Bose Smart Soundbar 600 Review: Dolby Atmos

The Bose Smart Soundbar 600 was the company's second soundbar to support Dolby Atmos, following the larger Smart Soundbar 900. It is considerably more compact, and that compactness is bought by dropping two of the 900's headline technologies: AdaptiQ calibration via a headset microphone, and PhaseGuide, which creates surround effects around the listener. What remains is Bose TrueSpace, which continuously uses all five of the bar's drivers to improve playback of stereo material. In practical terms it is the Atmos version of the Soundbar 300, whose cabinet and drivers it shares.

The result is a soundbar that is genuinely excellent at one thing — voices — and distinctly limited at the thing its Atmos badge implies.

The 600 inherits the Soundbar 300's cabinet almost unchanged. Dimensions are modest: barely 70 cm wide, 5.6 cm high and 10 cm deep. It is a discreet unit that sits easily on a TV bench without dominating it.

Construction is matt black PVC with rounded corners. An acoustic grille runs across the front and around the sides, and behind that anodised aluminium sit the centre-channel driver, the conversation microphones for Alexa, a row of status LEDs and, at the edges, the side-firing drivers. The top surface carries its own grille concealing the two upward-firing Atmos drivers.

The rear holds the connectors, a heatsink and two bass-reflex ports. Underneath, two thick silicone pads prevent vibration reaching the furniture below.

Bose has kept physical controls to a minimum — there are two buttons, one for power and one to disable the microphones. Everything else runs through the supplied remote or the Bose Music app. HDMI, optical Toslink and power cables are all included in the box.

Disassembly reveals a seriously built product. Most of the electronic components, capacitors in particular, are coated in resin to protect them from the vibration the drivers generate. The amplification chip is covered in thermal paste and topped with a copper pipe linking it to the rear heatsink — the sort of provision that suggests a bar designed to play loudly for long periods.

Inside are five full-range drivers, and only one fires directly at the listener: the centre channel, which is itself fairly small. The upward-firing units are slightly larger at around 5 cm across, while the side-firing drivers are larger still, oblong, and fitted with substantial magnets.

All five share a single air volume tuned by two bass-reflex ports. Bass reproduction is therefore spread across every driver, with none dedicated to an LFE channel. That decision explains a good deal about how the bar sounds.

HDMI is present with ARC and eARC support, so a single cable to a television's ARC/eARC port carries digital audio from whatever is playing. CEC is supported, letting the television remote control the bar's volume.

A second digital input, optical Toslink, covers older televisions or a direct connection from a DVD or Blu-ray player. In that case only conventional Dolby signals are carried rather than Atmos — though this matters less than it might, because TrueSpace will remix stereo and 5.1 material regardless.

The 600 can connect wirelessly to Bose's optional Bass Module 500 subwoofer and Bose Surround Speakers, both sold separately at meaningful additional cost. A wired subwoofer output is also provided, along with a micro-USB port reserved for servicing.

Wi-Fi brings AirPlay 2, Google Chromecast and Spotify Connect, so the bar can be selected as a playback device directly inside a streaming app. Bluetooth is available as well, and built-in microphones support Amazon Alexa.

The Bose Music app is worth using, at minimum for setup, which it guides clearly with illustrations covering cabling, placement within the room and the addition of optional speakers. Sound adjustments cover dialogue intensity, a wall-mounting equalisation preset, bass level, the upward-firing channel and the side channel — each adjustable across twenty increments, which is unusually fine-grained.

A dedicated dialogue mode reinforces voices, and is genuinely useful with broadcast television, whose tonal balance is calibrated for TV speakers and can leave voices sounding muffled through a soundbar. The app also handles firmware updates. SimpleSync allows simultaneous listening through the bar and a compatible pair of Bose headphones.

TrueSpace is Bose's spatialisation technology, and it is always working. Whatever signal arrives from the television, every driver is used — including the upward-firing pair. The incoming signal is analysed and its elements distributed across the array.

The consequence is worth understanding: the vertical channels never carry Atmos height effects exclusively. They are simultaneously reproducing content from the centre, left and right channels. On mono material, voices remain principally with the centre driver but are audibly assisted by the upward-firing units; the same happens with stereo music, where every driver contributes.

Supported formats are PCM stereo, Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby Digital Plus with Atmos. DTS is not supported and will be converted to PCM 2.0 by the television or optical source.

The midrange is where the 600 excels. It is precise and organic, and human voices come through intelligible and full of substance — the single most useful quality in a television soundbar, and one many rivals get wrong.

The limitations sit at both ends of the spectrum and in the spatial presentation. Bass is limited, which follows directly from an architecture with no dedicated low-frequency driver and five small full-range units sharing one ported volume. The treble lacks finesse. And the surround and Atmos presentation is not sufficiently immersive to justify the Atmos badge — a predictable outcome once PhaseGuide has been removed and the upward-firing drivers are also busy handling ordinary channel content.

This is a 2022 product and the assessment above reflects testing carried out in November 2022. It could not be verified as currently stocked on Amazon UK or on Bose's UK store at the time of writing, and Bose has since introduced a newer Smart Soundbar. That successor is a different product and is not covered by this review, so no current UK price is shown here.

The Smart Soundbar 600 is a well-engineered, compact soundbar with a genuine strength: it makes dialogue clear and natural in a way that improves television watching immediately. Build quality is serious, the app is clean and unusually configurable, and streaming support is comprehensive.

Its weakness is precisely the feature its name leads with. Atmos and surround effects are not immersive enough to matter, bass is limited without adding the optional subwoofer, and treble lacks refinement. Anyone buying primarily for spatial audio will be disappointed; anyone buying to hear speech clearly from a compact bar will be well served.

Given its age, and that a newer model has replaced it, it is worth treating this as a reference for what the 600 does rather than as a current buying recommendation.