When Ikea launched its super-cheap $10 Bluetooth Kallsup speakers in April, aside from the rock-bottom price and bright, white/green/pink colors, the claim that really caught WIRED’s ear was that the Swedish furniture brand said it was possible to chain 100 of these 2.75-inch sonic cubes together, should you so wish.
Now, because it’s highly unlikely any one household will ever own more than a handful of mini Bluetooth speakers, this is one of those consumer-tech statements that rarely gets tested. So we asked the good folks at Älmhult in Ikea headquarters if they’d let us do just this. To our surprise, Ikea not only agreed, but it also upped the ante, saying it might be possible to link up to 150 without breaking the connection, so that’s exactly how many it sent us. “No one has ever tried this, though,” an Ikea spokesperson said. “We haven’t.”
That is how we ended up building a literal wall of sound at our London office, stacking 150 Kallsups carefully on top of one another to test how many would chain-play from a smartphone. Sadly, one casualty during shipping from Sweden—a single Kallsup—despite lighting up correctly and looking ready to chain, made an ominous rattling sound as if its innards weren’t entirely secure. Sure enough, it refused to play ball (or anything else), so we ended up with 149 speakers.
The chain process itself is simple. Once you have paired a single Kallsup with your music device—in our case, an iPhone 16 Pro —and it’s up and running, simply power on another cube while playing and hold down the Play button until a chime tells you it’s in “multi-speaker” mode.
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