Review on 🔊 Hyperboom Portable & Home Wireless Bluetooth Speaker by Ultimate Ears - Powerful Loud Speaker, Enhanced Bass, Water Resistant IPX4, Extended 150 Ft Range – Black by Justin Reedy

For reference, I've been a picky audio enthusiast for 30 years and have several systems with large components (large high power speakers and subwoofers, AV processors, separate amplifiers, etc.) and use lossless content for music (FLAC rips from personal CD collection and Tidal FLAC streaming). Because of this, my bar for sound quality is pretty high, but sometimes I want to take my music with me on the go (travel, camping, beach, etc.). The challenge was to find a portable speaker that offered a reasonably satisfying music experience. I got a Bose Revolve+ from my employer and I also have an LG PK7. Both are fine for small portable speakers, but their small size limits bass (it's just physics). So I recently decided to try out some of the larger portable speakers. First I tried the JBL Boombox 2. I returned them. In my opinion, the bass was overdone and muffled, drowning out the mids and highs. Also, the sound was very directional, meaning my ears had to be pointed directly at the speaker (vertically and horizontally) to get some mid and high-frequency presence. Enter the Hyperboom... IMHO the Hyperboom sounds pretty darn balanced, with good tone. Basses as well as open and detailed mids and highs. It's more like a pair of decent bookshelf speakers pushed together. The driver placement also ensures good dispersion, contributing to an open and detailed sound. We have a Sonos Play5 Gen 1 in our kitchen and I think the Hyperboom sounds better. I'm very impressed and believe it will be a goalkeeper. I've tested it in a few places, inside and out, and it sounds good pretty much everywhere (maybe the adaptive EQ will help), but I'll say there's a bit of an emphasis on bass in the overall sound signature, especially when the speaker is on placed on the floor or near walls. So the sound isn't perfectly balanced to my ears, but it's not annoyingly unbalanced either, as I found the JBL Boombox 2 to have with its exaggerated bass. Heck, I expect a lot of people to prefer JBL for its bass, so YMMV. In addition, the Hyperboom sounds balanced when the volume is turned almost to maximum. The loudest I've ever had was a click or two below maximum, and at that level it's loud enough to satisfy me. Of course, this is a mid-range portable speaker, so it doesn't have the power and dynamics of a 'real' full-blown system - that's just not possible. Warning… UEs might be successful if they enable aptX and AAC Bluetooth codecs, not just SBC. Hyperboom has enough resolution to get higher quality source streams. However, enabling the optical input provides additional options. For example, one could connect a battery-powered Bluetooth receiver with aptX/AAC and an optical output (like I did with the Monoprice device in the attached image), or even connect Chromecast Audio via optical, which isn't portable but eliminates Bluetooth -Overall compression. If UE does a $400 Hyperboom with aptX/AAC Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, they're getting a big helmet, IMO.