Anker Soundcore 2
This classy wireless speaker has plenty of impressive features, but the bass is too lean for our liking
The market for affordable, portable Bluetooth speakers is booming. But, terrible puns aside, spending less than £50 on a diminutive design today doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t enjoy a musical sound too. Some recent budget arrivals, such as this Anker Soundcore 2, have shown that is certainly possible.
Anker is more often associated with super-fast power charging banks, but the company has recently updated its initial contender to the wireless speaker market, the Soundcore.
The update is clearly aiming to please more than just our ears – the Soundcore 2 is far more striking in appearance than its predecessor.
Rubber love
The Soundcore 2 is covered in smooth, but grippy rubber, and while you’ll either love the touch or hate it (we’re in the former camp) it helps the Soundcore 2 achieve a fully waterproof IPX7 rating – meaning that it will survive being submerged in water at a depth of one metre for at least 30 minutes.
On top of this, there is also a claimed battery life of up to 24 hours, which should be long enough to last for an entire weekend camping trip in the South Downs.
The Soundcore 2 is curvy around the edges, reminding us of a swish pencil case. As well as our black review sample, the speaker also comes in blue or red.
As for inputs, there’s a micro USB and aux in at one end, covered by a little rubber plug to keep it waterproof. The five raised control buttons across the top are tactile and self-explanatory.
The power light shows white when on, red when charging and flashes red for when the battery is low. The Bluetooth pairing light at the other end is blue – naturally. There’s a built-in microphone for talking to Siri or Google Assistant, and for making hands-free calls, plus a 20m Bluetooth range.
Once it's been run-in for a few hours, this little curvy cuboid is initially quite fun – there’s plenty going on through the midrange and it’s well-projected too. We’re not surprised that the amount of detail on display is rather limited, but things tick along nicely and timing is not an issue. Lethal Bizzle’s Fester Skank doesn’t come across as hard or insubstantial through the midrange and we’re tapping our toes along quite happily.
However, despite claiming an enhanced bass with Bassup technology, the twin-driver design (each unit is powered by 6W of amplification) doesn’t offer much in the way of bass depth.
Lethal tones
Dynamics are also an issue. The bolshy tone in Lethal’s vocal is present, but the detail resolution that might deliver his emotional skittishness with a greater sense of drama isn’t quite there. There’s a diminished space between notes – an absence of the kind of layers that would allow our ears to celebrate nuances between vocals and instruments.
That said, the Soundcore 2 is still worthy of your attention. It’s very much at the affordable end of the market and, considering the IPX7 rating, it’ll take some pretty serious abuse when out and about. Visually, it’s inoffensive compared with some of its competitors – classy even.
In our tests, we prefer the similarly priced JBL GO 2 for sound, but the Anker Soundcore 2 surpasses its rivals for features and battery life. And if the microphone is important to you, then this is little money well spent.