LG's new Xboom speakers take on Sonos, Sony and Bose all at once

With CES now just a matter of days away, and a deluge of techy announcements therefore on the way, LG appears to be trying to steal a march and get some of its news out a little early, when there's less going on. Yesterday, it told the world about its rival for Samsung's The Frame TVs, the Gallery TV, and now it has news from the speaker market.

It's unsurprisingly planning a big 2026 refresh of its Xboom speaker lineup, and there are a bunch of new portable models to show off. The four new speakers are the Xboom Stage 501, Blast, Mini and Rock, and all are endorsed once again by the mystical Will.i.am, whose name never gets any easier to type.

This being 2025 (or 2026, depending on when you read this), there's of course an AI angle here, in the form of what LG calls FYI.RAiDiO (sigh), which is on all of the speakers and lets you choose from AI personas and DJs to get recommendations and music discovery in a more algorithmic way.

The biggest speaker, the Xboom Stage 501, is aimed at parties where karaoke might be on the cards, and lets you automatically remove the vocal track from any connected song, which is undeniably cool if it works. That's powered by more AI in the form of machine learning, and it has 25 hours of battery life, too.

The Blast has even more battery at 35 hours, and the same sort of audio output minus those karaoke smarts, so I'd assume it might come in a little cheaper (although all of these speakers lack prices for now). It's also much more rugged with rubber bumpers for stability.

The Xboom Mini is a little square speaker that rivals the JBL Clip for being uber-portable and has 10 hours of battery life. This makes it an ideal travel speaker, or a backup for when you want something better than your phone's speakers.

Finally, the Xboom Rock is similar but again far more rugged, with a rubber casing that helps to protect it from drops and dings. It's apparently tested to a whole seven military standards, meaning it might be quite a challenge to ever break the thing.

This probably won't be the only slate of new portable speakers announced in the next couple of weeks, and it only confirms that the market is now as competitive as it's ever been. LG's up against it given the stellar options on offer from the likes of Bose, Sony, Sonos and more – but we'll see if its new Xboom speakers hold up to our standards as and when we gets our hands on them.