I heard Sony's massive new Ult speakers – and they pretty much melted my face
Yeah, fair enough, that's really, really bassy
After Sony said it had new Ult speakers for me to check out at a hands-on event in late August, it was a bit of a surprise to walk into their event space and see speakers about ten times bigger than I was expecting.
I was faced with the new Ult Tower lineup – the Tower 5, Tower 7 and Tower Max, and from where I was seated, even the smallest was a little hard to imagine making sense in my admittedly compact living room.
These are party speakers that make absolutely no apology for their size or scale, not least because they're aimed squarely at those who want such power. Listening to each one in turn, it was pretty easy to see the appeal, too.
The "smallest", the Tower 5, was still hefty enough to need a sensible approach when you pick it up to move it, and had impressively full and rounded sound in its default "flat" mode, which still has more bass than many other speakers would tune for.
Swapping up to the Tower 5, which expands the size of its main driver and adds some more tweeters for precision, you indeed get a pretty significant boost in overall volume and depth. That middle size looks relatively modest in the lineup photo below, which is pretty hilarious – it would be the biggest speaker anyone you know owns, and only looks small because the Ult Tower Max is so absurdly massive.
The Tower Max was my favourite demo of the three, not least because I got to choose a track to listen to. Justice's Waters of Nazareth is a go-to for bass testing, and its crackly yet precise beats were fairly monstrous, in a good way. This sort of track can help sift out speakers that dial up the bass while losing any detail, and the Tower Max passed that test with flying colours.
That said, its chunky price and enormous size mean that it's really only going to make sense for professional use. That might mean DJs who bring their own kit to venues, touring companies, or party planners, but it does also ensure that any event with sound running through Tower Max speakers will be able to get ridiculously loud.
In a soundproof basement, each speaker tended to be running at around 60% of its maximum volume, and that was generally more than enough to be antisocial in the wrong setting. My downstairs neighbours wouldn't thank me for testing any of them, frankly.
I was also thoroughly impressed by the new design of the three speakers, unified with their metal front grilles and LED fringes. Party speakers can often be a little too poppy and unserious for my tastes, whereas these are among the more mature and industrial I can remember seeing.
That said, I'm always fascinated by the concept of party speakers in the first place, from a marketing and sales perspective – how many units will these Ult speakers sell? It's a question I probably won't get an answer to, but I'd love the insight. Speaker-makers clearly know something I don't, though, because they keep on making new ones.
From what I've seen, the Ult Towers will be impressive new competitors in the market when they arrive later this month.
