Ultimate Ears Everboom speaker review: Great sound, rugged design

The Ultimate Ears (UE) Everboom is a $249 speaker that belongs at your next outdoor party or trip to a festival. With an exceptional sound, the Everboom is an easy recommendation for those who need a powerful, portable speaker that’s built to last.

The Everboom forms part of the fourth generation of UE speakers, and in terms of price it acts as a stepping-stone between Ultimate Ears’ Megaboom ($199) and the Epicboom ($349). Much like the other fourth-gen speakers in the lineup, the Everboom has a solid array of features, compatibility with the UE Boom app and the ‘Magic Button’ input system. The Everboom performs exceptionally well both outdoors and at home, providing great performance at the high and low ranges, with a more-than-meets-the-ear soundstage. The speaker doesn’t compromise on functionality or performance while remaining tough-as-nails with an impressive IP67 waterproof rating. And its 20 hour battery life is perfect for long days out, too.

Sadly, the lack of Wi-Fi connectivity and a few missing bells and whistles prevented me from taking full advantage of the potential of the Everboom. Additionally, we have to stomach one of two fairly garish color options, compared to the usually good selection of finishes UE is known for.

Besides these small issues, the Everboom is easy to recommend as a sub-$300 speaker. The durable design that doesn't sacrifice quality will make this speaker a favorite at both indoor and outdoor parties, no matter how chaotic they might get. The Ultimate Ears Everboom is definitely up there with the best bluetooth speakers available.

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Cheat Sheet

• What is it? On the higher end of the UE Boom range, a powerful Bluetooth speaker for outdoor use.
• Who is it for? Party-animals, festival-goers, and those in need of a powerful outdoor speaker
• What does it cost? Available in the U.S. from Ultimate Ears from $249 , or Amazon in the U.K. for £249 .
• What do we like? The bass is incredible, with a rich texture. There is also a great amount of social features, and the durable construction makes it feel like it could endure even the rowdiest of parties
• What don’t we like? I would have liked to see a few added features on top of the norm for the UE Boom series.

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Specs

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Price & availability

The Everboom is available at $249 from the Ultimate Ears website. By no means a cheap speaker, I found the sound quality and performance to be fantastic — the Everboom really punches above its price. While it might be slightly lacking in fidelity and features when compared to more expensive speakers such as the Sonos Move 2 ($449), the Everboom makes up for this by being convenient and resilient. The familiar cylinder design, at 8 x 3.3 inches and 33.9 ounces, allows for great portability too, putting the Everboom leaps and bounds over more expensive, but cumbersome speakers, like the JBL Xtreme 4 ($379).

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Design

At just over two pounds (33.9 ounces) the Everboom has good weight —  it’s not as heavy as the Ultimate Ears Hyperboom ($319), but it’s got enough heft to feel premium and well-anchored. It remains portable thanks to its elongated oval shape, and the aforementioned carabiner included which hooks onto a secure loop on the back. Although it does not feature a handle, like what can be found in boombox designs such as the JBL Boombox 3 ($499), the Everboom was easy to transport thanks to the narrow oval shape — great for carrying in a bag. And the carabiner means you can attach it to the outside of the bag if you want, too.

The Everboom is IP67 rated, which makes it one of the more durable Bluetooth speakers available. It can be fully submerged up to 3ft deep, for 30 minutes, and floats in water. While the novelty of bringing a speaker into the pool might be appealing to some, for most this means that you never have to worry about damage from rain or spillages. And besides, you’re going to severely diminish the audio quality if you’ve got this speaker floating in a pool or a bathtub. This resilience is all thanks to the Everboom’s efficient design: a speaker cover made from tightly woven dust-proof polyester, with its top end and bottom encased in sturdy rubberised plastic. UE says the speaker is drop tested to 3ft, and during my testing it easily withstood such a fall.

I was a little disappointed by the fact that only two colors were available for the Everboom. The model I tested had bright blue tones, with the other model available being fully black with yellow highlights on the volume controls. While UE is known to release further variants later into a product’s lifecycle, it would have been nice to get some sleeker or less garish colors to choose from at launch — the Wonderboom 4 ($89) comes in four colors, including a clean looking black and white variant, which I would have loved to see with the Everboom.

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Sound Quality

One of the strongest aspects of the Everboom is the fantastic quality of the bass, which was powerful without losing detail. You can really feel the power of the Everboom in dance tracks from Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ album, with each pulse of the bass in ‘360’ shaking the room, and the more distorted lower frequencies in ‘Von Dutch’ having a wonderfully detailed bite to them. More melodic pop tracks, such as ‘The aisle’ by PinkPantheress, also kept vocals spotless, without losing any of the pounding bass.

You can throw any genre at the Everboom and it will sound fantastic, thanks to the stellar high range on the Everboom. Both the soft acoustic folk of Adrienne Lenker’s ‘not a lot just forever’, and hip-hop tracks like Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’, were well-pronounced and every syllable was clearly distinguishable. The speaker handles the ‘wall of sound’ in heavier rock well, too. Tracks like Deftones’ ‘Be Quiet and Drive’ sounded great and the speaker did a solid job keeping the vocals defined and detailed.

The Everboom performs its best when playing music that takes advantage of its deep bass and vocal clarity. However, I found that it suffers slightly with the mid range. In fact, the powerful bass sometimes ended up drowning it out. For example, the lead guitar in ‘Transmission’ by Joy Division feels muddied by the otherwise great sounding low and high range. The same is true for ‘Andromeda’ by Gorillaz, where the lead synths were very underrepresented and drowned out by the bass.

Your mileage will definitely vary, and tweaking the EQ can help make up for some of the issues around the mid range. This makes the fact you can only have one custom EQ profile very disappointing. This seems like a limitation of the app rather than the hardware, but I would expect to be able to set up multiple profiles for different genres as needed.

Creating an amazing soundstage, the 360-degree output of the Everboom works wonders. Thanks to an equal distribution of sound around the speaker, the Everboom is adaptive to different indoor setups as well as being great for outdoor gatherings. Perfomance-wise, the Everboom handles audio panning very well, including even the extreme examples of the panning found in songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by The Beatles. I was impressed by the way the Everboom mimics a speaker double its size.

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Features

The rubberised top of the speaker houses the buttons for operating the speaker. There’s the standard Bluetooth pairing button, but also the option to enable “Outdoor Boost,” somewhat similar to Sony’s new ULT bass boosting function . This pushes the maximum sound output up to 91 decibels. At lower volumes, the boost still applies, and provides a notable improvement on the projection of the 360 degree sound, and drowned out background noise, at a minor cost of quality.

Meanwhile, the fantastic NFC connection feature became my go-to for quickly pairing devices. Without needing the app, tapping the top of the Everboom with an NFC-enabled Android phone allows for the device to instantly pair with the speaker, with nothing further required. This feels great in practice as it allows friends to quickly take control without any hassle. The one drawback is the fact this is limited to Android only — iPhone users will have to pair the normal way via the Bluetooth button on the speaker.

The ‘Magic Button’ on the Everboom (also seen on other UE speakers) replaces the touchpad found on older UE speakers, and has three main features. A single press acts as a play/pause, and a double press skips the current track. If you have installed the app, you can configure a long press of the button to instantly play a designated playlist— perfect for getting the music going on-demand.

However, it is odd to see no significant extra features to those available on cheaper speakers in the Ultimate Ears line-up. The UE Wonderboom 3 ($99), for example, provides the same on-board features as well as durability standards. Besides a difference in performance and quality, for a $150 price gap, it would have been nice to see something to make the Everboom stand out from the crowd. For instance, JBL models at this standard offer quality of life features, such as the ability to use the speaker as a power bank, for example.

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Mobile App

While the speaker features the above on-board settings, the fantastically sleek UE Boom app was the star of the show. Adjusting EQ profiles is very easy, with five presets to choose from along with one custom profile. While I have misgivings about the UE Signature default equalizer, it was flawless to switch between them quickly and the range was useful. I particularly liked the inclusion of the ‘Cramped Spaces’ mode, allowing for the powerful speaker to be used more comfortably for personal listening.

You can remotely power the speaker on and off from within the app. This was super convenient and worked like a charm, and I liked that I could completely disable the feature to save battery— although the battery drain was miniscule when keeping this enabled.

Thanks to the ‘Party-up’ feature, the Everboom can pair with up to 150 other UE third and fourth-generation speakers at the same time (find the full list on their website ). While you’re not likely to find this many in one place outside of an audio retailer, it is handy to easily put together a network of speakers, intuitively managed by dragging and dropping speakers from the app.

Outdoor Boost, accessible from both a button on the speaker and via the app, was great for projecting the full range of sound over background noises like traffic or weather. It adds 1 decibel onto the maximum, bringing the maximum sound to 91 decibels and puts the speaker into a pre-adjusted equalizer that UE says is tuned for outdoor environments. At lower volumes, the boost provided makes a notable improvement on the projection of the 360-degree sound.

The Everboom’s loudspeaker mode feels like a bit of an afterthought. Via the app, you can project your voice using your mobile device’s microphone, through the speaker. This feature can’t help but feel like a novel gimmick, especially due to the reliance on the generally poor quality of a phone mic. Creative features like this are nice to see — just don’t go replacing a proper microphone set-up with an Everboom any time soon.

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Connectivity

I had absolutely no issues with the Bluetooth connection between the Everboom and my phone. Support for Bluetooth 5.1 allows for a range of up to 180 ft, and I had no problems connecting to the speaker without line of sight.

It is a shame, however, that the Everboom is restricted to Bluetooth pairing. Despite how well this worked for me, competitors like the Sonos Move 2 ($449) offer connectivity over Wi-Fi, which provides a more stable and higher quality connection than Bluetooth. It also gives more versatility for a variety of setups, such as larger house-scale configurations. Ultimate Ears has also done away with supporting 3.5mm aux connections as seen on older models, and the same is true for the Everboom — the speaker instead has a single USB-C port for charging.

I also had issues whilst connecting multiple devices at once to the Everboom, which appears from their marketing material to be a feature. Connecting more than one device will disconnect the first device — I tested this across both iPhone and Android, but was unable to get this working. While not something that would stop me from recommending the Everboom, this is something to bear in mind.

Ultimate Ears Everboom review: Verdict

Look no further if you are after a seriously potent yet portable Bluetooth speaker. The Ultimate Ears Everboom impresses with its excellent sound and IP67-rated build quality, meaning this speaker will easily cope with any conditions you can throw at it, all the while offering excellent thumping bass and dazzlingly clear vocals.

Be warned, particularly if upgrading from a third generation Ultimate Ears speaker, as you might not get that bang for your buck with its lack of new features. While I loved the sound overall, you should also be prepared to tweak the EQ to ensure all of your favorite tracks sound their best. This is by no means the cheapest speaker with strong bass and durable build, either — the JBL Charge 5 ($179), at $80 cheaper, offers a really strong alternative.

That being said, if you’re after a speaker with the endurance to last your next festival, or a killer centerpiece for your pool party, the Ultimate Ears Everboom absolutely demands your attention.