23 hours ago
3
🔈 Bose launches a new Lifestyle collection of flagship speakers, soundbars, and subwoofers
🛜 Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker is the company’s first smart wireless speaker
🎵 Lifestyle Ultra Speaker delivers room-filling sound with height audio
🎥 Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar drives wider 5.0.2 channel surround sound
💬 Bose Speech Clarity taps into an AI algorithm to boost dialogue
💰 $299 Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, $1,099 Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, and $899 Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer will all be available on May 15
Bose has launched a new Lifestyle collection featuring a flagship speaker, soundbar, and subwoofer.
Starting with the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, it’s the company’s first wireless smart speaker designed to compete with the Sonos Era 100, Apple HomePod 2, and Denon Home 200. The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker features three drivers, including a forward-firing tweeter and woofer with an up-firing twiddler, which is a combination tweeter and middle-range driver.
I got to hear the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker play a litany of songs at the NYC hands-on event, and I can already tell you it has the strongest bass I’ve heard from any wireless smart speaker. That was surprising, given that Bose’s home speaker (4.8 x 7.3 x 6.6 inches) is ⅓ smaller than the Denon Home 200 (5.5 x 8.5 x 5.5 inches).
The real secret to the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker is actually a QuietPort, which, in extremely simple terms, is a shaped tube with a large opening at the back of the speaker. This allows the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker to deliver more bass without the turbulence that can cause low-frequency distortion.
On its own, the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker can fill a room with sound by reflecting audio off your walls, but if you want true stereo sound, two Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speakers can be arranged in a stereo pair from the Bose smartphone app.
Bose also explained that its app is strictly for creating rooms, and there’s no built-in music player like the Sonos or HEOS app. Lastly, Bose has teamed up with Alexa+ to make it the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker’s primary and only AI assistant.
The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker will be available starting May 15 for $299.
The Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar is Bose’s new flagship soundbar, replacing the Smart Ultra Soundbar. It produces 5.0.2 channel sound with six full-range drivers, including two up-firing, four front-facing, a center tweeter, and two PhaseGuide drivers.
The PhaseGuide drivers are the most interesting, as they use Bose technology from the 80s to achieve wider stereo separation. Essentially, this piece wraps a long cone-shaped object around a small tweeter that guides the sound further to the sides using a slit with bristles.
The Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar also comes with a new iteration of Speech Clarity dialogue boosting. This new technology builds on Bose’s previous AI Dialogue, using a new AI algorithm that only boosts dialogue after determining which parts of the center channel are or aren’t speech.
The actual strength of Speech Clarity, set to max (there are also low and high levels that users can set), only boosted the dialogue by a decibel or so. I’ll have to put this through more testing as we review the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, but so far it seems much weaker than AI Speech Enhancement on the Sonos Arc Ultra or Voice Zoom 3 on a Sony Bravia Theater Bar 9.
Lastly, if you want some real bass, Bose has introduced a new Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer packing a 10.5-inch woofer. Like the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, this subwoofer taps into Bose’s QuietPort technology to deliver distortion-free bass.
The $1,099 Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar and $899 Bose Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer will both also be available starting May 15.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
.jpeg)
