Beoplay P6 will take your ears away to a better place

By Noel Campion

I don’t consider myself an audiofile, but I do appreciate good music and great sound, something I have always associated with the Danish company, Bang and Olufsen.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been testing one of their portable bluetooth speakers, the Beoplay P6, thanks to their newly opened shop in Dublin’s, Duke Street.

The Beoplay P6 was designed by Cecille Manzis and is a beautifully crafted, all metal speaker grill that houses powerful speakers and amplifier within a stylish design that harkens back to simpler times. The aesthetics are gorgeous with smooth rounded edges and a practical rubber base for added stability.

On the top of the P6 are aluminium flex buttons, finely cut out of the metal. These consist of volume up and down, bluetooth, power and a OneTouch button.

The latter allows you to play or pause the audio, answer phone calls, interact with Siri or Google Assistant, or select pre-set ToneTouch features.

I love the timeless look of the Beoplay P6, which has a bit of weight to it. This only adds to the overall feeling of style and premium build quality. The speaker measures 170 mm x 130 mm x 68 mm and weighs 1 kg.

Even the box the P6 comes in looks great, but the unboxing experience is short and sweet with only the speaker, a USB to USB Type C cable and a thick, genuine leather strap, hooked into a slot in the speaker.

I’m not sure why there’s no power supply included, but to be honest, I wasn’t short of a few dozen adapters up to the job of charging the P6, which typically takes three hours from flat to fully charged.

To be clear, this is a bluetooth speaker only. There’s no 3.5mm jack, so you can’t connect it to a device that doesn’t have bluetooth. Also, it’s worth mentioning, you don’t get NFC either, so no one-touch bluetooth pairing. Also absent is any kind of pouch or carry case for protection.

My test unit was black but there’s also an off-white version that B&O call Natural.

Both colours look great and I think they add a touch of class to any environment, but thanks to the amazing weather recently, I was able to enjoy fantastic music in the great outdoors for a lot of my testing.

The Beoplay P6 has an impressive battery life of up to 16 hours of active listening at medium volumes. The more you push the volume the less time you’ll get on the battery, but overall, battery performance is fantastic and a key feature for a portable speaker like this.

Like I said already, I’m not an audiophile, but do appreciate good sound. During my testing period I listened to hours of music from a broad variety of genres.

The more I listened the more I liked the sound coming from the P6; sound is subjective and we all like different frequencies.

The P6 delivers tight but not overpowering bass when listening to rock, while being able to deliver great vocals while listening to folk music. Classical music produced incredible detail and a wide soundstage with clean trebles.

Even at full volume, I didn’t notice any distortion, which I take as a sign of a good speaker but equally, at low volume, the sound quality is still impressive. This is the best portable speaker I’ve heard, and it offers both sound quality and power in such a small package.

The Beoplay P6 features Bang & Olufsen’s signature True360 sound that expands the stereo sound stage to engulf a room in sound.

This makes music really fill a room but I also appreciated this when watching movies. I mostly used the speaker with my phone but I also tried connecting it to my Apple TV.

This worked great and significantly, there was no lag in the audio, something I’ve seen other bluetooth speakers I’ve tested suffer from. The P6 has an omni-directional microphone that can be used to make calls, which was more convenient than I expected and worked really well.

The Beoplay P6 has a free companion app that allows you to pair two P6s for multi-room audio. You can also control volume, pause/play, forward and back a track and customise the OneTouch button and see the battery level.

You can also control the tone by sliding a large white dot around four corners from warm, excited, relaxed and bright. From here you can save presets or choose B&O presets (lounge, party, podcast or clear).

Finally, the Beoplay P6 comes with an IP54 rating, which basically means it’s splash and dust proof — just don’t bring it into the shower.

Overall — in spite of the absence of NFC, 3.5mm jack or power supply — I loved my time with the Beoplay P6.

You’re getting a premium device that doesn’t compromise on design or sound quality and if that’s what’s important to you, then I highly recommend you go and take a listen for yourself.

Beoplay P6, retail price €399 from Bang & Olufsen, Duke Street, Dublin or www.nuconnect.ie