Can $200 worth of $10 Ikea speakers beat my Sonos and Bose?

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

The Kallsup is about 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 it’s available in pink, white, and yellow green. There are two buttons and a small LED light on the top, and a USB-C charge port on the back. The button with the Bluetooth symbol turns the speaker on, plays a short welcome jingle, and puts it into pairing mode. It makes some slightly odd breathing noises while waiting to pair. 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, which has a play symbol on it, can be used to play and pause, skip or repeat the previous track, and connect it with up to 99 more Kallsups. Turning the speaker on and pairing takes around 10 seconds.

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

The Kallsup’s driver isn’t very big, so there’s not a lot of bass response, but it’s more than my laptop speakers can muster. As would be expected from a single, small driver, most of the frequency focus is on the midrange, so vocals are and speaking voices are highlighted the most — which is what makes the Kallsup good for audiobooks and podcasts. At max volume, there’s some slight distortion with tracks that have a lot of high-end frequencies, but when listening at close range at my desk, I never felt the need to blast the tiny speaker.

When these speakers were first announced at CES, what caught The Verge staff’s attention most 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 overall volume. With the 20 I had on hand, while measuring with a decibel (dB) meter from a few inches away, a pink noise test signal increased from 86 dB with one speaker and up to 94 dB with all of them together — which is nearly twice the perceived volume. So spreading them around a 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 putting $200 worth of Kallsup speakers up against comparatively priced Bluetooth options — the $269 Bose SoundLink Plus, $189 Amazon Echo Studio, and $179 Sonos Roam 2 — the Ikea array sounded okay, but the other three all had better response across the frequency range. The Echo Studio was my favorite because of how the low end balances against the mids and highs, but it also needs to be plugged in and doesn’t have the portability of the others. The Bose gets far louder than them all, even when all 20 Kallsups play together, and the Roam 2’s sound is more balanced (and the speaker more portable) than 20 Kallsups. All three of the more expensive speakers also offer far more features: the Bose and Sonos are IP67 dust- and water-resistant (the Kallsup are 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 20 of them are 20 very simple Bluetooth speakers.

Stacking up a bunch of the speakers, or spreading them around, increases their volume and area coverage, but it can be time-consuming. Turning on and pairing a single speaker takes 10 to 20 seconds, but when you multiply that by 20 speakers, it turns into minutes. And that connection isn’t maintained once the speakers power down, so you’ll need to go through the process again the next time you want to use all of them. And then there’s finding 20 unused USB-C charging ports when they run out of battery after nine hours. The Kallsup also makes a rather disconcerting “aahhhh” sound when you plug it in to charge that I could do without, especially in chorus.

Still, when using just one or a handful of them, the Kallsups are a fun, colorful, and cute way to add sound to your space. I could see putting a few around a kid’s room — my 10-year old liked their look when I set them up for photos — or just adding a pop of color to your desk. And for $10, the Kallsups more than live up to their price.

Photography by John Higgins / The Verge