We got a live one here.
We at Swagger are always sifting through the internet molasses for the next game-changing style, service or gadget, and today we’ve found a toy worth singing about.
Friends, meet the B.R.O. Ball, a football ready to make your summer much, much better. We found it the way all great things are getting found out in twenty-first century, Kickstarter, where as of this writing they’re at the halfway point of bringing this thing out of prototype stage and onto shelves throughout Christendom.
Being a magazine writer has its privilege, so we got a prototype delivered to HQ a few days after a request.
The first question we had for this bad boy was, how good could sound emanating from a rubber air bag actually be?
Answer: Very. This thing may be what finally gets our European friends to shake their nasty soccer habit.
First thing’s first, as a guy who listens to most of his tunes through a 5S speaker, I’m used to a half-assed sound; nobody appreciates high quality more than me. Sitting on my desk and linking up to my iPhone via bluetooth (nice and easy), the music was high, high quality. But unless a football has been signed by anybody from the Bills (suck it) it’s not for trophy cases, it’s for throwing.
The promotional video shows a bunch of California boys chucking the ball around the ocean or whatever in what looked like the nicest summer day ever. We took the prototype out for a spin in the park in our decidedly unfriendly October-in-Toronto jacket weather and we beat the living shit out of it (for the record, the good people at Invincible Audio told us we could). In a rainfall that ranged in twenty minutes from “spitting” to “pissing”, we threw it, spiked it, and were all kinds of mean to it while it blared Big Pun back out at us loud enough to offend some old people.
The jams didn’t miss a single beat through all the violence.
I’m not going to pretend I know how you get a speaker inside a ball and have it sound like a rich kid’s civic, I can’t say how it can be pegged off asphalt into a puddle deep enough to drown a border collie and still kick out the jams, I can only say that it does.
Until we get weaponized robot vs. convict football, this is the best pigskin-tech mashup going. It’s as clear as day that these guys give a shit about sounding awesome no matter what you do to it. B.R.O. Ball is the real deal, and I’m not keen on giving it back.
