Altec Lansing InMotion Air review

Altec Lansing’s InMotion Air is a wireless speaker with two speaker drivers in a single bar-style unit, with a remote control and rechargeable battery. It’s surprisingly small and, at £180, shockingly expensive. We were surprised by its full sound and resonant bass for its size. It could also put out enough volume to drown out all other noise and conversation in our testing labs.

You can steam sound to it wirelessly using either apt-X or standard Bluetooth audio. Apt-X streaming is only possible if the device you’re sending audio from has a transmitter that can handle the apt-X codec, but Altec Lansing has supplied a USB transmitter with the speaker. Apt-X is a major improvement on standard Bluetooth – we noticed no difference between a 320kbps MP3 sent to the speaker wirelessly and with a cable via its auxiliary input.

A completely wireless speaker with a seven-hour battery certainly has its uses. Altec Lansing claims that the wireless system can stream over distances of up to 100m, but in practice you won’t see that kind of range in any indoor environment. We could carry the speaker without signal loss until we hit a wall 22m away in a straight line, but its sound soon broke up when we turned a corner.

Despite its high price, we liked the InMotion Air. Most people don’t need a compact and completely wireless speaker, but if you do, this is the best we’ve seen. The rest of us would probably be better off spending the same money on a pair of high quality active studio monitors like the ESI nEar 05 eXperience.