AirPlay 2 Brings HomePod Stereo Pairs and Multi-Room Audio To iOS 11.4 (betanews.com)

Today sees the release of iOS 11.4 and with it Apple is adding AirPlay 2. From a report: This brings some important changes to HomePod, including the stereo pairing option that was missing at launch. AirPlay 2 also adds multi-room audio to HomePod, bringing Apple's smartspeaker in line with Amazon Echo and Google Home. Other new features of iOS 11.4 include the ability to access iMessages via iCloud on any Apple device. The lack of stereo pairing and multi-room audio was seen by many as a failing of HomePod, but Apple has now addressed this. The company says that when two speakers are paired, they are capable of "delivering room-filling sound that is more spacious than a traditional stereo pair."

Comments

You're hearing it wrong

[PopeRatzo]

"The company says that when two speakers are paired, they are capable of "delivering room-filling sound that is more spacious than a traditional stereo pair."

You gotta give it to Apple. Who you gonna believe, them or your own lying ears?

Re:You're hearing it wrong

[fluffernutter]

If you are going the multi-room route, it is incredibly inefficient to put a separate pair of $700 speakers in every room. Yes, maybe those are decent for a primary space such as an entertainment room; but what if I want to set up a speaker in the bathroom so I can listen while I'm taking a shower? Or the garage for when I'm working on something? I'd prefer to just have reasonably decent but ultimately cheap speakers in those places. I have three stereo clock radios that sound pretty good and have aux inputs. I also have older devices I don't use any more. Again, this is part of a culture that throws out devices instead of reusing them.

Re:You're hearing it wrong

[LynnwoodRooster]

You could also go the SONOS route; get some small Play:1 speakers for the garage or bathroom. Bigger speakers/systems for other places, or a Connect for use with regular stereos. And have the ability to "stream the TV" from your Playbar/Playbase to all other speakers in the house, if you want (for big football games, for instance).

Re:You're hearing it wrong

[TheFakeTimCook]

"The company says that when two speakers are paired, they are capable of "delivering room-filling sound that is more spacious than a traditional stereo pair."

You gotta give it to Apple. Who you gonna believe, them or your own lying ears?

It's called "Acoustic Holography", and studios have been using it for years to use psychoacoustics to apparently place sound sources outside of the stereo field. I can't find any good cites at the moment; but I read about it several years ago.

Your brain is very easily deceived when it comes to sound-direction.

Re:You're hearing it wrong

[TheFakeTimCook]

Something tells me you're not going to replace a decent setup with a subwoofer with many small speakers, no matter how hard you try.

I tend to agree: But pretty much everyone who hears the HomePod in real life is amazed with how good they sound; and the frequency response plots seem to bear that out.

I haven't heard one (let alone two) yet. Have you? (Serious question)

Re:Squeezebox

[teg]

Yaay, Apple caught up to squeezebox! Created by Slim Devices in 2000 and later purchased by Logitech. Of course, with squeezebox you can have squeeze player on Android/iOS/Windows/Linux/MacOS driving a $5000 amp and speaker or a $20 one. But.... enjoy your vendor lock-in Apple fans. I'm sure you will tell yourselves the sound is fabulous.

Squeezebox was a good idea, executed poorly, I had a Squeezebox radio and a Squeezebox Touch. The radio is one of the few items I've ever returned - even just a room away from the Wifi-router, it was unable to get a good enough signal to play music reliably. Having skimped on the wireless networking, it only had 802.11g. The Touch was a little better, but using it was a pain. All in all, Squeezebox was unable to succeed, and died many years before Homepods were even announced.

Apple seems to be competing mostly with Sonos, and a little bit with Google Home and Amazon Echo.

Re:Seven twiddlers and a woofer...

[TheFakeTimCook]

Arrange your twiddlers around the periphery so that only one points forward. HomePod - bringing the Bose 901 "blur of audio-something generally over-in-that-direction" to the 21st century!

For those not aware, Bose calls their wideband midrange/tweeter transducer a twiddler.

Computer-controlled beamforming is a LOT different from Bose fakery.

If you'd get your head out of your ass, you'd see that there really is some pretty cool shit going on in the lowly HomePod.

Re:Seven twiddlers and a woofer...

[LynnwoodRooster]

Having listened and measured a HomePod, it's doing a bit more than the 901 - but not much, in terms of final results. Wave field synthesis is a pretty well-established field, and the biggest issue is always the tradeoff between image accuracy and image size. HomePod pushes way too far to the image size at great expense of image accuracy. A pair of them will most likely end up with a big image - and one that has no definition inside of it. Much like a modern 901.