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Reddit Audiophiles Test HomePod, Say It Sounds Better Than $1,000 Speaker (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple released its much-hyped HomePod speaker to the masses last week, and the general consensus among early reviews is that it sounds superb for a relatively small device. But most of those reviews seem to have avoided making precise measurements of the HomePod's audio output, instead relying on personal experience to give generalized impressions. That's not a total disaster: a general rule for speaker testing is that while it's good to stamp out any outside factor that may cause a skewed result, making definitive, "objective" claims is difficult. But having some proper measurements is important. Reddit user WinterCharm, whose real name is Fouzan Alam, has made just that in a truly massive review for the site's "r/audiophile" sub. And if his results are to be believed, those early reviews may be underselling the HomePod's sonic abilities. After a series of tests with a calibrated microphone in an untreated room, Alam found the HomePod to sound better than the KEF X300A, a generally well-regarded bookshelf speaker that retails for $999. What's more, Alam's measurements found the HomePod to provide a "near-perfectly flat frequency response," meaning it stays accurate to a given track without pushing the treble, mids, or bass to an unnatural degree. He concludes that the digital signal processing tech the HomePod uses to "self-calibrate" its sound to its surroundings allows it to impress at all volumes and in tricky environments. "The HomePod is 100% an audiophile grade speaker," he writes.
...still needs more cowbell.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
..and Bose' 'space age' technology lets their shitty 70s era paper coned, echo chamber speakers sound great too.
Of course some people are saying it's better than everything else, it's got an Apple logo on it.
Not saying they're right, but this should not be unexpected.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
And yet it can't even play Spotify using voice control A major fail. The walled garden works as long as the services you are tied to are actually competitive with the alternatives. Apple Music sucks in terms of compatibility. I want a service I can use to play music anywhere
Imagine how much better it would sounds with a $485 wooden knob
Of course there was that time when a bunch of audiophiles couldn't distinguish the difference between the results when using Monster Cables vs coat hangers...
The price of a speaker and a bunch of so-called-audiohpihles endorsing it doesn't mean much.
...and it involves actual tests? I'm pretty shocked.
Quick, somebody sell me this privacy destroying microphone!
Also this homepot certainly is quite mono, ..?
So is it actually measured as neutral, or is it applying DSP tricks to *sound* neutral given the environment? The summary seems to indicate both, but these are mutually exclusive goals. Interestingly enough, most people aren't used to hearing neutral sound and react poorly upon hearing it for the first time. It'll be interesting how this is received.
If there is anyone I trust, it is audiophiles from the Internet. They are the ones that prompted me to buy the $10,000 gold plated cables to hook my gear together. My music has never sounded better!
blasfemy, to be audiophile grade this speaker should have gold contacts, be analog, cost an arm and a leg, have a "warm" and "full" sound, but be no different than a 5 dollar speaker to everyone else.
THD in the lower frequencies (below ~75 Hz) is between 18% and 56%, per his own graphs. I guess that is audiophile?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Can somebody "Jailbreak" the HomePod so it can be flashed or in some other way given new firmware?
Sounds like great hardware suffocating within a walled garden. Set it free.
The Apple HomePod sounds good, but other smart speakers sound better.
#DeleteFacebook
Too bad all of your losses audio is trapped in music libraries that you are not allowed to connect to homepod. -- "You may want to use iTunes Match or iCloud Music Library to keep your iTunes library in the cloud. If your iTunes library contains lossless files, iTunes Match and iCloud Music Library treat them differently from other files. If the files are matched, then they’re matched to the iTunes Store equivalents: files at 256kbps AAC. If iTunes can’t match them and needs to upload them, iTunes converts them to 256kbps before uploading. This means that your lossless files will never be in the cloud." - Macworld
No stereo sepadation
I don't trust slashdot anymore.
...the anguished REEEEEEEs coming from the incoming horde of apple-haters about to post on this thread sound crystal clear.
Didn't read TFA or ever listen to one of these things, but it's not anywhere near audiophile quality.
Hey APPLE! Where's the support for 24-bit audio?
Life is not for the lazy.
To be accurate, they compared the HomePod to a $999 speaker. That extra dollar might make all the difference.
Have gnu, will travel.
I used to be a sound tech. I've tested more speakers than I care to count, and set up enough audio rigs that I can typically pinpoint sound quality problems in a few seconds with the right test clips.
Pro tip: It's almost never the speakers' problem.
I know it annoys the "audiophile" crowd, but a speaker is, for the most part, just a speaker. The response curve doesn't matter much, if you can equalize it to suit your taste. Yes, I said that evil nasty word: taste. No, you're not usually going to get objective measurements of a "good" or "bad" speaker that are worth anything*, because listening to sound, especially music, is a heavily subjective experience.
If I'm setting up a sound system for a classical piano concert, the whole system is configured for that goal... There is still reinforcement, but it's only to boost what's naturally echoed by the room, not to push anything unnaturally. For a rock concert, I usually arrange the sound differently, boosting instruments to match the band's desired sound profile. Generally, my best advice is to figure out what kind of mood the music is supposed to inspire, and adjust to fit that.
If the HomePod includes an automatic equalizer, that's great, but I'd just as soon spend 15 minutes doing proper configuration on my own. Frankly, a flat response sounds boring. I prefer a thumping (but not rumbling) bass, with clear vocals. In other words, I like a fairly deep low-end disco scoop. Is the HomePod for me? Eh, perhaps not, unless I can tweak it or pull the output to my own system. After all, I'm the one listening to the music, so I should enjoy it, no?
* There are actually bad systems out there, but (barring mechanical failure) they're usually because somebody put too much work into fine-tuning to meet a particular response curve spec, rather than making things that sound good. Such systems can be identified (and rejected) in about 30 seconds by playing the Star Wars main theme.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
it must be true!
I'm an Apple house, we have it all, but I've had Sonos Play 5 for a couple of years.
We got the HomePod and I did a side-by-side comparison by playing 'Such Great Heights' from the Sonos and from the HomePod. This song has been a good test for me because there are well-defined trebles and bass notes with a tenor/alto vocal that sounds clean. Both units were tuned to the room using their tuning algorithms.
To be completely honest, based on my hearing (and I'm older than 45, younger than 50), the Sonos has a little bit more depth in the mid-range and bass. But it's close. The HomePod does well with hearing 'Hey Siri' even when the music is on, and so far it seems like Siri works better than it has in the past (we don't push it though). Sonos is also a little louder.
Both have high quality sound, I haven't plugged my Vienna Acoustic Grand Beethoven's into my receiver for three years because they have been good enough for my needs.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
It uses gold coated platinum antenna on the wifi. The spokesman said, "It is a myth to say signal quality does not matter for digital transmission. The new Monster Cable Wi-Fi router will broadcast perfectly circular zeros and the perfectly straight ones. All audiophiles will appreciate the difference in the sound quality".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The perfect trifecta of absolutely cringeworthy bullshit.
The $999 price is for a *pair* of speakers, so you can listen in stereo.
This Apple thing costs $349 for a single speaker. So unless you listen exclusively to pre-1965 monophonic classics, it will sound significantly less good than any decent pair of stereo speakers.
This guy doesn't know how to interpret or display measurements.
Someone took his measurements and posted a graph displayed properly. This speaker is bad.
https://i.imgur.com/hWRCOUnr.png
$179 earpods are cheap?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Like "wine experts", they are people who believe their imagination is actually real, to use snobbery, to inflate and compensate their inferioity complexes.
I have seen enough tests with "audiophiles", where they believed something to be better in an ABX test, purely because the equipment happened to have a higher output volume.
I have also seen them claim, that Monster cables and a $400 replacement wooden volume knob would make the sound "warmer". Or that vinyl sounds better because "digital sound waves are jagged", showing zwro clue of how *any* of this works.
Plus, Reddit is a cesspit of viral advertising and political propaganda, disuised under a very thin veil of lame immature meme parroting. (Disclaimer: I worked for one of the big social media campaing organizers.)
So I could not give less of a crap about their views.
If you want some serious views, at least the head-fi.org forums have some professionals with actual technical competency, who can make actual arguments, that allow you to tell them from morons who use emotion-only terms like "warmth".
No self respecting "audiophile" is going to review a speaker with no real stereo separation and pseudo stereo as good
I'm sure it is quite possible to do some ABX testing on this speaker vs some others and arrange them into an order that represents their comparative quality without people's bias / imagination creeping into reviews.
are those the guys who buy overpriced 50s technology with the illusion that performs better than current technology.
After their TOS "changes", I can only hope it leads to some of them getting terminated.
Did they have a cat knock it off a table six or seven times to check the toughness?
If it isn't cat proof it is junk.
The most striking six comments I have read in almsot every review of this device are consistent:
1. It has stereo-like directional sound effects.
2. It sounds good in any room. Somehow it is adpating
3. There is no "sweet" spot but sounds good in most places in the room. This one is very intriguing.
4. It's definition is very good. not mushy sounding like typical devices.
5. remarkable base that doesn't turn to buzzing when cranked to max volume
6. the ability to command siri is not affected by how loud the sound is, and works at great ranges.
It "sounds" like this is a sonic engineering masterpiece.
By the way, bose also does sonic engineering to make inexpensive parts sound great. I would think that computer people would actually appreciate this since it's effectively what microchips did-- replace expensive bespoke electronics with universal cheap electronics via free-to-replicate software engineering.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We live underground. We talk with our hands. We wear the earplugs all of our lives. Do not use the HomePod.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
"Sorry, I wasn't able to find sod around the woods for pounding sneakers. Here are some web results though."
As in: Not *actually* disabled. But merely giving you the warm and fuzzy feeling of a psychopath luring you into their manipulative delusion, right before raping your private area for profit.
the not "mushy" sound is interesting because one common reason for a device to sound mushy is because the device is non-linear so while it could play any one frequency in a "flat" way, it can't play them all at the same time.
This is almost dictated by the physics. And this is why, in part, why speakers that divide up the base and trebble to different speakers do better.
A related phenomena is the direction of sound. a given speaker may angularly radiate different frequency bands differently. Again giving both mush and imbalance in a room.
the fact the the apple speaker is reported to have clarity, directional sound, and self-equalization based on the room suggests they are actively compensating for the non-linearities.
if so $350 is shocking cheap!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
For the past 60 years, the electronics industry has been telling people that stereo sound is the way to go... now Apple is selling a monaural sound system? (Granted, in theory two of them can be used for stereo... if you don't mind paying $800 and seeing them argue over who answers the audio commands)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
can we get a non apple fan boi to test this? :P
After hundreds of years of engineering speakers, why haven't we come up with an almost eprfect speaker?
There seems to have been some progress - those 10$ little chinese bluetooth speakers sound way better than most medium range speakers I heard when I was growing up, IMHO - but how come that there's still innovation happening regarding how you route some air pressure waves through a box?
These are the same people that think an IPHONE is the best phone and will stand in line every time a new model comes out.
If you're talking about actual music listening, you need a minimum of 2 speakers. 1 speaker cannot create stereo imaging accurately. Even 2 speakers together touching each other can't either.
I call BS on this reporting and it's likely a shill post from Apple employees.
Grown men gushing over a DSP-equalized mini speaker. Congratulations morons, you rediscovered Bose.
A true audiophile grade loudspeaker will faithfully reproduce the timbre of acoustic instruments and voices. I'm a stickler for mid-range detail and clarity and that doesn't come easily, and certainly you're not going to get it in a HomePod. Loudspeaker design isn't magic, nor is there anyone at Apple who suddenly knows more than the zillions of audio designers out there. It's just physics and as innovative as Apple may be with software and the user interface, that's not the same thing as physics.
if you want to build a great audiophile loudspeaker in the under $1000 class, build the Linkwitz LXmini system available as a kit from Madisound. No "audiophile" cables needed. This design images and gives a more natural presentation better than most commercial designs costing many times more.
4Chan Technophiles Test Gentoo On ThinkPad Bought From eBay, Say It Works Better Than $1000 Laptop.
It's going to be playing back streaming audio?
Seriously? A $1000 pair of decent speakers would utterly destroy this thing. I'd wager a $350 pair would actually.
COMPRESSED streaming audio. Admittedly codecs are getting better but few (if any) do streaming lossless.
A Reddit audiophile!
Good one. I laughed.
Seriously!
Bah! Pear Anjou cables are the minimum acceptable cables you should be using. Sure, they're about $450/foot but aren't your ears worth it?
(Yes... I'm kidding. But not about that pricing.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
No, you can not hear it. Nobody can. Not even trained experienced professionals with 5-figure worth of gear.
The purpose of high-res is to compensate for losses during extensive editing and mixing. (Where you usually use floating point anyway.)
Of course it can also be used to rip off losers who belive it can compensate their perceived lack of self-worth. Just like rhino horn powder or gold watches and the likes.
Stereo
Without AUX or any other input (not even bluetooth), the Homepod can only be used with iPhones or iPads and nothing else.
So three years from now, it will be useless, whereas my stereo speakers will be still useful and used 20 years from now, just like they were 20 years ago when I bought them.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Therefore it is useless. There is good reason why we make A/B test or technical test only : to avoid the visual bias.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Any audio review that doesn't have the words "blind" and "double" in close proximity is just someone defending or attacking something they have an emotional reaction to. I thought we'd worked that out by now.
If he'd just posted the "bias" section and the words "I liked it", it would have had exactly the same useful content for anyone wondering whether to buy the thing.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I have some Teufel PC Bamster here with a frequency range specified starting from 100Hz. This is a small soundbar. The actual usable frequency range starts quite lower: this thing has an aluminum frame touted as making it feel "solid" but that's just an excuse for weighing down the thing with internal weights, giving it a rubbery full-scale underside covering and orienting the speakers semi-vertically. As a result, it turns your table top (which has a more reasonable surface area for low frequency reproduction) into a bass speaker substitute without rattling around on it. Obviously, you cannot spec this since the overall effect very much depends on your table. They also don't advertise it. But it's definitely part of what makes the thing sound better than it should.
So I would not rule out that the dearth of measurements to support the "sounds good" contention here also is a case of the typical placement making more than the device itself involved with sound emission.
LOL! More blatant BS.
Your one to talk about people ignoring facts they don't want to believe and continuing along their merry way. https://slashdot.org/comments.... You still try to push that lie, even though you know it's not true.
In Apple Russia, speaker listens to YOU!
http://pogueman.tumblr.com/post/170722337727/head-to-head-does-the-apple-homepod-really-sound
Never trust apple to be fair.
In apple USA speaker votes for you.