Quick review
The good
The not-so-good
You’ll get groovy and searingly hot lava vibes from the Laser Retro Lava Lamp and Bluetooth Speaker, but the audio quality leaves a little to be desired.
Laser’s whole pitch to market has always been about delivering budget priced products that essentially do what they say on the box.
That’s absolutely true for the Laser Retro Lava Lamp with Bluetooth Speaker, because it is… well… it’s a lava lamp that has a Bluetooth speaker incorporated in its base. That’s it.
It’s a simple enough pitch, and its value proposition ultimately rests on whether you think that combination has some appeal for you beyond retro kitsch.
Design and features
Lava lamps themselves aren’t a new technology, and they always give me a distinct 70s kind of vibe, despite dating from 1963.
What’s interesting in a technological sense about the Laser Retro Lava Lamp speaker is that it is running on technology that dates back 63 years now with no fundamental changes at all.
The unit itself is remarkably simple, with a sealed liquid and wax tube that sits on top of a heating element, and a power cable snaking out the back to keep it charged up. This is also a speaker, so Laser has included a 3.5mm input jack to the right and a switch for choosing between line input and Bluetooth at the left.
The front of the base houses simple cheap rubber buttons for playback and volume control of audio through the speaker sitting just above them.
Finally, there’s a power switch at the side, without which the lava lamp Bluetooth speaker would do absolutely diddly squat.
You do get instructions – which are mostly a warning guide around the heat that a lava lamp can give out (more on that later) – but most people really won’t need them at all. It’s all pretty self explanatory.
In-use
If you’re not familiar with their operation, any lava lamp works on the basic principle that if you heat up wax it melts. We know, you’re surprised.
If that wax is suspended in liquid, the differences in the wax’s density as it heats and the surface tension of the water cause the wax to rise to a point, after which it cools enough to solidify and drop back down through the liquid to the heating element below.
Do that for long enough, and you get globules of wax with a somewhat lava-style appearance, and if the heating element is also a light bulb… you get a lamp.
This is exactly what the Laser Retro Lava Lamp does, and no more at all.
It warns you that the lamp gets hot, and it does. However, it does take some time to heat up and start forming lava bubbles, although some of the strings of wax that form while it does do still have their own slightly trippy charms.
Performance
The underlying lava lamp technology in Laser’s Retro Lava Lamp with Bluetooth Speaker is nothing new, and that does mean there’s really only one thing you need in terms of its lava flow: patience.
On first switching it on, you’ll get a light and… not a whole lot else. It takes time, covering around 20 to 25 minutes before the wax base gets warm enough to start rising, and then maybe around 30 to 45 minutes again before you get a real lava “flow”.
You’ll be waiting for the lava vibe to be a thing, that’s for sure.
In the meantime, you get shapes that look like they belong in the test tubes of a mad scientist, something that wasn’t helped in the case of the review unit I was sent, because it lights up bright green. Insert maniacal laugh here.
Lava lamps work off heating up the wax, which did make me wonder just how hot it would get… and that’s when I had the brainwave that I could finally make use of the thermometer function in Google’s Pixel 10 Pro XL, because it’s meant to be able to measure surface temperatures.
This is something that Pickr Editor Leigh and I have debated for some time now, because it long felt like a feature on that phone that had no practical usage.
Is it practically useful to use it to measure the exterior temperature of a lava lamp? Probably not, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
At last, the Pixel 10 Pro XL could have its moment in the sun… or to be more precise, its moment near a glass tube filled with molten wax that certainly felt dangerously warm.
Here’s what it measured: hot.
As expected, the Laser lava lamp was also one of the warmest Bluetooth speakers you could find. While speakers normally get warm, this pushes things to a degree most speakers would struggle to hit.
Is this finally a reason for Pixel phones to have thermometers in them?
Maybe there are better reasons after all, but the point here is that the liquid inside is likely even hotter than that, and it is quite vital that you place Laser’s lava lamp speaker somewhere solid and safe, outside the reach of small children and away from pets who might knock it over.
Lava lamp fires, or even scalds from hot wax, are nothing to trifle with.
Perhaps the tiny benefit here is if, like me, you’re using the Laser Retro Lava Lamp with Bluetooth Speaker in a smaller room, because over time that ambient heat will raise the room temperature, at least a little.
It’s a grossly inefficient way to do so, and you might want to prefer simply putting on something warmer. However, it’s a tiny plus against the rather more obvious risk of scalds and burns and molten wax on your furniture if you were to accidentally break it.
Of course, what Laser’s selling here isn’t just a lava lamp; it’s a lava lamp Bluetooth speaker.
Pairing is very simple, though there’s no support for multi-point pairing, and you do have to choose between Bluetooth or 3.5mm connectivity via the switch at the back at the time.
You might be thinking that it would be unusual to listen to audio that’s broadcast through a lava lamp, what with the varying resonance of different sized globules of molten wax. I know I did.
That’s a question that Laser’s lava lamp speaker hybrid doesn’t answer in any way at all, because its Bluetooth speaker sits at the bottom of the lava lamp underneath the heat source.
The positioning means your audio just isn’t going to have the impact you might want. Even at full volume, it’s not enough to get the wax even mildly vibrating, though this would be a bad idea in safety terms, really.
Laser’s audio output is rather understandably mono, and quite basic, at that. If you’re after that retro AM radio sound for your next hippie-themed party, it would fit in beautifully, but for most musical genres it is predictably underwhelming.
To give this its full workout, and while hoping that Pickr editor Leigh won’t have me summarily executed for not using the official Pickr sound test exclusively, I also assembled a thematically suitable playlist of the following songs that felt like they should be “right” for the Laser Retro Lava Lamp with Bluetooth Speaker.
- We Didn’t Start The Fire – Billy Joel
- I’m On Fire – Bruce Springsteen
- Girl On Fire – Alicia Keys
- Eternal Flame – The Bangles
- Light My Fire – The Doors
- Fever – Peggy Lee
- Set Fire To The Rain – Adele
- Steve’s Lava Chicken – Jack Black
- Fire – The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown
- Burning Down The House – Talking Heads
Of those, the songs that presented best were Fire and Light My Fire, and that’s largely because their presentation works slightly better with a treble-heavy speaker anyway. Everything else was ordinary at best save for Steve’s Lava Chicken, which is a song so irredeemably awful that speaker quality makes no difference to it in any way at all.
(Editor’s note: stunned Alex didn’t use Jimi Hendrix’s Fire or the Nigel Kennedy equivalent, or even Modern English’s I Melt With You.)
Value
The Laser Retro Lava Lamp with Bluetooth speaker retails for $69.95, which is a little higher than you’d just pay for a straight up Lava Lamp all by itself; some simple research finds similar audio-free units available for between $30 and $50 in Australia.
That puts the audio component at around $20 or so of the total cost.
While nobody with ears is going to sing the praises of its speaker, and audiophiles are likely to recoil in horror, $20 isn’t a lot to pay for a serviceable Bluetooth speaker, as long as your audio needs are very basic indeed.
What needs work?
The speaker on Laser’s retro lava lamp is ordinary at best, but then anyone expecting high-level audio out of what is absolutely sold as a novelty gadget is only fooling themselves.
Of course it could be better, but that would undoubtedly involve a more costly unit.
My bigger gripe here is with the lava lamp itself, and the fact that it features a single colour bulb.
You absolutely do need a heating element to melt the wax, but multi-colour LED lights are ludicrously cheap things to buy even for consumers, and they must be a scale cheaper again at the manufacturing end.
Adding the ability for variable or even switching light patterns would give the Laser retro lava lamp speaker even more scope for entertaining patterns. As it is, the green model I’ve got would make a fine background prop for any mad scientist labs in B-grade horror movies, but that’s about it.
What we love
I am a bit of a sucker for a lava lamp once it’s heated up, and I will admit that even beyond the point where I’d assessed the Laser Retro Lava Lamp’s speaker for its audio and basic wax-melting capabilities, I did keep it going a little longer just for its slightly hypnotic effect.
That does suggest to me that in my own personal case, I’d be better off just buying a lava lamp. I do tend to like a few retro games, so maybe I’m just more of a retro kind of guy.
Final thoughts (TLDR)
The Laser Retro Lava Lamp with Bluetooth Speaker is very much a gimmick product, and like most gimmicks, its value directly relates to how often you’re likely to use it.
If you were setting up an artisanal rug and “coffee” storefront in Mullumbimby, it would fit in beautifully and allow you to play all the Etruscan Nose Flute music you wanted to for your customers.
Equally, if you were hosting a lot of 70s-themed parties – whether for nostalgic reasons of your youth or for a retro-throwback vibe – then it might also get a lot of use.
Like any lava lamp, you do need to be careful, however; one breakage could lead to some pretty serious hot times in your home… and not the party kind, unless a visit from the fire brigade and maybe an ambulance is your kind of shindig.
