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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.
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
...and it involves actual tests? I'm pretty shocked.
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!
I'm confused by your confusion: if it measures neutral on a highly calibrated microphone in a given environment then wouldn't it sound neutral to a listener in the same environment?
Not necessarily, and actually highly unlikely. The problem is that if the sound is shaped to sound better in one spot, it will sound worse in other spots, especially when it does trickery like bouncing sound off walls. Unless you plug one ear with wax, and put the other one in the exact same spot as a directional mic, you won't hear the same.
There are some other problems with the test procedures here, including not testing sound latency nor echo effects as noise. If you send continuous tones, you won't capture these kind of problems, which are quite common in speaker systems that aren't unidirectional.
Playing back a rattle sound with varying speed easily exposes this problem, which direct line speaker systems are immune to.
Then there's the high-pass filter. You won't actually get deep bass, only psycho-acoustic approximations. But then again, today's generation grew up with music without any deep bass like tympani, or even mid-deep bass like bass guitar.
To get bass that moves your diaphragm, you need speakers that displace air with their diaphragm.
So, No, he has NOT 'provided empirical evidence that the HomePod reproduced sound more accurately than a speaker that costs nearly 3x its price.' .
Yes, he has, and your assertion to the contrary is nothing more than denialism. While you’re quite correct in arguing that having a flat response curve is not the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to speakers, that doesn’t change what he provided evidence of. You can disagree with his methodology or you can disagree with the conclusions people are drawing from his evidence (and by all means feel free to do so, since I’ll be right there with you in agreement that many of them are way off-base), but I don’t see how you can suggest that he didn’t even provide the evidence at all.
It is trivial to get flat response - and few look for that as the only requirement, because it comes at the cost of other bad problems.
Getting a truly flat response is hardly the trivial task you make it out to be, but I do agree that it’s generally not desirable. Flat responses are great for people mastering tracks or doing mixing (which is where I was first exposed to them), but the general population is usually better served with the warmed up sound that’s more popular in audiophile circles. Accurate sound can be fatiguing to listen to for prolonged periods and sounds unpleasantly harsh to most people’s ears.
As for your claim that beam forming isn’t possible, why do you say that? It seems perfectly plausible to me. You’d simply rely on reflection instead of spatial separation to achieve distance.
Will the results be as good? By no means! I agree with you on that. Direct line sound with proper spatial separation is going to be far superior, but using reflections and then calculating the correct delays to account for those reflections (for their seven tweeters, incidentally, not six as you incorrectly stated) is still beam forming. Again, I already said, “I frankly don't see how it can hold a candle to a proper stereo setup”, so I agree with your assertion that it will likely be a mess compared to real stereo. Even so, I stand by my remark that, “it does sound like it'd be pretty decent for people who want just one speaker”, which is a large chunk of the population.