- Bose launches premium soundbar, smart speaker and wireless sub
- The Ultra Lifestyle Soundbar is the new Bose flagship at $1,099 / £999 / AU$1,800
- The Lifestyle Ultra speaker has Dolby Atmos for $299 / £299 / AU$549
Bose’s new Lifestyle Collection is likely to cause some frowns at Sonos HQ: it’s a set of three premium audio devices designed for every room in your home, offering excellent flexibility, including multi-room audio, and promising a typically luxurious Bose sound experience.
The three speakers are the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar and the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer. And in addition to working with each other, they also promise to work in groups with speakers from other manufacturers.
Bose says its app delivers “one of the simplest setup experiences in home audio,” and if the collection sounds as good as it looks, Bose may well have a home audio hit on its hands.
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Bose Lifestyle Collection: key features, pricing and availability
The Bose Ultra Lifestyle Speaker is a cylindrical speaker with three drivers, two of which fire outwards and one of which fires upwards. Bose says it’s enough to create room-filling sound from a single speaker, and it features Bose’s CleanBass system and QuietPort acoustic opening to deliver a low end that’s clean and punchy.
It also features Bose’s TrueSpatial spatial sound processing, which is platform agnostic, meaning it will create spatial sound from any source. You can run it solo, in a stereo pair, in a multi-room setup or as part of a surround sound system with the Ultra Lifestyle Soundbar and Subwoofer.
The Soundbar is Bose’s new flagship and comes with a fresh new design and a completely new acoustic architecture; it’s the first major soundbar redesign that Bose has developed in more than a decade.
There are six full-range drivers – four forward-facing and two upward-pointing for height channels – plus a center tweeter and two of Bose’s PhaseGuide drivers designed to provide extra virtual width for an immersive Atmos experience.
PhaseGuide is a system that expands the soundstage by using strategically placed transducers and waveguides to make sound appear to come from places where there are no speakers.
There’s also TrueSpatial processing for anything not in Dolby Atmos, SpeechClarity to enhance dialogue, CleanBass and QuietPort for deep, controlled bass, and the newly renamed CustomTune room calibration system (formerly known as ADAPTiQ), which uses your phone as a room calibration microphone – what do you know, it’s just like Sonos!
Bose says the system delivers the lowest frequencies of any Bose soundbar to date, just from the soundbar alone, while improving highs and delivering better separation of sound elements.
But for those who want even deeper bass, the third speaker is the powerful Lifestyle Subwoofer, which again comes with CleanBass and QuietPort. It is built around a 10.5-inch driver and connects wirelessly to the soundbar.
The three speakers all have Wi-Fi connectivity and support Google Cast, Apple AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect, and they can be grouped via Apple AirPlay or Google Home. There’s also Bluetooth for streaming directly from devices like your phone and other audio sources.
The Bose app promises to walk you through the entire setup process, whether it’s a single speaker or a full surround system, and then lets you control the volume, source, equalization, surround and height levels. There is also built-in Alexa+ for voice control.
The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker has an official price of $299 / £299 / AU$549; The Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar is $1,099 / £999 / AU$1,800; and the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer costs $899 / £899 / AU$1,300. All three are available for pre-order now and will be fully released on May 15, 2026.
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