Most Ultimate Ears speakers have adopted a variation of the cylinder form factor. The WONDERBOOM is a little squashed, but the BOOM and MEGABOOM are straight up cylinders. Standing at 9.4-inches, the EPICBOOM is a few inches taller than the MEGABOOM and is much wider–but still with the curved edges. It almost looks like two MEGABOOMs pushed together. At 9.4 x 6.3 x 4.6-inches and weighing over 4 pounds, the EPICBOOM is a substantial portable speaker.
Ultimate Ears included an integrated, woven cloth carrying strap that snaps to the side with magnets when not in use.Despite its size and new form factor, the EPICBOOM is instantly recognizable as being part of the Ultimate Ears family. It’s covered in fabric mesh with prominent “+” and “-“ volume buttons on the front. In the case of my review unit, the fabric is black, while the buttons are lime green.
On the top are the power button, a button to engage Outdoor Boost mode and the “Magic” button that can be used to skip tracks or programmed to access streaming music service playlists .There are two departures from past BOOM series speakers. Pressing the volume up and down buttons simultaneously does not trigger an audio message with battery charge percentage; instead, it triggers LED battery indicator lights on the speaker.
Audio is what you would expect from an Ultimate Ears speaker: energetic, with a nice bass thump, plenty of volume without distortion and a more spacious sound than many portable speakers are capable of producing. Better yet, that sound is automatically optimized based on speaker placement by an integrated adaptive EQ–a feature introduced with the HYPERBOOM.For those times when you want to manually customize the sound, the BOOM mobile app has an equalizer along with four presets.