Ant Audio Ammo review: We drove a car over this speaker

Ant Audio recently entered the Indian market with a slew of audio products. The one product that caught my eyes was its Ammo rugged speaker, which the company claimed could survive bring dropped in water, playing football with and driving a car over it. The last point got me was extremely interested in the speaker. But can this speaker survive a car driven on it?

Ant Audio Ammo

The speaker though portable was considerably heavy, which would add some confidence into the user’s mind regarding the ruggedness of the device. The review unit we had was a chirpy kind of blue. I would have preferred it in black to give it a more muscular look.

The speaker is on the front and has buttons to control it and an LED light integrated to the top of the device. The device has a protective flap on the bottom, where the auxiliary port and the micro-USB port is located to make it water-resistant. There is another flap located on the back, which protects nothing and seems quite useless.

Considering that the Ant Audio Ammo is priced at Rs 1,399, I didn’t expect much going into the review. However, I was pleasantly surprised, when I first turned it on. I am not an audio reviewer and don’t have much experience using a lot of audio devices, but I know a cheap Chinese speaker when I see (or hear) one.

The first time I turned on the speaker, I at least didn’t hear a female bot type voice telling me that the “Bluetooth device is ready to pair”. I was greeted with a normal voice that said “pairing”. I found the audio quality of the speaker to be loud and bassy. Anyone outside of my room could easily listen to what I was playing. I am one of those typical Punjabis who like loud music and moreover crave for the thump that a speaker with good bass provides.

My sound quality expectations when it comes to a speaker of this size are highly skewed towards the side that I will not like it that much. But the Ant Audio Ammo was able to impress, I tried different types of music from EDM to Indian classical, which I did not hear for long and slept. I loved listening to music on it on the go, but it’s not all hunky-dory for this speaker as there are issues that you might face while using it.

I found the lows to be muddled as it is too much for a speaker of this size to catch the best lows. According to me what the speaker was doing was muddling both the lows and the mids and packaging it as bass… quite impressive given the size and, of course, the price.

Mids are where the Ammo is able to shine a bit more, with clear vocals and subtle elements. If there’s a song whose vocals feel a bit muddled, you can play it on the Ammo and you will easily be able to understand it.

Coming to the Highs, I found them to be cut back a bit as they were quite faint. To test out a speakers highs, I usually play a track of an opera, which provides me with the sense of how a speaker delivers the highs. The sound during a song which mostly consisted of high notes went shrill sometimes too.

Also, keep in mind I mainly used the speaker wirelessly, only using the 3.5mm wire to test if the port was working or not.

The battery, especially in a speaker that a company is saying you can carry anywhere, is important. I was able to get a constant payback of up to a solid five hours every time I charged the speaker fully. To charge it via a normal charger, it took around two hours to get from zero to 100 per cent.

Now for the part, you have been waiting for. What happened to the speaker when I drove a car over it? But first, let me tell you what happened when I threw it in water. It simply floated and was fine, then I pushed it down and played a song which came out fine. When I was playing the song I could hear a bit of it and the water had ripple waves and a few bubbles.

So what happened when I drove a car over it. Nothing is what I want to say, but that won’t be true. Truth is that the speaker still works perfectly and sounds the same as before, but it’s a pale shadow of its old self. The rubber covering tore off badly with the lower flap gone. The metal grill with the Ant Audio logo was dented. Maybe the speaker ground against the gravel a bit and that might have caused the rubber covering to get damaged.

So technically a car can drive over this speaker and it will still play music.