For the last few years, our favorite Bluetooth speaker here at WIRED—really, one of our top tech products overall—has been the UE Boom. The compact $200 speaker sounds amazing and goes more than 15 hours on a charge. It stands vertically, spreading stereo sound over a w-i-d-e arc, and has a footprint about the size as your morning beer. After the product became a hit at launch, UE (owned by Logitech) began iterating on the design, offering a larger version called the Megaboom, and two smaller designs with similar DNA, the Mini Boom and the UE Roll.
Now, Ultimate Ears has gone back to the well, producing an updated version of the Boom. It's called, appropriately, the UE Boom 2. The sound quality is just as good as the original, and the new Boom is waterproof, more rugged, and offers more wireless range. It even does a new trick: Pick it up and whack the top, and it skips to the next song.
The price is the same: $200. And for that money, I can't recommend it highly enough. The new UE Boom 2 speakers ship before the end of September in the U.S., and everywhere else soon after.
UE sent me a loaner, and I've spent the past few weeks using it as my primary speaker. The first Boom was fairly rugged. I never worried about taking it to the park or the pool, but I'd get a little nervous if rain or cocktails were expected. But no more. The Boom 2 meets the IPX 7 standard, meaning you can dunk it in water a few feet deep without a problem. The charging and auxiliary ports are sealed with rubber gaskets and little flap-doors; the volume, power, and Bluetooth pairing controls are chunky buttons with no seams. The speaker grille is different, too: Hold the Boom and Boom 2 side-by-side and you'll see a tighter weave on the material enclosing the Boom 2. The entire gadget is sealed against water and sand. I put mine on the floor of the shower a few times, and even threw it into the Pacific Ocean. Then I kicked it around in the sand. It still plays fine.
There's an innovative trick to this speaker: UE added an accelerometer, so you can pause or skip songs by tapping the Boom 2. You have to pick up the speaker (to prevent accidental taps?), but once the Boom 2 senses you're holding it, smack the top. One whack pauses or unpauses. A quick one-two skips to the next song. Neat, especially if your hands are wet or your phone is across the room.
To my ears, the Boom 2 offers the same sound as the original at normal volumes. It's still the best I've heard from a speaker this size. Furthermore, UE claims the new Boom is 25 percent louder. That's a difficult claim to verify without the proper test gear—I'm stuck with my battered old ears—but the speaker does sound a little bit louder. Maybe not 25 percent, but yes, louder. I can also hear some digital signal processing being applied to keep the music from distorting as you crank the volume. This is common among small speakers (like Jawbone's Jambox, Soundfreaq's Sound Kick 2, and B&W's T7), and here it's applied subtly enough that most people won't notice. The compression and low roll-off of the DSP becomes evident only when you turn it up loud. The Boom 2 sounds perfectly natural at moderate levels.
The wireless range is noticeably improved. The first UE Boom was a champ at sustaining a signal even with my phone in the other room or in my pocket, so I already was impressed. The Boom 2 kept a signal from across the house, three rooms and 50 feet away. I tested the same distance with the original Boom and the sound stuttered. The battery lasts so long that it's difficult to measure because I don't have all day to sit around listening to music. It's rated at 15 hours, and in my testing, it lasts longer than that between charges.
The UE Boom 2 works with any Bluetooth device, from iPods to Tizen phones. If you have an iOS or Android device, you can download an app that gives the speaker extra capability. You can adjust the sound of course, and you can pair two UE Boom 2, Roll, or Megaboom speakers (or any combination of them) to create two identical speaker nodes or a left-right stereo pair. Firmware updates come through the app as well, so it's worth downloading to take advantage of the updates.
If you have a phone and a streaming subscription (or 52GB of lossless Acid Mothers Temple, whatever, you get the point), you should have a Bluetooth speaker. There are zillions of these things out there, all of them varying in sound quality, construction, and battery performance. I will make things very easy for you: Just buy the UE Boom 2. Of all the products in the category, this is without question the best.
