There are plenty of options available to outfit your living room, cinema room, or bedroom with a full-fledged audio system. However, if you’re looking for something simpler, there are also speakers that can do the job that subwoofers and satellite speakers typically do—or at least most of them, anyway. Soundbars are more powerful than ever, with expanded features to support smart homes and more immersive TV viewing.
The Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar can work as a standalone speaker or be used with other Bose audio systems. With its powerful speaker lineup and smart home integration, the Smart Ultra is set to become the new centerpiece of the living room — but can it fill a room with sound on its own? I put the speaker to the test to find out.
Bose Smart Ultra Speaker
The Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar is a premium speaker for casual home theaters. It supports easy music streaming, custom equalizer, and spatial audio tailored to your room using proprietary technology. Enjoy an advanced movie and TV experience with an enhanced chipset and 5.1.2 Dolby Surround, and seamlessly add to your smart home with this speaker’s compatibility with Alexa and Google Assistant.
- Smart Assistant Support
- Custom sound field setting via height channels
- Powerful sound that fills even large rooms.
- Expensive for just the soundbar.
- Remote response is often delayed.
- Needs a subwoofer to get very powerful sound.
Price and availability
Get it from major electronics retailers.
The Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar is priced at $899. It’s available at major online retailers, including Amazon, B&H Photo and Video, and Best Buy. At the time of this writing, the soundbar is discounted by $100 at select retailers. Bose’s website also has the soundbar in stock and promises to match the price if you find it cheaper elsewhere.
to set
- Contact
- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, Optical, HDMI
- Integrations
- Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant
- Speakers arrangement
- 5.1.2
- Dimensions
- 2.29″H x 41.14″W x 4.21″D (
- colors
- white or black
Design and Hardware
High quality design adds height to your sound
The Smart Ultra is a fairly tall and slim speaker, measuring 41.14 inches (about three and a half feet) long, 2.21 inches high, and 4.21 inches deep. The sides and front are covered in a mesh-like metal cover, the back is where all the ports are located, and the top is a glossy black acrylic panel. A single power/response light can be found on the front-left side, and nearby are function buttons for controlling the smart assistant and the microphone.
This soundbar uses a nine-speaker array with Dolby Atmos 5.1.2 technology, including two height-firing speakers. Connectivity options include optical audio, HDMI, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi. The soundbar also has optional Ethernet and USB-C ports for use.
The device comes with an eight-button remote control, capable of handling simple controls such as power, volume, mute, play or pause, and source selection. The device also comes with an HDMI eARC cable, an optical cable, an AdaptIQ headset, a quick start guide, and a remote control.
Features
Smart controls and equalizer customization
One of the standout features of the Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar is AdaptIQ. This feature allows the soundbar to adjust its output to the room’s layout and acoustics, creating a personalized sound field and unique spatial imaging based on the room’s layout and where the user is most often seated. Other high-end soundbars do this using a built-in microphone or a mobile app, but the Smart Ultra does it using a wired black headband that plugs into a dedicated port on the soundbar.
During the AdaptIQ process, the user puts on the headband and selects five different seating locations around the room. At each location, the Smart Ultra goes through a sequence to read each location’s position and distance and optimize spatial audio output accordingly.
The Bose Music app, which comes with Bose, is clean and easy to use. Through the app, you can control the volume, change custom EQ settings, select the speaker input source, or link the soundbar to other Bose devices to enable multi-room audio. This comes in handy when you’re cleaning the house or hosting a party, for example, and want to play the same music throughout the house, but want the music in one room to stay at a conversational level. One of my favorite uses for speakers around the house is to play low-quality music throughout the day; multi-room audio allows me to play music at a lower volume from the small desktop speaker in my office and a lower volume through the soundbar in my rarely occupied living room.
The Bose Music app offers optional integration with Apple Music or Spotify… but the speaker is also AirPlay/Chromecast compatible, so the integration seems a bit overkill. With its built-in Alexa compatibility, the Smart Ultra is also an extension of Amazon’s smart home ecosystem. The soundbar doesn’t come with Google Assistant integration. However, you can still play music via Chromecast by asking Google Assistant on a separate device like a smart speaker or your phone.
Performance and sound quality
This loud bar will fill the room with sound.
If the Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar is anything to go by, it’s loud. One of the rooms I tested it in was a very large living room, open to the adjacent dining room and kitchen, with vaulted ceilings. For casual TV watching, I didn’t need to crank the bar’s volume much above 30% of its capacity; for playing tunes while cleaning, even around 60% of its capacity was adequate—and that’s speaking as someone who has lost a significant amount of hearing at concerts.
AdaptIQ made a big difference in my larger living room. Bose seemed to be able to take advantage of the room’s natural acoustic qualities and project the soundstage farther into the space, especially with the two upward-firing speakers. I also tested it in a smaller, more enclosed media room, and in that case, AdaptIQ helped the soundbar deliver movie sounds (like side voices, footsteps, and noises that tend to occur in a peripheral direction) in a more ambient, cinematic way.
The Smart Ultra Soundbar’s midrange is punchy and solid, and the highs are crisp and detailed even at higher volumes. The bass is also good on a soundbar, especially if you’re used to using just your TV’s internal speakers, and the bass effect is definitely more noticeable while watching TV/movies. But if you really want to get rid of some plaster dust while playing music, you’ll need an additional subwoofer. Bose offers a premium home theater system, which adds the Bose Bass Module 700 to the deal. That nearly doubles the price, but the added bass boost will take the soundbar’s performance to the next level that some audiophiles crave — and your neighbors fear.
I switched from a much older TCL soundbar to the Smart Ultra, and the clarity of dialogue while watching TV or movies with the newer soundbar was impressive. That’s thanks to Bose’s AI Dialogue Mode, which detects when dialogue is occurring and uses automatic pitch adjustments to sharpen spoken words. I went into this test with a lot of skepticism about AI Dialogue Mode, but my doubts were quickly dispelled. The feature can be turned off, but it’s so effective that I don’t see any benefit in doing so. I found the improvements in sound quality to be especially noticeable when watching older movies and shows (like those shot in the 20th century).
a race
Everyone wants to sell the sound bar.
When it comes to shopping for the best living room soundbar, you have options. If you want to go all out, Bose offers the Smart Ultra speaker in two packages, one that adds a subwoofer and one that adds a subwoofer plus two speakers. There’s also the JBL Bar 1000 to go all out, a set of one speaker, one subwoofer, and two subwoofers, and we were really impressed with its powerful 7.1.4 sound.
Related to
JBL Bar 1000 Review: Surround Sound All Around Us
With Atmos surround sound and plenty of power, the Bar 1000 gives you an immersive home theater experience in soundbar form.
Bose offers a number of more affordable options if you’re hesitant to spend nearly $1,000 on a soundbar alone. The Bose Smart Soundbar 600 is still feature-rich with smart home integration. Need something super-compact for a small entertainment console? Check out the Polk MagniFi Mixi AX , a small soundbar that punches well above its weight in audio performance.
Related to
Polk MagniFi Mini AX Speaker Review: Big Power in a Small Size
Polk’s built-in speaker competes with full-size speakers, but not without some limitations.
There’s a wide range of very affordable soundbars out there, with options from Polk, Yamaha, TCL, and more, all priced at $400 or less. If you want something similar to the Bose Smart Ultra but from a different brand, the Samsung HW-Q800C is designed to work with Samsung TVs and uses the brand’s custom spatial audio solution.
Should you buy the Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar?
The Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar is an excellent addition to the living room for people who don’t want to spend a lot of money on a multi-speaker surround sound system but still want a powerful speaker to elevate their home theater or listen to casual surround music.
I would recommend this soundbar to anyone, but especially to people with large/open living rooms, people with Alexa-powered smart ecosystems, or anyone who doesn’t have enough room for a subwoofer. The lag in response to pressing the button on the Bose remote was annoying, but it can easily be overcome with the app or a third-party remote. There may not be a perfect all-in-one soundbar, but the powerful Smart Ultra comes pretty close.
Bose Smart Ultra Speaker
The Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar is a premium speaker for casual home theaters. It supports easy music streaming, custom equalizer, and spatial audio tailored to your room using proprietary technology. Enjoy an enhanced movie and TV experience with an enhanced chipset and 5.1.2 Dolby Surround, and seamlessly add to your smart home with this speaker’s compatibility with Alexa and Google Assistant.
