Real Relax PS6500 Massage Chair Review 2024

Do you spend more time and money on chiropractic visits than you’re comfortable with? Are you looking for a way to save money while still managing your chronic pain, or are you simply interested in enjoying a relaxing massage from the comfort of your home any time you like?

If you answered yes to those questions, then you’re going to love what you read in this—our Real Relax PS6500 review.

If you normally shop for big-name brands when you make a purchase, you may have never even heard of Real Relax. Although they’ve been in the business for more than twenty years, they’re not one of the industry’s leaders, and they don’t have an enormous footprint in the market.

Although they occasionally make a misstep and produce a substandard product like every competitor, on the whole, they make massage chairs that punch well above their weight class, and the 6500 is an excellent example of their work.

The design team didn’t cut any corners here, and the chair that grew out of their efforts compares favorably to competing products that cost significantly more than you’ll spend here.

Of course, if you decide you want one of these, the downside is that you’ll be buying an off-brand and from a company with only a limited capacity for post-sales support. As with everything then, there’s a tradeoff, but by the time you reach the end of this review, even if you’re not a fan of off-brands, we think you’ll agree that this is a really good design.

In the sections that follow, we’ll walk you through everything the PS 6500 has to offer, and we won’t be bashful when describing its shortcomings. That way, you’ll have all the information you need at your fingertips to decide for yourself if this is the chair you’ve been looking for. If that sounds good to you, read on, and let’s take a closer look.

An Overview of the Real Relax PS6500 Massage Chair

The design team of the PS 6500 played it safe where the overall look of the chair is concerned. 

It looks like just about every other massage chair you find on the market today. If your tastes run to the slightly futuristic, that will suit you just fine, but complaints about the overall aesthetic of massage chairs are not uncommon.

If you really want a massage chair that will blend in with your “regular” living room furniture when you’re not using it, you can have that. There are a handful of companies that make massage chairs that could easily pass for pieces of conventional living room furniture.

Those chairs are expensive, but they do exist. If that’s what you want, you’ll probably find something perfect for you by searching “Human Touch Massage Chairs.”

If you’re okay with the overall look of the 6500, you’ll be thrilled to know that it is robustly built and supports up to 400 pounds of user weight, making it useful to more than 95% of the massage chair market. In addition to that, its size makes it a good fit for users ranging in height from 5’ tall to 6’4”, which, again, caters to the vast majority of the market.

Speaking of its size, this is a big piece of furniture, measuring 28.5” W x 57.5” L (74” when fully reclined) x 42.1” H and weighing a hefty 206 pounds. If you decide you want one of these, do yourself a favor and have a friend standing by on the day the chair arrives. An extra pair of hands will help you get it where you want it to go with a minimum of fuss.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you decide to buy one of these, you can order yours in either black, gold, or dark brown, which gives you at least some ability to color-coordinate with the other furnishings in your home.

As illuminating as these facts are, they don’t tell us much about how the PS6500 is as an actual massage chair. To begin digging into that, we’ll need to look at some of the core technologies used by the design team, and that’s next!

The Real Relax PS6500 is Built With State-Of-The-Art and Cutting-Edge Technology

We consider this to be a very strong component of our Real Relax PS6500 review as all of the technology incorporated into this chair’s design is either state-of-the-art or cutting-edge. 

Take, for example, the PS 6500 massage chair’s body scanning tech. Absolutely cutting-edge, and you won’t find anything like it on any other massage chair on the market right now (though you can bet that the big-name brands will be quick to copy this idea).

Conventional body scanning tech takes a scan of your back when you sit in the chair and adjusts the position of the rollers so that they hit your body’s pressure points exactly. 

This tech does that, but it also does more. When you sit in the chair and grasp the scanning sensor in your hand, it will take a biometric readout of you and use that data to detect your fatigue and pain level and adjust the chair’s settings accordingly.

Also, instead of simply scanning your back, the 6500 will take note of your neck position, the size of your shoulders, and your waist and hip position in the chair, taking all of those factors into account when it adjusts the rollers.

The bottom line is that you’ll feel that this chair knows you and what you need and delivers the perfect massage based on how you’re feeling the moment you sit down. It’s next-level good, and you’re going to love the massages you get from this chair.

We don’t feel that our PS 6500 massage chair review would be complete unless we stress this. The body scanning tech on this chair is a genuine innovation, and that’s a pleasant surprise given that we’re talking about a small, off-brand company.

As cool as the body scanning technology is, however, if it didn’t have a long massage track and rollers capable of rendering a world-class massage, it wouldn’t matter. Fortunately, the 6500 delivers in style, boasting an impressively long 51.6” massage track with quad 4D massage rollers mounted on the track.

Here, we should pause for just a moment to say a few words about the different types of massage chairs you’ll find on the market today.

At the low end of the spectrum, you’ll find a handful of chairs that feature stationary massage heads. 

Honestly, don’t bother with these even if you’re on a budget. They mostly give simple vibration-style massages, and you can get yourself a good 2D or even 3D massage chair for not much more money.

The 2D massage chairs were the industry standard for a long time. They featured a massage track that allowed the rollers to move along both the X- and Y-axis, which is to say that the rollers could move up, down, left, and right.

These chairs give a decent massage, but they can’t give a true deep tissue massage because they are incapable of moving along the Z-axis.

3D massage chairs represent the current state of the art, and most of the massage chairs you’ll find on the market today are of this type. They allow movement along the Z-axis and are capable of giving truly incredible massages with genuine therapeutic value.

At the bleeding edge, you find 4D massage chairs. These are similar to 3D massage chairs except that the rollers are “smart” and vary their speed and intensity based on where they are on your body. The result is a massage experience that feels very much like what you’d get from a human masseuse. That’s what the PS6500 massage chair offers.

Another cutting-edge feature you’ll find here is the 7” touchpad used as the chair’s control center/operations panel. It’s not at all uncommon to find massage chairs controlled via simple LED or LCD remotes, but there’s none of that here.

Instead, you get a crisp, brightly lit touchpad, which makes issuing commands to the chair a snap, especially since the menu system is well organized. Simply fantastic.

The PS6500 Boasts An Impressive Array of Massage Chair Options

We regard this as an incredibly strong component of our Real Relax PS6500 massage chair review. This chair will blow your mind with the number of massage options on offer.

For starters, you’ll find thirteen different massage techniques on offer. These are:

Note the presence of two advanced techniques (Swedish and Shiatsu) and two variants of Swedish. 

Some of the basic techniques are little more than slight variations, but there’s a lot to like here. Even if you stuck strictly with the massage techniques themselves, you could spend days or even weeks just experimenting with the possibilities.

Fortunately, there’s a lot more on offer, so you won’t have to stick just to the techniques outlined above. 

This chair also offers a stunning 27 pre-programmed massage routines with options like:

There are so many great massage options here that it’s hard to know where to begin. In our view, the very best of the lot is the Thai stretch routine, which has the same basic effect as a chiropractic adjustment.

If you suffer from chronic pain, this will probably be the one you rely on most often but fair warning! The Thai stretch is a fairly aggressive routine, and depending on your pain level, it may be more than you can handle. If at all possible, we recommend trying this routine at a showroom before you commit to a purchase.

If it’s too much for you, you may want to check out any Kahuna chair with a stretch. Theirs is gentler and may be more to your liking.

It gets better.

You can modify any of the pre-programmed massages or massage techniques via the touch screen with five levels of speed and five levels of intensity, plus you can select spot or partial massage modes if you want to zero in on a certain part of your body that’s causing you pain.

If that wasn’t enough, you could further enhance your massage experience with a wide range of sound effects thanks to the built-in Bluetooth speakers. In our view, the company refers to these options as White Noise, but that sells it short. The sound effects you can choose from include:

All of this is to say that there are a simply dizzying number of massage options on offer here. So many, in fact, that it’s slightly problematic.

One weak point in the design we want to point out, and something we haven’t seen mentioned in most other Real Relax PS 6500 massage chair reviews, is the fact that this model doesn’t have memory slots, so it’s not possible to program your perfect massage then save it for one-touch recall later.

It’s not the kiss of death by any means, but we regard the absence of memory slots as a missed opportunity, and it’s something we’d love to see addressed in some future model update.

Three Different Zero-G Seating Options Are Included

This is another incredibly strong component of our PS6500 massage chair review because Zero-G seating is a great all-around feature with tremendous therapeutic benefits.

Inspired by NASA, Zero-G seating works by placing you in a position such that your knees are elevated slightly above your heart, and it really does make you feel weightless. 

That’s not the real magic of these seating positions, however. Any of these three positions will enhance any massage routine you order from the chair, improve your circulation, and help lower your blood pressure.

In addition to that, sitting in a Zero-G position for a little while every day has been shown to help speed post-surgical healing, so if you’ve got surgery of one type or another, that’s something that’s well worth keeping in mind.

While more than a third of the massage chairs on the market today offer Zero-G seating, only a single position is usually offered. Occasionally, you’ll find a chair that offers two, but it’s fairly rare to find one that offers three (or more). We’re thrilled. Kudos to the Real Relax PS 6500’s design team for a job very well done!

Heat? Of Course, It Has Heat!

Yet another strong component of our Real Relax PS6500 review, Real Relax describes the heat function of their chair as “graphene waist heating.” As a practical matter, it’s functionally similar to the lumbar heat you find featured in a fair number of massage chairs on the market today.

Heat is always a welcome addition to a massage chair’s design. Not only does it offer powerful therapeutic benefits but it also simply makes just about any massage you pair it with better. The cool thing here is that you can pair heat and Zero-G with your favorite massage and take things to the next level.

We absolutely love that, and we’re pretty sure you will too, but we have two minor gripes regarding the offered heat. First, we wish the footwells were also heated. Given how often the company went the extra mile where feature implementations were concerned, we’re actually a little surprised and disappointed not to see heated footwells.

Second, we wish there was a way to precisely control the temperature. Granted, that’s a feature you almost never see on massage chairs at any price, but if we could make a wish list of model improvements down the road, temperature control for the heat would be on our list!

The Real Relax PS 6500 Massage Chair Also Has an Exceptional Airbag Massage

Most modern massage chairs feature an airbag-based massage, but honestly, most airbag-based massages are nothing special. This one is different, making this another remarkably strong component of our Real Relax PS6500 review.

The key difference between this chair’s airbag-based massage and most of the others on the market today is that the Real Relax design team decided to arrange them in multiple layers so that when activated, they offer pressure in a wave-like fashion, which feels amazing.

Even better, the controls on the PS 6500 chair allow you to customize your airbag massage experience by choosing from any of five different intensity levels or selectively activate the airbags via the following body regions:

This is superb. In fact, the air massage on this chair is one of the best we’ve ever seen. Normally, we mention this feature and move on, but Real Relax deserves credit for going above and beyond here. You’re almost certain to love this feature.

The Real Relax PS6500 Boasts An Excellent Calf And Foot Massage

When we were talking about heat earlier, we mentioned that we’d love to see heat included in the leg massage ports. That’s true, and it’s about the only way we can think of to make the calf and foot massage better on this model.

The calf massage is rendered via airbags, and the foot massage by a combination of foot rollers and airbags. In both the calf and foot body regions, the massage is aided by Real Relax’s amazing “wave style” airbag placement.

It feels incredible, and if you come home most nights after a long day’s work with sore feet, this is almost certain to be your favorite feature of the chair.

The Real Relax PS 6500 is Also Brimming With Extras

One of the main ways that smaller brands compete with bigger brands in the massage chair industry is that they focus on the basics. They offer chair designs that sport really good massages for not very much money, and to do that, they basically forget about extras. They just don’t offer any, or maybe one or two that are high value and easy to implement without increasing their costs much.

That’s not what we find here at all. Real Relax pulled out all the stops, offering a suite of extras and finishing touches that would make even some of the big players in the industry green with envy. 

You’ll find:

It’s basically everything you could ever want in a massage chair rolled into one deliciously priced package.

Pros & Cons of Real Relax PS6500 Massage Chair

We have mentioned a few points of weakness in the design, which we’ll summarize here:

The first three would be fantastic additions to the chair, and the last one is more of an aspirational goal for the company.

Having said that, even if you take all of our “cons” together, we seriously doubt they would be considered deal breakers by any potential buyer. The bottom line is that this is a fantastic, versatile massage chair offered at a great price.

Real Relax PS6500 Review Conclusion

If you weigh 400 pounds or less and are on a budget, we’d say here in our Real Relax PS6500 review that there’s absolutely no reason this chair shouldn’t be on your shortlist of options to consider.

Even if you’ve got the money to buy something that offers even more from one of the big players in the industry, this one deserves a second and maybe even a third look to compare and contrast. This is a great massage chair, and we absolutely recommend it.

Other Options to Consider

If you’ve reached the end of this review and have decided that no matter how impressive we think the chair is, it’s just not a good fit for you, here are a couple of other models you may want to consider:

This chair is significantly more expensive than the model we just talked about, but Kahuna does occasionally offer it on sale at a fairly steep discount. If you can catch it during one of those times, it’s a spectacularly, colossally great deal.

The 9300 utilizes bleeding-edge tech in many of the same ways that the chair we just talked about does, but it also offers a stunning 8-roller array (compared to the quad rollers offered by the Real Relax 6500). It’s a masterpiece of design and not to be missed.

This model is also more expensive than the chair we just talked about, though not by much. It’s a great example of what you can get for a comparable amount of money if you buy from one of the big-name brands. A solid chair by any definition, if you want the security of buying from one of the big players in the industry, this would be a great choice.

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Official Manufacturer Support

References & Resources

• Real Relax, Official Brand Website.
• Massage Therapy for Sciatic Nerve Pain, Massage Today. 
• Effectiveness of Massage Therapy on Fatigue and Pain in Patients With Multiple Sclerosis, NCBI. 
• 14 Leg Massage Ideas, healthline.
• Massage Therapy Decreases Pain and Perceived Fatigue After Long-Distance Ironman Triathlon, Science Direct.