The reviewer has been compensated in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card and/or received the product/service at a reduced price or for free. All opinions are my own.

I’m a child of the 80’s and back then having a Boom Box was a big deal. With one you could bring your music with you all over the place, like the beach. Summers were spent listening to music at the beach, riding our bikes up to the music store to buy more cassettes or cassingles and repeating the process over and over. I still have a couple of cases of my old tapes from back in those days. They include many of my favorite musicians and also so many mix tapes. I used to make mix tapes all the time and friends would make them for me as well. I still have them but would like to convert them over to be able to listen to them on my phone. I’d also like the option of playing those old tapes again and listening to them as they are. That’s where the ION Boom Box Deluxe comes in.

With the ION Boom Box Deluxe, which you can pick up at Best Buy, you can not only play your old cassette tapes again but you can do so much more. The ION Boom Box Deluxe is a Bluetooth Speaker and can play music that you have on any of your bluetooth enabled devices like phones. It is also a full-featured classic boombox that can play your entire tape collection. You can even record to cassette tape, you know you have a blank cassette tape hanging around somewhere. It might be super fun to have the kids see what they can record on a tape. It will blow their minds! There is a built-in microphone for recording or you can record from a line in of an external source.

Is the ION Boom Box Deluxe loud? You can crank up the tunes with the two robust full-range speakers powered by 14 watts of system power and a powerful bass. Time to party!

There is definitely a retro look to the ION Boom Box Deluxe but it has many modern features. It can stream music wirelessly from any Bluetooth®-enabled device and it has USB playback capability to handle virtually any other music source. You can control the bass and the treble to have your own preferred playback. You can also take that old tape collection and convert it to digital files on a USB stick. Then maybe I can finally part with all my old cassettes and clear up much needed space.

One of the biggest issues with having a boombox as a kid was how many batteries it ate up. You used to have to put in about 6 D batteries and they would just get chewed up so fast. ION Boombox Deluxe Bluetooth Speaker has a 10hr rechargeable battery and it can also run off AC power. The rechargeable battery means that you can take it anywhere. That way you can show off that retro style of yours. If you want to get even more retro then tune in to your favorite radio station with the AM/FM radio and try making a mix tape of your very own.