Tantrum Audio Angry Box

Sound and fury, signifying nothing... or a remarkably useful mixing tool?

One of your most important tasks when mixing for the mass market is to ensure that the most important elements of the music survive their unpredictable journey to the listener. Many end‑user playback systems are way too small to transmit appreciable low end, for instance, and the large‑scale public‑address systems in public spaces rarely offer much bass either, simply because subwoofers are large and expensive to install. At the other spectral extreme, high frequencies are extremely directional and easily shadowed (by obstacles in the listening environment) or masked (by background noise), so plenty of listening situations provide no meaningful high end either.

A common response to this problem is to check your mixing decisions with a bandwidth‑limited loudspeaker, thereby focusing your attention at mixdown on the midrange area of the spectrum, since that’s the frequency region that’s likely to reach the greatest number of real‑world listeners. Probably the most famous example of this kind of product is the original Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube from the ’70s and ’80s: a small loudspeaker that not only naturally generated a midrange‑heavy tone, but which also, by virtue of its single‑driver, closed‑box design, provided a forensically accurate presentation of the midrange balance, without the crossover artefacts and resonance problems inherent in most wider‑bandwidth multi‑driver studio monitors.

In recent years, a number of companies have attempted to update the original Auratone concept with varying degrees of success. Having reviewed a number of these products in Sound On Sound over the years (including Auratone’s modern reissue), the most successful one to my mind has been Avantone’s Mixcube. It’s not quite as severely mid‑focused as some of the original Auratones, but just as clean and fast, and at least as useful at mixdown, in my opinion. However, UK‑based start‑up Tantrum Audio are now offering their Angry Box as a new and slightly higher‑priced competitor. Can it challenge the Mixcube’s supremacy?

Hardware

The Angry Box is a cubic sealed box containing a 4.5‑inch driver, a 65W Class‑D amplifier and some DSP processing. The whole thing measures 14cm across and weighs only 2.5kg, which makes it significantly smaller and lighter than the Avantone Mixcube; it also has an internal PSU, rather than the Mixcube’s large external line‑lump. The rear panel provides a balanced combi jack/XLR input, a switched IEC connection for mains power, and a three‑way volume switch, which can deliver some extra headroom should the front‑panel clip‑warning LED turn red. A further rear‑panel Mode switch offers two different sonic flavours: a bandwidth‑limited mode with negligible DSP processing for midrange monitoring purposes, and an extended‑bandwidth mode for more general‑purpose auditioning.

The speaker’s eye‑catching red textured finish feels very much in keeping with the product’s disgruntled moniker, and generally feels solid and robust. Recessed into the speaker’s underside are four rubber non‑slip feet, although on the models I reviewed, I found that these didn’t quite protrude enough to give a confident grip at all four corners when the units were placed on hard flat surfaces, so I ended up using rubber matting to ensure the speakers remained securely anchored to my stands for review purposes.

The Angry Box did a commendable job of rendering every one of my own personal mix reference tracks with a sense of accuracy and familiarity.

In The Mids

Given that there are two different tonal options on offer here, let’s deal with them one at a time, starting with the midrange focus mode. As I’d hoped, this was extremely effective at clarifying critical questions of midrange balance and, unlike some other small speakers that I’ve tested in this capacity, the Angry Box did a commendable job of rendering every one of my own personal mix reference tracks with a sense of accuracy and familiarity. The transient definition and detail transmission were both excellent, too, contributing to both an impressively sharp stereo image and decent depth presentation.

Comparing the Angry Box side by side with my own trusty Mixcube, the Angry Box’s midrange emphasis felt a little less severe overall, as well as being ‘centred’ maybe a half‑octave lower, giving a slightly warmer and friendlier subjective tone — a tonal character particularly audible on dense rock textures like Linkin Park’s ‘Forgotten’ or Royal Blood’s ‘Lights Out’, say, as well as on tracks with full‑bodied kick drums, such as Dynoro & Gigi D’Agostino’s ‘In My Mind’ or Post Malone’s ‘Circles’. Initially, this left me with the impression that the Mixcube’s transients were perhaps a little faster and tighter than those of the Angry Box, but this feeling all but dissipated after more extended auditioning. If you held a gun to my head, I’d still probably give the Mixcube the edge in terms of cleanliness and detail on complex arrangements like Outkast’s ‘Bowtie’, Justin Timberlake’s ‘Can’t Stop The Feeling’, and David Guetta’s ‘Don’t Leave Me Alone’, but there honestly wasn’t a heck of a lot in it.

The bottom line is that I’d happily use either the Angry Box’s midrange mode or the Avantone Mixcube for any professional mixing job. Indeed, for comparison purposes I deliberately used the Angry Box exclusively to do the detailed lead‑vocal fader automation for a mix I was working on (probably the most critical midrange balancing task of all), and when I subsequently checked my work on the Mixcube I really couldn’t fault the results at all. Nuff said!

Now, there’s an argument that the Mixcube’s more severe midrange focus might give a better indication of mix translation, given that the Angry Box’s presentation retains some mix elements that fall off the extremes of more restricted‑bandwidth mass‑market playback systems — both the high‑frequency fizz in the choruses of Dr Dre’s ‘Housewife’ and the bass low‑end weight on Bonnie Raitt’s ‘Right Down The Line’ are noticeably more present on the Angry Box than on the Mixcube. Set against that, however, is that the slightly wider frequency context provided by the Angry Box made the sonic transition from my main monitors a little less jarring, with the result that I found the process of balancing lead vocals against a backing track a touch more intuitive. The Avantone is great at highlighting relative vocal levels, but it does often push the vocal so far out front of the rest of the balance (especially if you listen in single‑speaker mono, as I would usually do) that you sometimes have to fight against the urge to turn it down while automating! With all this in mind, I wouldn’t personally chalk up the tonal difference between the two speakers as a clear win for either camp.

Internal DSP allows for two listening modes: the default ‘mid focus’ mode, and an extended‑bandwidth mode.

Highs & Lows

What the Angry Box does definitely have in its favour, though, is the extended bandwidth mode, which uses the onboard DSP to flatten out the speaker’s frequency response such that it more closely resembles that of a traditional small nearfield. Specifically, it extends the bandwidth to 90Hz‑12kHz at the ‑3dB points and 60Hz‑20kHz at the ‑10dB points. Despite my concerns that this DSP processing might introduce unwelcome resonance issues at the low end, I was pleasantly surprised that this didn’t seem to be much of an issue in practice — certainly not by comparison with the bass overhang problems I’ve often heard on small ported speakers in this price range. The sound retained a good deal of its speed and punch, such that the only substantial down side of the DSP processing at the low end was the steep ported‑speaker‑like frequency roll‑off, a frequency‑response characteristic that makes balancing kick drum and bass rather hit‑and‑miss depending on their spectral content (the missing bass line on Justin Bieber’s ‘Boyfriend’ being just one case in point), and also undermines your ability to reliably compare the low‑frequency balance of your mix against commercial reference tracks.

The lack of spectral extension at the high end (an inevitable by‑product of the tweeterless design) will likely dissuade anyone from seriously considering the Angry Box as their main monitoring system, but if you consider the typical purchasing process for entry‑level mix engineers, I can nevertheless see that the Angry Box’s extended‑bandwidth mode could serve as quite a useful halfway house for project‑studio engineers on a budget. Imagine, for instance, that you’ve started out mixing on decent‑quality headphones, as a lot of SOS readers do, but are considering upgrading to speakers. Now, for the price of the Angry Boxes, I’ve yet to find any pair of budget active nearfield monitors that honestly offer solid value for money in terms of increasing your ability to generate commercial‑quality mixes if you’ve already got high‑quality studio headphones. Buying the Angry Boxes under those circumstances, though, would give you genuinely professional‑grade midrange monitoring, plus a ‘bonus’ extended‑bandwidth monitoring experience that doesn’t actually lose much ground to similarly priced two‑way nearfields. Furthermore, the Angry Boxes might actually be a better long‑term investment under these circumstances than similarly priced traditional nearfields, because they’d continue to serve a vital monitoring role even if you eventually expanded your monitoring system in the future to include higher‑fidelity full‑range nearfield monitoring.

Sounds & Sweet Airs

Overall, then, I think Tantrum Audio have come up with an extremely attractive product here. If you’re only looking for a midrange reference speaker, the choice between the Angry Box and the Avantone Mixcube may be a fairly nuanced decision. Do you prefer the smaller, lighter, and (ironically) less aggressive‑sounding Angry Box, or the cheaper and more midrange‑focused Mixcube? In terms of sheer midrange referencing performance, you’d be a winner whichever way you jump. However, entry‑level mix engineers in particular may well be swayed in the Angry Box’s favour by its ‘bonus’ extended‑bandwidth mode, delivering as it does a good chunk of the mixing power of similarly priced traditional nearfield monitors into the bargain.