BEOPLAY P6 by Bang & Olufsen is a compact but premium design Bluetooth speaker that comes with amazingly big sounds.

It has a footprint of 170x130x68mm but its sounds can fill your room with both clarity and powerful bass.

B&O says the P6 is designed under the concept of “My Sound – My Space” as its sounds can be adjusted with an app to suit your music tastes.

The P6 has a strong and premium built with a mostly aluminium body and a leather handle-strap on one side. It comes in natural grey or matte black. I thought the black one I had my hands on looked really sleek.

The shape of the speaker allows for safe and stable standing, and with its smooth aluminium surface it can be easily gripped from any angle. The anodised and pearl blasted aluminium shell comes with the characteristic hole pattern that shapes elegantly around the corners fir 360-degree sound dispersion, while the double layered premium leather strap adds a warm contrast and provides a touch of exclusivity and reliability.

Moreover, the splash and dust resistant design makes it possible to use the speaker in any room around the home and outdoors as well, since it’s also dust proof. It conforms to the IP54 rating.

The P6 comes with five flex buttons to offer full control of speaker functions including play-pause music and speaker phone. The five buttons are Volume up Volume down, One touch, On/Off and Bluetooth.

The Bluetooth button is used for initiating pairing with your smartphone or a music player that supports Bluetooth connection. You simply press and hold it for two seconds and use your phone to find and connect to the P6. When the P6 is ready to pair, its status LED blinks blue, and when the connection is made, it turns solid white.

The One touch button has multiple functions that can be selected and customised with Beoplay app that is installed on the phone to which the speaker is Bluetooth-linked.

By default, the One touch button is used to control music playback on a phone or music player connected to the speaker. You press it once to pause or play music as a toggle button. You press it twice to go the next track and three times to go to a previous track.

Or you can customise the button to play the last-played track on your playlist when you press the button once.

Best of all, you can use Beoplay app to customise the functions of the button. For example, you can use the app to change the button’s function to launch Voice command depending on the phone the speaker is linked to. If you use it with an iPhone, it will activate Siri. If the speaker is connected to an Android smartphone, it will activate Google Assistant to receive your voice commands.

The One touch button can also be customised to activate your choice of sound setting that can be customised and selected via the app.

The sound customisation is called the ToneTouch function of the app. When you bring up Tone Touch, the app will display a screen with three concentric circles in a square. Two lines divide the circles in the middle horizontally and vertically into four main parts, called Warm, Excited, Relaxed and Bright. The speaker will adjust its tone of sounds in accordance with the touch of the screen in each section.

For example, if you touch the middle of the screen, the sound setting will turn flat. If you press the far right part of the Excited section, the speaker will boost the bass sound.

You must try selecting the various parts of the screen until you find the sound setting you like and you can save it for future use. If you select the One touch button and ToneTouch option, it will act as a toggle switch to turn the sound setting of your choice on and off.

The Beoplay app also provides four pre-set sound settings to select – Lounge, Party, Podcast and Clear.

The app can also be used to pair two P6 speakers together to generate stereo sounds.

During the test, I found that P6 really has good sound quality with prominent mids and highs and also deep bass.

It uses two 1.5-ihch full-range drivers and one 4-inch woofer. The woofer is powered by a Class D amplifier with 36 watts of power while the full-range drivers are powered by two 30-watt Class D amps.

So, the P6 has a 215 watts of peak power, which is very high for this size speaker. The speaker has an effective frequency range of 55 to 20,000Hz.

I enjoyed playing rock music for hours during the test as it blared out powerful bass and clear mids and highs.

The P6 has built-in 2,600mAh battery that can last up to 16 hours per charge.

Beoplay P6 is distributed by RTB Technology and available at Studio7 shops and IStudio, .life, Siam Discovery, Jaymart, Munkong Gadget, Betrend, Power Mall, and Lazada for Bt16,900.

>> Power amplifiers: 1x36W Class D for woofer; 2x30W Class D for full-range drivers

>> Drivers: 2×1.5-inch full-range, 1×4-inch woofer

>> Effective frequency range; 55-20,000Hz

>> Connection: Bluetooth 4.2

>> Microphone: One electret type, omni-directional

>> Battery: 2,600mAh, 16-hour playback, 3-hour charging time through USB-C port

>> Dimensions: 170x130x68mm

>> Weight: 1kg