Anker Soundcore Motion X600 review: A spatial audio speaker to get you moving

The Anker Soundcore Motion X600 has got a fairly impressive history to live up to. It’s the latest Bluetooth speaker from a brand that has previously wowed us with affordable noise-cancelling headphones like the Soundcore Life Q30 and spatial audio earbuds like the Soundcore Liberty 4.

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We’ve not been as impressed with Soundcore’s speaker output, but the Motion X600 has a good shot at changing that. The design is stylish, the build durable and audio impresses across the board. Despite a couple of niggling issues, this is a speaker well worth considering if you’re after big sound at a relatively affordable price.

Anker Soundcore Motion X600 review: What do you get for the money?

Speaking of price, the Soundcore Motion X600 will set you back £200, which is £10 more than last year’s Soundcore Motion Boom Plus cost at release. It’s part of the same Motion range but is a rather different proposition, trading the cheap-feeling plastic boombox style for a more refined, mostly metal build, roughly shaped in the style of a retro radio.

Available in Lunar Blue, Aurora Green and the Polar Grey reviewed here, the X600 cuts a striking figure no matter which colour you choose. The main body is quite low-profile, measuring 311 x 81 x 122mm (WDH), with a fixed handle to help you lug around its 2.35kg frame. The handle makes moving it from room to room easy enough, but if you’re taking it on a longer trip, it’s still small enough to slip into a bag.

The metal front grille and carry handle are complemented by a plastic backside, with a rubber cover hiding the USB-C and AUX-in ports. This seal preserves the speaker’s IPX7 waterproof rating, which means that it can be fully submerged in 1m of water for up to 30 minutes. It doesn’t float though, so I wouldn’t recommend chucking it in the pool, and there’s no official protection against dust and particle ingress. In short, this one’s fine for a pool party, but you’ll probably want to steer clear of the beach.

The base is coated in a soft plastic, with a matching layer on top of the body. Here, you’ll find the Soundcore logo in the middle of a circular, upward-firing speaker grille, with buttons for volume control and playing/pausing on the right and the power and Bluetooth buttons to the left, alongside toggles for the spatial audio and BassUp modes.

While the spatial audio is exclusively enabled via the physical controls, BassUp can also be activated in the Soundcore app. The app also provides access to a toggle for listening to audio via the LDAC codec on compatible Android devices and a customisable nine-band graphic equaliser. This equaliser allows you to save your own tunings alongside four preset profiles: Voice, Treble Boost, Balanced and the default Soundcore Signature.

The app also has a setting for enabling the internal microphone, allowing you to hail your phone’s voice assistant via the speaker, as well as using it to take calls. As the voice assistant isn’t built into the speaker, but rather just relaying to your phone, commands take a second to register, but it’s efficient enough with playing and pausing audio to be worth the inclusion.

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Anker Soundcore Motion X600 review: What did we like about it?

The X600 crams five drivers inside its compact frame, with a further five amplifiers strategically placed to push the sound further out around you. And push it does – this thing gets seriously loud. So loud, in fact, that I had to move a few feet back in order to test it at maximum volume. Whether you’re trying to fill your flat with tunes or want to make sure your music can be heard over a raucous party, the Motion X600 has power to spare.

Of course, volume isn’t worth much if the audio quality can’t keep up, but the Motion X600 manages to find a solid balance. There’s a lot going on in New Order’s “World in Motion”, with a frenetic drum beat vying for attention alongside the piano, guitars and vocals – and that’s before we factor in the enthusiastic chanting of Keith Allen and his 1990 England team choir. As chaotic as the track is, the Motion X600 keeps its eye on the ball and lines the disparate elements up neatly, ensuring that no one section steals too much focus from the rest.

On the spatial audio front, the X600 doesn’t support Apple’s Spatial Audio, but instead features what Soundcore describes as its “Sky Channel Spatial Audio”. This uses the speaker’s up-firing driver and Soundcore’s audio algorithm to create a greater sense of space – particularly above you – and I found it worked well. Switching the mode on gave audio a more airy quality, pushing vocals and instrumentals further apart, giving each section more room to showcase fine details.

“Stillness in Motion” by Lulu and Mischka, for instance, is a duet for the majority of the track, but the standard mix sees Lulu very much at the forefront, and it can be a bit too easy to forget that Mischka is singing along too. Flipping on spatial audio doesn’t magically rearrange things – Lulu’s voice is still the most prominent – but it does separate the vocal tracks out slightly better, making it feel more like they’re independently singing next to each other, rather than trying and failing to share one mic.

Even before enabling BassUp, the lower end has a hearty thump to it, with the steady drums in John Parr’s “St Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” landing with a respectable weight ahead of the lead vocals. Switch the BassUp on, however, and the difference is palpable. St Elmo’s Fire spits out a fair amount of reverb, but we see the effects even more clearly with Ty Dolla $ign’s “Motion”. Here, BassUp takes an already meaty bassline and kicks it up to window-rattling levels, pushing it to the forefront of the track, but not completely drowning out the rest of the mix.

Anker Soundcore Motion X600 review: What could be improved?

The downside to the spatial audio and BassUp functions working so well together is that, between them, they’re quite a sap on battery life. Total battery life is stated as 12 hours at 50% volume with the bass enhancer function disabled.

While 50% is still plenty loud with the X600, anyone who keeps spatial audio and BassUp on, or cranks the volume any higher, will be lucky to get much more than eight hours of playback before needing a charge. In practical terms, this would just about be enough to soundtrack a day out at the park or a summer pool party, but it’s still fairly mediocre stamina for a speaker of this price. The JBL Charge 5, for instance, manages up to 20 hours, and costs a good £60 less than the Motion X600 at time of writing.

The other cutting edge to this blade is that, once depleted, the battery takes quite a while to charge, with Soundcore stating that it will take around six hours to go from empty to full. Given battery life is meagre anyway, the Motion X600 could really do with some form of fast charging.

On the audio front, I noticed distortion creeping into the upper frequencies when I pushed the speaker towards maximum volume. Relatively straightforward mixes got away unscathed – even when Debbie Harry really belted the lyrics in Blondie’s “Slow Motion”, the notes were clean and clearly defined – but more cluttered tracks lost a bit of clarity. Cheap Trick’s “She’s Got Motion” features a fairly manic chorus, with leading and backing vocals alongside guitars, and at certain points, the frequencies began to bleed into one another.

Last year’s Motion Boom Plus housed a USB-A port that allowed it to serve as a power bank for other devices, but that feature has unfortunately been dropped here. Considering the limited battery life of the Motion X600, the absence of another battery-sapping feature is not the end of the world, though there’s no denying that power bank capabilities are very handy.

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Anker Soundcore Motion X600 review: Should you buy it?

The fact that most of the issues I’ve had with the Motion X600 are linked in some way to the overall battery life is very telling. Aside from that one area, the Motion X600 does exactly what it intends to do, and does it well. Audio quality is terrific across the board, with the effective BassUp and spatial audio modes offering more ways to enhance your tracks, and the maximum volume is enough to rattle even the hardiest of eardrums.

Wrap it all up in a slick and portable package, and the Motion X600 is a tempting proposition. If you need a speaker capable of pumping out tunes at full volume all day and all night, it’s probably not for you – have a look at some of the higher-endurance models on our Best speaker list instead. If, however, eight hours sounds like plenty, or you typically carry a power bank around with you, the Motion X600 packs a hell of a punch for the money.