outdoor speaker

Credit: Daniel Oropeza

As I do with all of my outdoor speakers, I took it out to the court while hosting my Street FC soccer games. We played five on five on a hockey rink with walls, so the sound bounces off to give it a “surround” feel. Even then, the Brane X struggles to fill the court completely. This is by far the smallest speaker I’ve ever taken to my games, however, and I’m comparing the sound decibels to party speakers, which is an unfair comparison. The fact that the Brane X is even a contender here speaks volumes to its versatility. With that said, the audio did sound compressed at maximum volumes sometimes. Since it’s a Bluetooth connection outdoors instead of wifi, the compression sound is more noticeable at max volume (it’ll sound better indoors with a wifi connection). The Brane X comes with an IP57 rating, making it fully waterproof and dust-protected—great for an outdoor speaker.

The Brane X as a soundbar

The Brane X doubles as a soundbar and sub woofer combo with an AUX cable.
Credit: Daniel Oropeza

If you want to use the speaker as a soundbar, you’ll need an AUX cable (at least the end that connects to the speaker needs to be AUX). I wish the Brane X had Google Chromecast support so it could connect wirelessly to my smart TV, but you can’t have everything in life. You can still connect it with Bluetooth, but you won’t be able to use the AUX Pass-Though feature on the app to get rid of the sound delay (the delay is not bad, but sticklers will notice it). You won’t get eARC sound quality, but the speaker itself has a subwoofer, so the sound is surprisingly good as a soundbar and subwoofer combo.

I decided to re-watch Dune to hear how well the Brane X performed as a soundbar and subwoofer combo and compared it to the speaker system on my TCL QM7 TV, which has a subwoofer speaker on the back. The Brane X really brought Dune to life compared to the television speakers. I could feel every thud of the thumpers as they hit the sand when calling the worms. The soundtrack and vibrations of the explosions really put the excellent broad frequency range the Brane X has to use. The speaker is able to handle the dynamic audio you want from a soundbar, hearing whispers and feeling explosions.

Bottom line

Credit: Daniel Oropeza

The Brane X is a powerful wifi speaker with a subwoofer that gives it an incredible range in the sub-bass frequencies. It’s the best wifi and smart speaker for bass lovers. With Spotify and AirPlay 2, most people’s needs for music will be met. Its small compact size also makes it a great portable and outdoor speaker, with a waterproof IP57 rating and up to 12 hours of battery life. It can get very loud with a maximum of 98 dBs, and it doubles as a soundbar and subwoofer combo, making it great for watching movies. However, all that versatility comes at a high price of $499. If you’re looking to blast the Brane X at max volume, know that playing over Bluetooth will lead to some compression being noticeable. There is no speakerphone option despite its many microphones, and you’ll need to depend on the DC charger, which isn’t ideal for portable speakers.

The Brane X is ideal for someone looking for a wifi speaker that can do a bit of everything. A one-stop speaker that you can take to the beach, use as a soundbar, fill your living room for a party, or take on a whim to your next adventure. It definitely rivals the Sonos Move 2, and would recommend it to anyone who isn’t in the Sonos ecosystem already and/or loves to feel bass in their life.