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Apple Homepod Review: Locked In (theverge.com)
On Tuesday, the review embargo lifted for full reviews of Apple's new HomePod smart speaker. The Verge's Niley Patel shared his thoughts on Apple's new HomePod in video and written form. Patel found that while it offers best-in-class sound for the price, Siri is frustratingly limited and the voice controls only work with Apple Music. Furthermore, Siri can't tell different voices apart, therefore raising some privacy concerns as anyone can come up to the speaker and ask Siri to send and read text messages and other private information aloud. Here's an excerpt from the report: The HomePod, whether Apple likes it or not, is the company's answer to the wildly popular Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers. Apple is very insistent that the $349 HomePod has been in development for the past six years and that it's entirely focused on sound quality, but it's entering a market where Amazon is advertising Alexa as a lovable and well-known character during the Super Bowl instead of promoting its actual features. Our shared expectations about smart speakers are beginning to settle in, and outside of engineering labs and controlled listening tests, the HomePod has to measure up. And while it's true that the HomePod sounds incredible -- it sounds far better than any other speaker in its price range -- it also demands that you live entirely inside Apple's ecosystem in a way that even Apple's other products do not. The question is: is beautiful sound quality worth locking yourself even more tightly into a walled garden? As for technical specifications, the HomePod comes in at 6.8 inches high, 5.6 inches wide, and weights 5.5 pounds. It features a high-excursion woofer with custom amplifier, array of seven horn-loaded tweeters, each with its own custom amplifier, six-microphone array, internal low-frequency calibration microphone for automatic bass correction, direct and ambient audio beamforming, and transparent studio-level dynamic processing.
How much does it spy on you?
Why is Snark Required?
C'mon. HiFi has been around since the 1950's. It doesn't take six years for a multi-billion dollar company to R&D good sound.
Getting good sound by sitting between two medium to large-sized speakers properly located (rule of 3rds) and toed in is easy. Getting good sound from a small cylinder placed arbitrarily in a room is difficult.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Where else can you find a speaker with beam forming for that price? Generally you have to look to spend about $20,000 to get that kinda setup.
Airfoil and Airfoil Satellite are in the vein of what you’re looking for, so far as software goes. There’s also AirParrot that can act as a sender. You might be able to use Airfoil Satellite with an old iPod Touch receiving audio through the 3.5mm headphone/mic jack, which then transmits it back to Airfoil on a PC/Mac, which then transmits it via AirPlay to the HomePods, but I have no idea if that’d actually work and it sounds like way too brittle of a workflow.
Besides which, why introduce latency concerns, especially if you’re watching movies or talking about hooking up consoles? It’s one thing for music, where latency isn’t a problem, but it’s something else when you now have lips out of sync with the words being spoken or audio cues that don’t correspond to the inputs you’re providing or the action on the screen.
Actually I was not impressed by the sound of any Sonos speaker. I have not yet heard the Homepod, not sure if I’ll find it good enough but eager to see it in action - the reviews are uniform in extolling the audio quality. In the end I might give up on the idea and just replace my big floorstanders with small speakers, though I like the idea of using the homepods for music streaming without switching on the hifi, and only switching it on for other sources incl tv sound.
Forgot to mention that direct support of apple music is sufficient for me. Some other services can be airplayed. I think that I could airplay netflix audio from the apple tv to it but must check (can anyone confirm?). It is for me really a matter of also adding non-computer sourced audio from analog line level or derived from hdmi.
Well, on the good side, it sounds like reducing latency has been a major focus for Airplay 2, which is due out for the HomePod via software update in a few months, so it may become more viable. Even so, I not convinced there’s a huge market for that sort of thing. Seems to me they could simply enable Bluetooth support using the existing hardware the HomePod has to eliminate the market for a device like that, given that you could then use one of the existing analog to Bluetooth adapters that exist.
Honestly, all the engineering done here seems to be with the intention of mitigating shortcomings inherent in having all your speakers sitting in a tiny box that gets placed on the kitchen shelf, or on top of a bar in the center of the room, or some other suboptimal spot. Cool, it's got automatic bass response correction... but where is that bass going to go when it leaves the plastic speaker container? The laws of physics, specifically acoustics, still apply - where the speakers are placed will have a *huge* effect on the sound. Placing the speaker in a corner is the best way to get bass that really fills and shakes the room. You'd need to stand the thing on its side to angle it right to take advantage of the acoustics of being in that corner. What's that going to do to the mics and the tweeters?
Where is the stereo image going to come from? Is it possible to link two together and have them split the channels properly? Why 7 tweeters? It sounds like this thing is designed to be placed into the center of a room and sort of radiate the sound evenly around it... meaning no stereo image.
Bass, bass, bass. The laws of physics again - no matter how high the excursion is on your woofer, if it's only measuring something like 3-4 inches, and it's sitting on a countertop, your low frequency response is going to be seriously limited.
Sure, it sounds good... compared to a tinny phone speaker, or the awful crap they put into the new TVs, "sound bars", and $30 Bluetooth tabletop speakers. But if you are looking to spend $350 on speakers, you can get a real serious set for that sort of money. This overpriced Apple gadget is no replacement. You're spending $350 on Siri. If you've got that money to blow, go ahead and blow it. But don't let the Reality Distortion Field get you.
C'mon. HiFi has been around since the 1950's. It doesn't take six years for a multi-billion dollar company to R&D good sound.
Getting good sound by sitting between two medium to large-sized speakers properly located (rule of 3rds) and toed in is easy. Getting good sound from a small cylinder placed arbitrarily in a room is difficult.
Considering Apple is the leading vendor in low-fidelity head-phones. I suspect the trick is simple to TELL people is has great audio, and most of their customers would believe it without having anything to compare to.