Forget Sonos, Bose's all-new Lifestyle speaker adds killer new audio feature

Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker — (Image credit: Future / Mike Lowe)

Quick Summary

Bose's all-new product, the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, enhances the audio brand's offering – whether used solo or stereo paired with the purchase of two.

This new speaker includes an up-firing channel for a sound immersion that competitors like Sonos don't currently offer from their equivalent products.

Bose has a longstanding history of delivering consistently great audio products. Perhaps best known for its QuietComfort Ultra Headphones and their exceptional active noise-cancelling (ANC), the brand also has a range of speaker options under its belt.

Principal to which is the inclusion of an upfiring speaker, adding an output to further enhance immersion to your listening experience. The speaker's three key drivers – two of which are forward-facing – are able to deliver a wide but also a tall soundstage.

The Lifestyle Ultra Speaker also features a 3-inch subwoofer within, ensuring bass is well handled. And, Bose being Bose, there's a lot of proprietary audio technologies at work here too – including Bose's Clean Bass tech for low-end clarity from this small package.

There's also Bose's TrueSpatial tech, which analyses audio and enhances its output to deliver a virtualised additional height and depth. It's similar to the spatial technology used in the brand's best headphones, just used in a different and static way.

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The 'lifestyle' element of the product's name is especially clear to see from the special-edition model, available as Driftwood Sand, which utilises a section of solid white oak to the speaker's base. This costs extra over the staple Black and White Smoke alternatives.

There's even a nice iPod-esque touch-control section on top, where the play/pause and plus/minus volume buttons can be bypassed by rolling a finger around the circular controller to ramp the volume up or down instead.

The speaker market is certainly bustling with lots of options from a wide range of brands at the moment, but the likes of Sonos don't offer an upfiring channel from its Era 100 model, for example, giving Bose's latest a distinct point of difference from its feature set.

Furthermore, pairing two Lifestyle Ultra Speakers together gives an even greater immersion in true stereo pairing. The brand has utilised a new radio in the build for minimal latency, whether you're streaming from Spotify Connect, casting via AirPlay or Google Cast, or using the line-in on the rear (for, say, a turntable connection).

The multi-room function is also a big part of Bose's play with this latest speaker. Interestingly, the app will play nice with speaker series even outside of the brand's own, enabling simultaneous play using multiple brands. It's not possible to sync in pairs across brands, nor is Bose's latest backwards-compatible with older products in this way (due to the new radio hardware).

The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker will go on sale from 15 May, priced at £299 in the UK and $299 in the USA. The Driftwood Sand carries an additional £/$50 supplement, while dedicated speaker stands are costed at £/$150 apiece, should those be of interest.

Mike is T3's Tech Editor. He's been writing about consumer technology for 15 years and his beat covers phones – of which he's seen hundreds of handsets over the years – laptops, gaming, TV & audio, and more. There's little consumer tech he's not had a hand at trying, and with extensive commissioning and editing experience, he knows the industry inside out. As the former Reviews Editor at Pocket-lint for 10 years where he furthered his knowledge and expertise, whilst writing about literally thousands of products, he's also provided work for publications such as Wired, The Guardian, Metro, and more.