This Waterproof Home-Assistant Speaker Might Be The Best Thing You Buy All Year

This incredible splurge-worthy portable speaker will take your home-audio experience to the next level.

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There are few things more satisfying than listening to your favorite tunes play from a crisp, crystal-clear speaker — bass booming as you chill out on the beach or just get things done around the house.

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Even better? If said speaker is super lightweight, Bluetooth-compatible, doubles as a home assistant, has a long battery life, and is capable of surviving a half-hour swim. Well, folks, it's 2018 and your dreams are now a reality! Allow me to introduce you to the Ultimate Ears Megablast speakers with Alexa.

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BuzzFeed Reviews recently tested the best portable speakers on the market — and named this one of our top picks!

Dang, you guys. Just dang.

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We started out NOT wanting to like the Ultimate Ears Megablast because of a bad experience with another UE speaker. One of our testers immediately took it out of the box and dropped it on the floor, hoping it would break and they could write it off. “Bummer,” they would have written in the notes to the team. “It broke. Next!” But it didn’t. So we begrudgingly charged it up and downloaded the app onto our phones. To our surprise, we found a much more fully featured speaker than many of the higher-priced models we were testing.

To begin with, the UE app includes an equalizer. Not just presets — though it has that too — but a custom setting that allows you to dial in the exact type of sound you like for whatever you’re rockin’. For podcasts, you can lighten up the high notes. For hip-hop, up goes the bass. And for anything else, you can tweak it to your heart’s content.

It has been said that in the background of the Adventure Time theme song, you can hear someone typing on a keyboard in the background — but using the UE Megablast as a computer speaker was the first time we could actually hear it. Crickets in the background during True Detective (Season 1, duh) sounded like they were somewhere IN the room.

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This speaker demonstrated no latency issues while using it with a desktop (aka the sound was never out of sync), waking up and connecting whenever the computer did.

Note that the version of Alexa that currently ships with the UE Megablast is kind of a “lite” version of the smart home assistant. While, for instance, voice control for Spotify and Spotify Connect are available, certain features, such as adding it to a multiroom speaker array, are not (though the company expects to rectify this soon).

The UE Megablast is IP67-rated — that is, it can be fully submerged in up to a meter of water for 30 minutes (!) and is virtually impenetrable to dust.

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This means you can take it with you anywhere, and the 16-hour battery life means it will perform all day long without dying, even at louder volumes.

The design of this amazing 2.6-pound gadget is sleek as heck, as are most of the options included in the app — and the Megablast fits in quite well among other tech toys.

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On board, there’s a power switch, Bluetooth button, and the “+” and “-” volume buttons that almost all UE products have.

The Megablast delivers on all counts, providing a versatile sound solution that you can take anywhere. At home, the sound will easily fill a room while also providing access to the Internet of Things and even Alexa; no other speaker we tried in the higher-end price range can do all that.

Oh yeah, and other people across the internet love this thing too.

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"Bass output is second to no other device with Alexa onboard. Nothing is even close. Put your hand near the side when it is rocking & feel the air from the woofers and passive radiators! Bass sounds like a quality 8-inch woofer!" —gadgetguy11

"This is by far, the clearest and probably loudest speaker I have ever owned (minus my old component system back in the day). Add to that the Alexa functionality and it makes this a no-brainer. I do a lot of cooking and my wife likes to bake so to now have a speaker that we can command with our voices and can fill the entire lower floor of our house with great music, is a wonderful thing. I probably won't be using all of the features of Alexa but I have already enjoyed checking the local traffic and weather in the mornings before heading out to work. Setup was a breeze. If you have been thinking about getting an Alexa-capable device and have been holding off, don't. Ultimate Ears has created a top-notch Bluetooth speaker that deserves to be bought just for that but then ices the cake by adding Amazon Alexa functionality." —Wraith

Get it from Amazon (available in five colors) or Best Buy (available in four colors) for $174.99+.

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And check out all of our picks for best portable Bluetooth speaker at three price points!

CORRECTION

Oct. 05, 2018, at 13:40 PM

Voice control for Spotify and Spotify Connect *are* available for this product; an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that they were not.

This post was adapted from a BuzzFeed Reviews article written by Joshua Yancey. Some reviews have been edited for length and/or clarity.

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