UE Boom 3 – Review 2020

The Boom line of outdoor-friendly speakers from Ultimate Ears has offered modestly room-filling power in a compact, waterproof design for some time now. The $149.99 UE Boom 3 is the latest model, sitting between the smaller Wonderboom ($99.99) and the larger Megaboom 3 ($199.99). It’s a stylish speaker that can get loud and offers fairly strong balance, but for the price, its bass feels a bit weak. It also faces heavy competition across the board from models that offer more power, a lower price, voice assistant support, or a combination of the three.

Design

The Boom 3 shares the same cylindrical shape as its predecessors, measuring 7.3 inches tall and 2.9 inches wide. It’s available in eight different color combinations, three of which are exclusive to Best Buy and one of which is exclusive to Target. The round sides are completely covered in grille cloth save for a strip of rubber running the length of the speaker and ending in a fabric loop, and the top and bottom which are hard rubber.

Large plus and minus symbols sit on the front of the speaker, dominating the grille cloth opposite the rubber strip on the back, and serve as volume controls. The top panel features a large, circular multifunction button (what UE calls the Magic Button), a smaller power button, and an indicator LED. That’s it for physical controls.

A micro USB port for charging sits behind a rubber door on the strip on the back of the Boom 3, and a cable is included. The bottom of the speaker features a small indentation for charging without a cable, with the optional $39.99 Power Up charging base. No wired audio connection is available.

Waterproof Rating

The Boom 3 is rated IP67, which means it can be submerged in water and continue to function, and handle dust and dirt with ease. The speaker is also buoyant, so if you bring it into a pool it will float.

You can tweak the Boom 3’s sound using the Ultimate Ears Boom and Megaboom app for Android and iOS. It provides a five-band EQ with a variety of presets, and enables a few additional features. You can use the app to set the Magic Button on the top of the speaker to play your favorite playlists from Amazon Music, Deezer, or Spotify. The app also lets you connect the Boom 3 to multiple additional Boom 3, Megaboom 3, and Hyperboom speakers for simultaneous playback across all of them in party mode.

According to UE, the speaker can last up to 15 hours between charges, though that will depend on your preferred volume levels. The Boom 3 has no microphone, so it doesn’t function as a speakerphone and it doesn’t support voice assistants like the UE Blast and the JBL Link Portable.

Performance

The Boom 3 doesn’t quite make good on the promise of its name, especially when compared with the larger Megaboom 3 and the much larger Hyperboom. It can easily fill a room with sound, but it isn’t quite the party driver its bigger siblings are. 

At maximum volume, the kick drum hits in Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” sound punchy with strong low-mid presence, but they don’t reach deep into the sub bass range. Using the Bass Boost EQ preset in the app gives the hits a bit more force, but they still don’t produce much palpable resonance. They also don’t distort, which is good, though this seems to be from digital signal processing (DSP) tamping down the lower frequencies at higher volumes. Tracks with strong bass components should be listened to at medium to medium-high volume levels, since the bass simply doesn’t increase past a certain point, which can make it sound flimsy at high volumes.

Yes’ “Roundabout” sounds full and balanced on the Boom 3, if not particularly capable of extremes. The opening acoustic guitar plucks get a good amount of low-mid resonance and some higher-frequency string texture. When the electric bass kicks in, it sounds poppy enough to maintain presence in the mix even without much low-end punch. Vocals and drums float prominently over the bass, though the guitar strums fade slightly into the background. The track gets strong range and balance, but lacks much treble finesse.

The ominous backbeat in The Crystal Method’s “Born Too Slow” gets enough presence in the lows and low-mids to punch through the dense mix, but the Boom 3 doesn’t reach quite low enough into the sub bass realm to really make the track thump. The guitar riffs and harsh vocals stand out against the steady beat, again giving the track a solid balance without reaching too ambitiously into the extremes. This is another track where medium to medium-high volume levels work best, because at higher volumes the mids and highs get louder but the backbeat stays the same, throwing off the balance.

A Moisture-Friendly But Modest Speaker

The UE Boom 3 is a rugged, room-filling little speaker with a generally balanced sound. But its $150 price feels a bit high when compared with less expensive, similarly sized, and similarly waterproof speakers like the $99.99 Sony SRS-XB23 and the $119.95 JBL Flip 5. For the same price, meanwhile, the larger Sony SRS-XB33 offers more powerful bass, and for a bit more money you can get the bigger, more powerful Megaboom 3 or the voice-assistant-equipped JBL Link Portable.

Ultimate Ears UE Boom 3 Specs

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