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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 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
Equally obvious alternative title: some audiophile gear is way over-priced.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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!
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!
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
Monster audio cables are worth every penny, some people just don't have the aural capacity to appreciate their greatness.
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 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
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.
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.
Not so, for reasons that should be apparent once you take a look at the device's interior layout (see: Apple's HomePod page).
You'll notice that the sound is produced by a circular array of seven tweeters. Were the HomePod relying on the sound going directly from the tweeters to your ears, you're quite correct to suggest that (given the lack of spatial separation) it wouldn't be able to achieve a decent stereo effect. But the HomePod's sound isn't going directly to your ears. Rather, it's relying on the fact that the rear and side tweeters will have their sound reflected—and then coupling that with beam forming that's automatically recalculated whenever the accelerometer detects that the device has been moved—to produce a stereo effect.
The reviews I've seen so far seem to suggest that they've managed to achieve an outsized soundstage for such a small device, but I don't know what that really means in comparison to other devices, and I frankly don't see how it can hold a candle to a proper stereo setup. Even so, it does sound like it'd be pretty decent for people who want just one speaker.
As for the rest of the claims, which you call BS on, the original redditor didn't make the subjective claim (that the headline does) that the HomePod sounded better than the more expensive speaker. Rather, he claimed that it reproduced sound more accurately than the more expensive speaker, which is a claim that can be empirically tested and verified without subjectivity. Towards that end, he described his control setup, posted pictures of it, discussed how he accounted for confounding variables, and then provided graphs, numbers, and files with the raw data so that anyone interested in verifying or refuting his claims could be capable of doing so.
So, if you think his claims are BS, have at it. He's given you everything you need to disprove him. In the meantime, he's provided empirical evidence that the HomePod reproduced sound more accurately than a speaker that costs nearly 3x its price.
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.
except, of course, 6 speakers in a circle CANNOT ACHIEVE BEAMFORMING.
This is PURE marketing BS from Apple, there is no beamforming happening, because it is physically impossible given the physical layout, frequencies involved, driver geometry, etc. It is not even a matter of opinion, it is simply impossible.
What is being used is a mixture of room mode excitement, perceptual tuning and direct/reflect sound to give people some feeling of 'space', however there is practically no actual stereo separation. Really. Try listening to strong left/right panning audio on one - it is just a mess.
Of course the pudits, as usual, just swallow the pseudo-tech terms thrown out by marketing, and write big glowing reviews which assume thats what is actually happening...
What this 'with the numbers' review fails to address is the HORRIBLE compromises in other areas (I am looking at you, phase and group delay) that must be made to achieve what they are doing. These speakers are 'better' than a cheap PC speaker (and 90% of the shite bluetooth speakers people listen to these days), and yet such a large distance away from even a middling proper speaker setup that A/B blind testing is made impossible as it is simple to audible tell if you are listening to this is a proper pair of separated speakers.
If having flat frequency response was the main target of speaker design, then speakers would have been near perfect in the 60s.. and yet they were not.
But that wont stop the believers, marketers, and consumers who need to rationalise their purchases.
So, No, he has NOT 'provided empirical evidence that the HomePod reproduced sound more accurately than a speaker that costs nearly 3x its price.' .
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.