Review: Vava Voom 20 Bluetooth speaker is worth the price

Vava started in 2015 as an audio company, but it has now expanded to include lines of automobile (dashcams, car mounts) and computer accessories (mice, keyboards) and home living products (kitchen appliances, lamps).

The Vava Voom 20 is a beautiful Bluetooth speaker about the size of a bottle of water.

The speaker feels substantial. It is made of metal and rubberized plastic. The exterior feels tough.

The all-black design is handsome, but the control buttons on top are embossed into the rubber and they are also black, so you might need to be up close to see exactly which button you are pushing.

Vava says the speaker emphasizes bass, but the sound was more flat from an iPhone. When streaming from a MacBook Pro, which has its own equalizer, the sound was more varied.

The Voom 20 isn't light. The battery is good for up to eight hours of music playback.

The speaker also can be used to make hands-free calls from a connected smartphone.

Overall, the Voom 20 is a pretty good speaker if you have some control over the treble and bass coming from your music source. It looks as if it can stand up to some harsh conditions and play all day.

Bottom line: It's a good speaker for the money. Built to last.

Tunity is an app to stream audio from live TV broadcasts to your smartphone.

It works like this: Let's say you are in a crowded airport waiting on a flight, and the TV in the waiting area is showing a baseball game without the sound.

The app turns your smartphone into a scanner. If you had Tunity, you'd take out your phone, point the phone's camera toward the TV and press a button to let Tunity "scan" the image. The scan is uploaded to Tunity's server for show recognition. In 20 or so seconds, the audio from the broadcast is playing through your phone.

It recognizes the major networks and most major cable and sports channels.