Performance

Judging the performance of a smart speaker is a bit tricky. First and foremost, you have the playback performance which is governed by the acoustic design combined with the DSP design.

Since it is a smart speaker as well, you have the performance of the microphone or microphone array. There are lots of different configurations out there, straight from a basic one-microphone setup to multi-microphone solutions with beam forming. Beam forming allows the critical distance for interactions with the speaker to be increased many times over just using one omni-directional microphone. Some speakers offer echo cancellation, which enables the speaker to pickup your voice even while it is playing. This is important as you want to be able to trigger the speaker's hot word even when listening. This is essentially the main parameter to enable some form of barge-in performance with speak that is equal or lower to that of the playback signal.



The BLAST devices from UE have a microphone array with beam forming. On top of that, they have echo cancellation, which should bode well for one's ability to control it even while it is playing music. We put the BLAST into a few different room locations and tested it against the original Amazon Echo, which has a 6+1 circular microphone array with beam forming. Hot word pickup performance seems pretty close between the two devices. You still get the occasional malfunction, but that is the same with all smart speakers. When you dial up the playback volume while attempting to trigger the hot word, performance becomes more sporadic. The BLAST has more volume than the Echo and sounds way better, its echo cancellation performance seems to be on par with the Echo, but it is still hard to trigger it from across the room with the volume up high. My pretty average male voice with a slight Danish accent did not seem to be very difficult for either Alexa speaker.

The UE BLAST uses the same well known driver and passive configuration than the UE BOOM, but with slightly smaller drivers, and they, unsurprisingly, sound a lot alike. The UE BLAST does not yet feature a user-customizable equalizer, but in its stock configuration, the BOOM and BLAST are quite hard to tell apart. In general, the BLAST has a little more bass in the normal setting, but once you apply the equalizer on the BOOM, you can easily surpass the BLAST's bass level on the BOOM (although limiters will probably kick in quicker).

Nowhere near the AUDIOCASE in terms of volume, both the BOOM and BLAST can still be quite loud. Since the acoustic and perhaps DSP platform is shared between the BOOM and BLAST, you get the same bass-related artifacts with playback at near its maximum output level. At normal and elevated listening levels indoors, this is not really a problem, but it is definitely a limitation.

The midrange seems slightly more precise than what you get on the BOOM in pretty much all scenarios, and the highs are somewhat clearer as well without introducing any noticeable graininess of harshness in the upper midrange. In terms of directivity, the BLAST retains the same almost omni-directional dispersion characteristics of previous UE speakers. There is some change in elevation and in azimuth when close, but in normal use, it is pretty close to delivering 360 degree sound as advertised.

The sound quality easily surpasses what you get with an Echo device, and the BLAST works well in a portable scenario and has 12 hours of battery life. The 12 hour figure matches well with what we get with normal music at a normal listening level indoors. As it is hooked up to Amazon, the device can access a variety of music and radio services directly. You need to connect via Bluetooth for Spotify, which is somewhat annoying. The fact that you are limited to the Amazon eco-system is a real annoyance.