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In a townhouse on New York’s Upper West Side, Bose revealed its new Lifestyle speaker collection through a multi-story demo involving quite a few stairs and equally ascending audio. From a company so well-known for actively canceling noise, this was about generating buzz.
Part of a small group of tech writers navigating the narrow stack of immaculately accessorized rooms, I was escorted to the first floor and to my first glimpse of a WiFi-connected sound system that our hosts said represented over four years of research and development.
Solo, part of a stereo pair, one endpoint in a whole-home system, or acting as the rears in a surround-sound system, the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker ($299-$349, based on Black/White Smoke or limited-edition Driftwood Sand colorway) was presented as high-immersion and low-friction. Easily set up, room-filling sound from a compactly sculpted, furnishings-friendly speaker made to blend into any real estate. High-class to humble.
And with its front-firing three-inch woofer and accompanying tweeter, but most of all its upfiring driver, the Lifestyle Ultra made the ceiling work as hard as our legs did going from landing to landing. A combination of the physical Direct/Reflecting array and proprietary TrueSpatial digital signal processing [not native Dolby Atmos support] lifted the center image and expanded the sweet spot. How high and wide that reaches compared to competitors will be revealed when we get a pair to compare.
As for the bass, it delves lower than the Ultra Speaker’s fabric-fronted capsule belies, thanks to CleanBass technology with a proprietary rear QuietPort treatment that uses resistive materials to detune disruptive resonances. This allows long ports in small enclosures without obvious turbulence.
Up a level, up the driver count to nine. The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar ($1,099, in Black/White Smoke) shares the contours and capacitive touch controls and CleanBass of the Ultra Speaker, stretched into a calmly modern 5.0.2 configuration [which does support Dolby Atmos via HDMI eARC]. Featuring what the team describes as the most radical acoustic redesign of Bose soundbars in a decade, the Ultra Soundbar has four full-range drivers under the front textured knit, two facing upwards, plus a center tweeter flanked by proprietary PhaseGuide radiators, derived from classic ribbon-tweeter thinking. “Leaky,” these waveguides use tiny radiating points that add up coherently in the direction of sonic travel, allowing sound to be placed off to the sides and present more width without additional drivers.
Taking advantage of that focused frequency is Speech Clarity, an evolution of AI Dialog features on previous soundbars. Instead of simply boosting center-channel levels, it uses AI to distinguish, isolate, and amplify dialogue above muddying effects.
A few more flights … of fancy and stairs. While the Ultra Soundbar can operate standalone, you might want things to be more immersive. Take a pair of Ultra Speakers and add them as wireless rears in the Bose app. And if you want to augment the low end, the new Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer ($899, in Black/White Smoke) is glass-topped and makes the bottom drop with its 10.5-inch woofer. Now it’s a 7.1.4 system (or you can pair just the Ultra Soundbar + Ultra Subwoofer for 5.1.2). Custom Tune, an updated version of ADAPTiQ, does room calibration tailored to your specific setup and unique space (no brownstone required) using your smartphone microphone. So long, dedicated headset.
The Ultra Speakers and Soundbar share support for AirPlay 2/Google Cast, allowing for a multi-room audio setup that includes both Ultra and non-Bose products. The company made a conscious choice to let users operate outside a walled garden, using Spotify Connect, for instance (TIDAL Connect coming later via firmware), instead of the Bose app, to control music and set up what speakers play. The app can build a home theater system progressively and offers controls, but so do the on-product touch points. There’s also Bluetooth 5.3 baked in. And the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker supports both an analog 3.5mm input (think a turntable with built-in preamp) and next-gen Alexa+, allowing for natural-language interaction. You can also physically mute the speaker for complete privacy. One thing the Lifestyle Ultra collection doesn’t support is pairing with previous Bose home-theater products.
The Bose Lifestyle Collection will ship on May 15 and is available to preorder now.
