Review: Soniq iM600K
by edit@cnet.com.au (Ty Pendlebury) 
The good
- So cheap!
- Sound quality far exceeds its price
- iPod lift is cool
- Supports all manner of iPods
The bad
- Some build issues
- Clock radio is too hard to use
Not a brand to grace these pages before, Soniq is the in-house brand of JB Hi-Fi (think of it as the No Name brand, but with less canned champignons and more “Name”). It produces all manner of iPod docks, as well as the majority of the budget TV models you’ll see in any JB catalogue. As a rock-bottom-priced iPod dock we didn’t hold much hope for the iM600K, but you know what? We were pleasantly surprised. No, more than that. It was more akin to having a bad day at work, then grudgingly agreeing to go out for a drink, staying out all night partying and then going to work in the same clothes.
The dock itself resembles an emo K9 with its slightly trapezoidal shape and black and silver clobber. The centrepiece of the design is the motorised, vertical loading dock for the iPod. Step 1) Press a button and it glides upwards. 2) Insert iPod of the dockable persuasion. 3) Press button again and it slides calmly downwards, closing its little trapdoor behind it. One minor thing is that the platform doesn’t rise all the way making it hard to access the “Home” key on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
The unit comes with a remote control but it’s not the greatest as the Volume buttons are hard to locate, as is the Play/Pause button (it’s smooshed up with the word “Scan”).
As you’d expect for a budget product, the fit and finish isn’t the best. While the external areas are a bit plastic-y though solid, there are bare wires and circuit boards visible inside the iPod dock area. The unit comes with an AM/FM radio but is missing a telescopic antenna. Unsurprisingly, the thin piece of wire had problems picking up stations. But we fixed that by wrapping the antenna around the top of an umbrella wedged into the middle of the CNET desks. For a while.
The dock features a brevity of connections with just the iPod connector and a 3.5mm input. There are no headphone or USB niceties, and no portable battery option, either.
The dock is ostensibly a clock radio but we would never buy it for this purpose. You see, all of the functions are only controllable by the losable remote control, and counter-intuitively the unit needs to be off to alter the alarm time, and you can’t even check what time the alarms are set to without going through the process of setting it again! On the plus side, it does have two alarms and a choice of a (shrieking) buzzer, iPod or radio. If you want an iPod alarm clock we’d suggest paying a little extra and getting the Logitech Pure-Fi Anytime - you can find it for as little as AU$135 online.
While the unit comes with five different EQ presets and an MBASS mode, you can’t tweak them and the default settings are pretty good to start with anyway.
For an AU$130 iPod dock the sound was surprisingly good. We even hesitate to call it the equal of some docks of years past in the sub-AU$400 category. The unit features two side-facing woofers which means you can get a good spread of sound from anywhere in the room, if not the best stereo sound. We played a number of different genres to it and it handled them all surprisingly well. Life by the Beta Band is a favourite of ours as it features some ultra low bass and can unmask a particularly rattly cabinet. The Soniq handled it well, with plenty of treble detail as well, and while the deepest of bass notes weren’t quite audible the unit didn’t disintegrate, even at volume.
Despite some clunky features, the company has instead invested its energy into making the iM600K perform musically, and for that we’re thankful.
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