Ultimate Ears Everboom review

Another day, another Boom. Ultimate Ears has so many Bluetooth speakers sporting the “Boom” suffix that it can be hard to keep track; from the dinky adorability of the titchy Wonderboom 3 to the substantial exuberance of the Sonos Move 2-rivalling Epicboom, there’s a Boom for every corner of the market. 

UE’s new arrival, the Everboom, is in a slightly odd position within the family. Essentially a scaled-down version of the semi-portable Epicboom, it’s a little larger than your average paperback book but sports a substantial price tag that sees it creeping into premium speaker territory. There’s serious competition for Bluetooth speakers of this size and form, and with the UE Everboom making a bold statement with its rather substantial price tag, it will need the performance to back it up if Ultimate Ears is going to tempt users away from the dominant clutches of JBL. 

Price

Considering its relatively small size, we’re surprised by how much Ultimate Ears’ latest will set you back. The Everboom retails at £250 / $250 / AU$349 – for that price you could pick up a hefty JBL Xtreme 3 for around £189 / $229 / AU$279, while the Award-winning, comparatively-sized JBL Charge 5 currently goes for around £170 / $180 / AU$199. The petite, five-star Bang & Olufsen Beosound A1 (gen 2), meanwhile, currently sits at around £190 / $250 / AU$300.

Build

We had some enjoyable office discussions about how to describe the size and dimensions of UE’s latest portable wonder, with comparisons ranging from a flattened baguette (way off beam) through to a lantern (somewhat anachronistic), a small swimming pool float and a large paperback book. It may be easier to stick to closer-to-home analogies: the Everboom has the same flattened cylindrical form as the larger Epicboom, scaled down so that it’s roughly on par with the chunky but portable JBL Charge 5. That wasn’t so hard, was it? 

However you describe it, the Everboom is a nicely made item. The pill-shaped portable is unmistakably an Ultimate Ears speaker, proudly displaying those large plus and minus buttons on its chest which, when pressed simultaneously, will helpfully give you a spoken indication of how much battery life you have left. The top of the unit offers power, Bluetooth pairing and play/pause buttons alongside a handy Outdoor Boost function, while the underside sports a speckly rubberised base which glows in the dark – useful if you lose your Boom on a camping trip, say. 

Speaking of exciting outdoor pursuits, Ultimate Ears is clearly keen for Everboom users to get out and about with their new buddy. A small cloth tag at the top of the speaker’s reverse side isn’t enough to get a finger through, but you can attach a provided carabiner through the loop if you’re carrying the Everboom around and want to clip into onto, say, a rucksack, the outside of a tent or an overhanging tree branch.

This is an Ultimate Ears speaker, so of course a lot has been made of the Everboom’s floatability credentials. We don’t have many swimming pools to hand to perform extensive investigations, but the office sink was as good a place as any to give the UE’s aquatic credentials a watery examination. Happily, it earned its rudimentary swimming badge, and while the tops of the unit might need a bit of a wipe-down after a dunk as they can retain a little surface liquid, the Everboom continued to work perfectly well during our tests that followed.

Features

For the price being paid, we’re expecting quite a few features to justify an undeniably significant outlay. The Everboom does a solid job in this regard, and while you shouldn’t expect anything that sees the UE go beyond its Bluetooth-based remit (wi-fi and voice commands aren’t on board), the Everboom just about does enough to prevent us from feeling short-changed features-wise.

Considering it's such a nicely made, durable product, we get the sense that the Everboom is a speaker designed, at least in part, for outdoor use. Like the larger Epicboom, the speaker’s Outdoor Boost button helps sounds transmit further and more confidently in open-air spaces by emphasising the mid and high frequencies that tend to travel outdoors, while a claimed Bluetooth range of up to 55 metres should ensure you stay connected to your source player as you enjoy your time in the wider world. The UE’s battery life is solid, too, with a healthy 20-hour lifespan equalling that of the Award-winning JBL Charge 5

What the Everboom does have is a host of fun, user-friendly tools designed to make using the portable speaker as hassle-free and social-friendly as possible. A handy one-touch NFC (near field communication) feature for compatible Android smartphones allows you to pair your device with a single tap, whereas the unit’s “Magic” button lets you set up one-touch playlists from streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify and Amazon Music so that they’re right there when you want them. 

You can even use the Everboom as a megaphone, something we can envisage being useful if you’re at a party and want to announce that the pizzas have arrived (we don’t go to many parties) or that Steve’s lost one of his contact lenses. It works well, too, and while there’s a small one-second delay, the goal of turning the Everboom into your own personal PA system is realised seamlessly – tap an easy-to-locate button in the app, speak into your phone and you’ll be bossing people around in no time. 

Sound

Between chucking your Bluetooth brick into a nearby river, dangling it from sturdy branches or using it to announce to your guests that you’ve run out of cocktail sausages, you might actually end up listening to music through your new Everboom. That’s the compact unit’s primary function, after all, though from what we’ve heard during our tests, it may not be its most potent strength. 

Admittedly, there are elements of the UE’s sonic presentation which we can appreciate, even enjoy, as we delve into its musical capabilities. As a speaker designed to offer surprising levels of power and punch from what is still a relatively compact design, the Everboom does an admirable job – whack the volume up all the way and you’ll be impressed not only by how little distortion the speaker suffers from, but by how well its forceful, pushy sound carries. We placed the speaker outside before taking continuous steps away from our tunes, noting with delight just how well the sound continued to travel as we moved further and further from its source, especially with Outdoor Mode switched on. The neighbours may not have been impressed, but we certainly were.

There are benefits to this “have-at-it” approach, even when a rainy afternoon or twisted ankle prevents you from taking your UE companion out and about. The Everboom is as much a party starter as it is a hiking hero, giving tracks such as Rick James’ Give It To Me Baby and Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend enough punch and pep for them to retain a sense of bullish, in-your-face excitement. 

Thanks to further listening, though, it isn’t long before we expose the Everboom’s sonic limitations, and as we switch from rocky numbers to the refined nuances of Debussy’s Claire de Lune, the new model begins to flounder. The Everboom’s lack of detail and textural insight becomes seriously apparent as we listen, with that delicate, twinkling piano coming across a little like an electric synthesiser, such is the artificial, mechanical nature of the speaker’s reproduction. Going back to Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend after listening to it through the JBL Charge 5 reveals a world of difference between the two rivals, with the established Award-winner revealing plenty of crunch and textural vitality from the track’s surging electric guitar that we simply didn’t experience through the Everboom.

The more we listen, the more we realise that the speaker’s hard-edged, flat-track bully approach to music has repercussions for the nuances and subtleties that go into making a song engaging and genuinely musical. Tool’s Forty Six & 2 sounds hard and heavy through the Everboom, but its lack of dynamics combined with an inability to pick out the spaces between notes leaves the prog metal workout feeling less like an enrapturing epic and more akin to a Michael Bay movie: loud and in-your-face but, ultimately, oddly soulless.

Fundamentally, the Everboom is much more of a “do it my way” kind of operator than it is a have-it-your-way appeaser. Everything is coloured by that uber-assertive approach, so that when a tune such as Ramin Djawadi’s mournful instrumental Eternal Loss calls out for spaciousness and restraint, it feels oddly rushed and overbearing through UE’s latest portable speaker. More adept rivals allow the track to bloom with space and airiness, something our test model fails to communicate thanks to its somewhat one-route approach. It’s powerful and forthright, yet that often comes at the expense of the finer details. 

Verdict

The Everboom sees Ultimate Ears continue a rather frustrating streak for its portable Bluetooth speakers. The scaled-down speaker has its likeable qualities, in that it pumps out a big sound from an attractive, likeable and impressively durable package, and for mud-caked festival goers and relentless ramblers, we can see the appeal.

What concerns us is that the Everboom’s lack of genuine sonic finesse means it struggles to justify its still-considerable asking price against similarly-priced alternatives. This leads us to a rather uncomfortable question: can you justify spending that sort of money on the Everboom if you could simply pick up the sonically superior JBL Charge 5 for a smaller outlay? We’re not sure you can.

SCORES

• Sound 3
• Build 4
• Features 5

MORE:

Read our review of the JBL Charge 5

Also consider the JBL Xtreme 3

Read our Bang & Olufsen Beosound A1 (2nd gen) review

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