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.

Comments

No Spotify, no deal

[Little_Professor]

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

Re:Duh

[uvajed_ekil]

Equally obvious alternative title: some audiophile gear is way over-priced.

An article with audiophiles and Apple products

[Headw1nd]

...and it involves actual tests? I'm pretty shocked.

Re:An article with audiophiles and Apple products

[mikeiver1]

Semi anechoic measurements in ones home or office with a calibrated mic are fine but the facts are still the same... Rooms have peaks and dips in response due to the reflections of the sounds at various frequencies. These build up in ways that, though they can be corrected for a specific listening location, will still cause havoc in the rest of the space resulting in a less than satisfactory listening experience. IE: listening out of the "sweet spot". There is in reality no way to correct a rooms acoustics for all listening locations. The other issue for some will be listening fatigue. A small driver is unable to reproduce the lowest octaves of the audio range and must resort to psycho acoustic trickery to make you think you hear what is not really there. This will lead to listener fatigue. In the case of speakers there is literally no replacement for displacement.

Check the THD plots

[LynnwoodRooster]

THD in the lower frequencies (below ~75 Hz) is between 18% and 56%, per his own graphs. I guess that is audiophile?

Re:Check the THD plots

[LynnwoodRooster]

Airplay can do Redbook audio if your SOURCE material is that bit rate (good luck getting that on to your phone, though). Apple Music is 256 kbps; you'd have to do your own rips to get to redbook (16/44.1), but you cannot do high resolution audio at all. Period. Nada. Apple doesn't care about high quality audio - just Beats and earpods and a mono speaker it claims can be full stereo (but which, in reality, it is not per lots of reviews, not to mention the laws of physics).

The butt hurt is strong with you!

Re:Confused

[arth1]

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.