GoKawiilis a senior reviewer covering TVs and audio. He has over 20 years experience in AV, and has previously been on staff at Digital Trends and Reviewed.
Last Thursday, in a staged home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I sat on a couch that was a bit too low and a tad too deep in front of a small, beige-colored smart speaker sitting on the middle of a trio of arched midcentury storage cabinets. On either side of the smart speaker sat two tall curved white screens.
The speaker was the new $299 Lifestyle Ultra, Bose’s answer to the Sonos Era 100. Alongside a $1,099 Ultra soundbar and $899 subwoofer, it’s one of three new home audio products the company announced today, all of which seem to be gunning directly for Sonos — hopefully minus that company’s recent missteps. I heard all three at Bose’s New York event, and the speaker in particular impressed me.
The $299 Ultra Speaker is the most interesting and most distinctive-looking of the bunch. It has a front-firing woofer and tweeter, an up-firing driver — unlike the Era 100 — and a bass port on the back. (For music, Bose uses its own processing for the upward-firing sound, rather than Dolby Atmos.) On the top of the speaker, behind the up-firing driver, are capacitive controls for power, Bluetooth pairing, microphone mute, volume control, and a play/pause button. The volume and play/pause are in a circular depression, which you can trace with your finger clockwise or counterclockwise to also control the volume. The Ultra Speaker and soundbar support Alexa Plus.
The Lifestyle series uses capacitive controls on the top of the speakers. The Ultra comes in beige, black, and white.
The speaker sounds impressively big with great vocal clarity, and without the harsh highs present on speakers like the SoundLink Plus. In fact, when listening to the first sample — “Man I Need” by Olivia Dean — I thought there must be additional speakers playing from behind the curved white screens.
I was partly right: The screens were hiding two more Lifestyle Ultra speakers, but they weren’t playing during that track. Instead, they were there for a later demo of a stereo pair. Playing Leon Bridges’ “Peaceful Place” and Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen,” they demonstrated good stereo sound separation.
I did find that the Ultra speaker can sound overly punchy when it comes to things like snare hits (I noticed this most during Chris Stapleton’s “Bad As I Used To Be”), at least at the volumes we listened to. This might be down to the lack of room correction, a surprising omission from the Ultra Speaker at launch. Especially when being used in a stereo pair, I expected there would be some way to tune the speakers to the room and compensate for any placement issues. I was told that Bose is looking into the possibility of adding room correction at a later date for both single-speaker and stereo setups.
Instead of forcing you to stay within a Bose ecosystem, the Ultra Speaker can be grouped with non-Bose speakers over Google Cast and AirPlay. Photo: John Higgins / The Verge
Instead of putting all streaming app playback control in the Bose app like Sonos does with its app, Bose instead relies upon the grouping and playback functionality within apps people are already using regularly, such as Apple Music and Spotify. The Ultra speaker can stream music over Wi-Fi through Apple AirPlay, Google Cast, and Spotify Connect, and it can be added to AirPlay and Google Cast speaker groups, including those with non-Bose speakers. When Wi-Fi is unavailable, you can stream to the Ultra via Bluetooth. The speaker is Auracast capable, but will not be Auracast enabled when it’s launched on May 15. Raza Haider, Bose president of premium consumer audio, told me Auracast will be turned on once that ecosystem is more mature.
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