Can IKEA’s $200 speakers outperform Sonos and Bose?

This $10 Kallsup Bluetooth speaker from Ikea is fun, colorful, and sounds better than its price suggests. It’s not amazing (it’s a $10 speaker), and there are no features to speak of, other than the ability to connect up to 100 of them together, but at this price, I don’t really care. It’s a quick addition if I need more color and sound at my desk or in my son’s room.

The Kallsup is as simple as a Bluetooth speaker can get. It’s a 2.75-inch plastic cube enclosure with four short feet on the bottom and a single speaker inside, and is available in pink, white, yellow, and green. There are two buttons and a small LED on the top, and a USB-C charging port on the back. The button with the Bluetooth symbol turns on the speaker, plays a short welcome tone, and puts it in pairing mode. It makes some slightly strange breathing noises while waiting for pairing. You can also turn it off with the same button, or put it back in pairing mode if you need to change to another device. The second button, containing the play icon, can be used to play, pause, skip or repeat the previous track, and connect it to up to 99 other Kallsups. Turning on and pairing the speaker takes about 10 seconds.

I didn’t have high expectations for a $10 speaker, but even one Kallsup speaker is surprisingly decent. At medium levels, the speaker works well for background music or for listening to a podcast or audiobook. While at my desk, I preferred it to the M4 MacBook Air’s thin-sounding built-in speakers.

The Kallsup’s driver isn’t very large, so there’s not a lot of bass response, but it’s more than my portable speakers can muster. As expected from a small single driver, most of the frequency focus is in the midrange, so vocals and speaking voices are more distinct – which is what makes the Kallsup good for audiobooks and podcasts. At maximum volume, there’s some slight distortion in tracks with a lot of high frequencies, but when listening at close range at my desk, I never felt the need to turn on the small speaker.

When these speakers were first announced at CES, what hold Edge Attention staff Most of it was the ability to connect up to 100 of them. Daisy chaining them is easy and is a great way to spread out the sound and increase the overall volume. Using the 20 I had on hand, while measuring with a decibel (dB) meter from a few inches away, the pink noise test signal increased from 86 dB with one speaker to 94 dB with all of these speakers together—which is nearly double the perceived volume. So spreading them around the room will give you some extra volume, but they’re still mono speakers and there’s no way to connect two as a stereo pair.

When pitting $200 Kallsup speakers against comparably priced Bluetooth options — $269 Bose SoundLink Plus$189 Amazon Echo StudioAnd $179 Sonos Room 2 -The IKEA array sounded okay, but the other three had better response across the frequency range. The Echo Studio was my favorite because of how it balanced the low end with the mids and highs, but it also needs to be plugged in and doesn’t have the portability of other devices. The Bose gets much louder than most, even when playing all 20 Kallsups together, and the Roam 2’s sound is more balanced (and the speaker is more portable) than the 20 Kallsups. The three more expensive speakers also offer a lot more features: the Bose and Sonos are IP67 dust- and water-resistant (the Kallsup is not IP-rated), the Roam 2 works in the Sonos ecosystem, and the Echo Studio can order your groceries. The Kallsup is a very simple Bluetooth speaker, and the 20 are a very simple Bluetooth speaker.

Stacking, or spreading out, a group of speakers increases their volume and area coverage, but this can take a long time. It takes 10 to 20 seconds to turn on and pair one speaker, but when you multiply that by 20 speakers, that turns into minutes. This connection isn’t maintained once you turn off the speakers, so you’ll need to go through the process again the next time you want to use all of those speakers. The 20 USB-C charging ports are then found unused when the battery runs out after nine hours. The Kallsup also makes a somewhat confusing “aahhhh” sound when plugged in that I can do without, especially in the chorus.

However, when using just one or a combination of them, Kallsups are a fun, colorful and cute way to add sound to your space. I could see putting a few of these in a kid’s room — my 10-year-old loved the look of them when I set them up for photos — or just adding a pop of color to your office. And for $10, Kallsups live up to their price.

Photography by John Higgins/The Verge