Ultimate Ears UE Megaboom Review


The Bottom Line

The Ultimate Ears UE Megaboom is the bigger, louder follow-up to the original UE Boom, and just like its predecessor offers a rugged design and strong audio performance for a portable Bluetooth speaker.

MSRP $299.99


  • Powerful for its size.
  • Solid audio quality across most of the range.


  • Struggles with deep sub-bass.

Ultimate Ears' UE Boom  was an excellent $200 Bluetooth speaker, and even two years after its release, it's still a solid choice if you want a rugged, portable way to share your music wirelessly. Now Ultimate Ears offers a bigger version of the Boom. The UE Megaboom is beefier, more powerful, and louder than the UE Boom, and at $299.99 it's also $100 more expensive. It's a very good portable speaker if you want to blast sound through a room without any wires, but it struggles with deep bass at top volumes. If you can spend $50 more, the Editors' Choice Bowers & Wilkins T7 ( at Amazon)  offers superior audio performance, but the Megaboom is a solid choice for the price. Just don't try to blow it out with thumpy dance music.

The Megaboom is a faithful upscaling of the UE Boom. It's a rugged rubber cylinder that measures a tall 8.9 inches and is 3.5 inches in diameter. It's available in black, electric blue, red, or purple, and is covered almost entirely on the curved side with a cloth grille. The speaker is both shockproof and IPX7 waterproof, so you can drop it and soak it with relative impunity. Placed on a flat surface, it looks identical to the smaller Boom, with a large rubber strip running the length of the speaker holding the volume controls, and the rubber top housing the Power and Bluetooth pairing buttons and indicator lights.

Its design only differs from the original UE Boom when you turn it over and look at the bottom panel. The handy D-ring is still there if you want to hang it up or clip it to your bag, but the micro USB (for charging) and 3.5mm ports are now covered by dedicated rubber doors built into the speaker body instead of by a thin rubber strip you have to thread around the D-ring like on the smaller speaker. This protects the ports more than the Boom, but it also recesses the micro USB port deep in the speaker. You should hang on to the included cable for its square head, which reaches far enough to connect; you can't count on just any cable to fit.

While the Megaboom doesn't have many controls on its own, you can make advanced adjustments with the free UE Megaboom app for iOS and Android. It lets you pair two Megabooms for a stereo setup, use a handful of equalizer presets, or manually adjust a five-band equalizer, and even turn the speaker on and off. UE Megaboom

Since the Megaboom is much larger than the Boom, it can get notably louder. However, it doesn't offer much of an improvement in low-end performance, and struggles with intense sub-bass. Our bass test track, The Knife's "Silent Shout" sounded punchy but lacked deep, rumbly low-end reach. The kick drum hits in particular were overly poppy, threatening to, but not quite distorting. For a name like Megaboom, it doesn't offer a very impressive sense of very, well, deep boom.

This weakness only comes through in songs that have extremely punishing ultra-low-end, like "Silent Shout." For slightly less sub-bass-heavy tracks, the Megaboom is more than capable of conveying fullness and warmth for deep instruments. In testing, the upright bass in Miles Davis' "So What" sounded appropriately low and rumbly, and the piano notes were clear and slightly warm, leaving the real brightness to the track's horns.

Songs that use actual instruments are better served by the Megaboom than thumpy club tracks. This comes through with ska, like Less Than Jake's "Harvey Wallbanger" and MC Lars' sci-fi-ballad-to-the-genre "This Gigantic Robot Kills" getting a good sense of texture and power across the full range of the songs. The horns and vocals in "Harvey Wallbanger" stand out against the appropriately voluminous bloopy bassline, and the deep muted bass of "This Gigantic Robot Kills" rumbles satisfyingly without overpowering MC Lars and MC Bat Commanders' vocals.

The UE Megaboom offers strong frequency response across the board, with the exception of issues with very deep bass, and it's a solid performer among portable Bluetooth speakers. However, for the same price you can get the superior-sounding but not nearly as rugged Editors' Choice Bose SoundLink III ($479.97 at Amazon) , and for a bit more you can get the (also not rugged) Bowers & Wilkins T7. If $300 is a bit too expensive, the original UE Boom and Bose SoundLink Mini ( at Amazon)  are both very good portable speakers available for two-thirds the Megaboom's price tag.  

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