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Easy, they use a network clock and one of the homepods is the master clock. Basically the HomePods communicate with each other and have a reference time relative for each other. This stuff has been built into airplay for
A long time, iTunes has been able to stream music to multiple devices at one time, all perfectly in sync.

If your curious how Pro audio (think concerts) transmit audio over a IP network, web search “Dante Audio”.. this is a very robust and Versitle design that has been around for a while now..

What Apple is most likely having problems with is the active DSP part of it, having multiple speakers playing and actively tuning themselves in real time is hard when the speaker has to decern what it is hearing is what it’s producing and not what the other speaker is playing.. keep in mind it’s not just a matter of a left and right playing, it’s multiples of more than 2 that really starts to get stuff screwed up. I’m sure whatever they do will work and it will be “revolutionary” in how well it works, just like how the HomePod does it’s thing just as a single speaker..

You've basically said the same thing I did. A pair of speakers is not going to be as difficult to sync as 14 drivers (7 tweeters in each HomePod) when they're trying to do beamforming using precise phase adjustments.

From Audinates website:

While possible in principle, the practical limitations of current wireless technology (802.11a/b/g/n) render reliable audio performance, with ultra-low latency unachievable. For this reason, Dante Virtual Soundcard and Dante Via will not recognize wireless connections for audio data.

I'm quite familiar with Dante, MADI, AVB and all the other digital protocols since I use them regularly.
 
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Would anybody with an iPad Air 2 want to comment on how well 11.3 is running by now?
I don't have an iPad Air 2, but I do have an iPad mini 2 and have noticed a great increase in performance. It's still very slow and choppy in spots, but iOS 11.3 has made it usable again in my opinion because a lot of the animations have been smoothed out. iPad Air 2 was doing pretty good on iOS 11 to begin with, so I can imagine things are even better now on 11.3.

But yeah, for example on my iPad mini 2 the app switcher is pretty much perfectly smooth now, as is cover sheet (Notification Center). The unlock animation is also smooth now. What still needs work though is the pinch to close gesture, as well as viewing and dismissing notifications (long pressing and then sliding down to dismiss. or sliding right, tapping view, and then sliding down to dismiss. its choppy when it slides down off the screen, that used to be smooth). Also the final thing that bugs me is the animation when going from an app to the home screen is often completely skipped. This is due to RAM limitations, and has been existent since iOS 8. It's gotten worse and worse with subsequent updates, however.
 
You probably are new to delays applied to large companies, one example of numerous, Airbus 380 delay story is well reported, the plane was delayed for 2 years and cost overruns were in billions. Does that bring you back to the ground from the mighty high horse you are on?
If not, I give up, you win.

Thank you! Stuff like this is why I tend to stay out of the forums. When an update comes I'll scan through to see if anyone's found something interesting, but the constant, never ending bitching about 1) how Apple is doomed, 2) why [whichever release of whichever os was published] is THE WORST ever, 3) why [name of feature/product] isn't here yet, and how there's no excuse, or 4) how the os update someone installed 45 minutes ago has really killed their battery. It's really off putting. At any rate, thank you for calling out the unreasonable bitching.
 
Thank you! Stuff like this is why I tend to stay out of the forums. When an update comes I'll scan through to see if anyone's found something interesting, but the constant, never ending bitching about 1) how Apple is doomed, 2) why [whichever release of whichever os was published] is THE WORST ever, 3) why [name of feature/product] isn't here yet, and how there's no excuse, or 4) how the os update someone installed 45 minutes ago has really killed their battery. It's really off putting. At any rate, thank you for calling out the unreasonable bitching.

exactly how I feel.. I mean Jesus
 
Sadly it is becoming a irritating habit of Apple to sell future abilities in current devices. To me, it is like they put themselves in debt with us, and I can assure you that I don’t like it, and probably Steve wouldn’t either.

Actually, this most probably don’t fit in marketing deontology... it is misleading and gives very obviously no guarantees to us as consumers.

Apple wants to sell the skin of the bear before it took the decisive shot!! Just to hold us in their ecosystem. Some day, other companies will catch them, hell yeah!

“Feature debt” actually sounds like a really good way to put it, because that’s what it feels like. At some point in the past features slipped past their deadline and Apple has never managed to catch back up. And since they have constant keynotes, they have to continue promising new features that aren’t ready yet. Unfortunately it seems to be getting worse rather than better, increasing times from announcement to launch.

I think Apple needs to bite the bullet and take a catch up year, where they don’t announce too many new major software features. Of course this would mean less exciting keynotes and likely an associated drop in share price, so I figure we’ll be stuck in this situation for the foreseeable future. Off the top of my head I can think of AirPlay 2 for ATV/HomePod, the sports app for ATV and portrait mode for iPhone, none of which were ready to launch with the new product/software.
 
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Battery Monitoring
I wish Apple would include a feature for managing the charge limit for a charging session of the iOS devices to prevent any battery damage from sitting at 100% and still on charge overnight. I mean something that lets you set a selectable charge limit of, say 80%, and the device stops charging when it gets to the limit. It's widely publicised that Li-Ion batteries don't like sitting at 100% charge and that keeping a battery somewhere between 20% and 80% most of the time is good for battery longevity. Android has this feature and I wish Apple would spend a little time to help customers who want to protect the charge lifetime of their devices, rather that just telling me if my battery is already damaged...
 
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Anyone know if the time delay when streaming audio from say youtube to homepod is fixed in this release?
 
Are you really comparing an airplane to a software feature... o_O.

Yes, actually. The original point was:

However, Apple is way too large of a company to overlook something this much.

Both Airbus and Apple are large engineering organizations. Both face issues of scale. Both run into the engineering triangle. If we're going to complain that their quality has been lacking, they're going to focus more on quality, and something has to give in return. In this case, that something appears to be the ship date of AirPlay 2.
 
Easy. Sending audio over WiFi to separate speakers is not as easy as it sounds. You need to make sure that both (if you have a stereo pair) get their audio at exactly the same time. Even the slightest delay in unacceptable.

Note that by delay I’m not talking about large obvious delays like the sound not syncing up with a movie where their lips are moving and their voice is completely out of whack. I’m talking about tiny millisecond delays. Our ears localize sound based on the volume and phase (time delay) that sound reaches our ears. If the signal is out of phase slightly (because of a slight time delay) it can have a significant affect on the sound.

I’m really very curious how Apple is going to deal with this.

Oh please! I understand that this may be complicated. However, software development in general is complicated. Sonos and many other companies figured this out 16 years ago. You’re acting as if Apple is creating something new.
 
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Oh please! I understand that this may be complicated. However, software development in general is complicated. Sonos and many other companies figured this out 16 years ago. You’re acting as if Apple is creating something new.

Please show me any Sonos or other speakers where a pair have 14 individual drivers all with precise control of phase. Today, let alone 14 years ago.
 
I imagine the real issue here is HomePod troubles. Imagine you have two HomePods close enough to each other that the mics on one can hear the sound produced by the other. How does each of them calibrate the 8 amplifiers used to handle directionality? Each would have to understand which sounds picked up by its mics are eminating from itself vs the other speaker.

This. I think Apple made the system too complicated by having the speakers continually calibrating themselves. They should just have a one time calibration that they run through when they are moved, sort of like you can do with Sonos.
 
This. I think Apple made the system too complicated by having the speakers continually calibrating themselves. They should just have a one time calibration that they run through when they are moved, sort of like you can do with Sonos.

It doesn’t constantly calibrate itself though. It calibrates when you set it up and when you move it.

That’s why they built the accelerometers into it. If it calibrated itself constantly, that would nullify the need for accelerometers as it wouldn’t matter if had been moved, it would be calibrating anyway.

This makes calibration simple with more than one speaker as they can perform the calibration one after the other.

There’s been a lot of back and forth with AirPlay 2, the truth is they probably expected to be finished, so announced it, before discovering bugs. Just as they did with messages in the cloud. It’s that simple.

As big a company as Apple is, there’s always the possibility of errors happening and some can take a lot of time to fix. Any software developer big, or small will tell you that.
 
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I am still confused about iCloud Messages. Isn’t it supposed to sync attachements e. g. images too? So far in every beta it only keeps texts up to date which is disappointing. I thought I could finally get rid of my image clutter this way. Tired of deleted all the images on each devise separately without a damn DELETE ALL button.

Oh and then u delete some images. Check again and some of those that I just deleted are still there. This bug has been there since like iMessages was introduced.


So it doesn’t do a full backup of your message threads on cloud? I haven’t yet turned it on, as still Leary if losing info.

Carl
[doublepost=1520364770][/doublepost]iOS 11.3 Beta 4. My phone didn’t update on beta 4. Should it have updated with iPhone 7, or is that beta just downloading to other model phones?
 
Has anybody had any issues with contacts app? Since this beta all mi international prefix (+1, +52, +34, etc.) are gone in iPhone and iPad...
 
I literally had zero interest about this emoji thing until I saw the dragon. I have a little tiny bit less regret for buying the X now haha.
 
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"Update: In iOS 11.3 beta 4, the renamed "Books" app has reverted to its original "iBooks" name."

Apple really doesn't know what its doing do they.
 
I'm not a billion dollar company, nor do I have millions of customers... so yea. Why is this the defense?? It's not my job to do anything, I'm their customer. It's a terrible oversight on their part. Ha, people on here defend Apple way too much... they f'd up, simple as that.
Explain how it's an f up? How is not releasing a half-baked feature an f up? Is it because it's taking a long time to get right? Entitlement these days is out of control. This "I want it and want it NOW" mentality is pervasive and ugly.
[doublepost=1520452905][/doublepost]
"Update: In iOS 11.3 beta 4, the renamed "Books" app has reverted to its original "iBooks" name."

Apple really doesn't know what its doing do they.
Tech198 doesn't understand how beta software works...
 
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installed this beta yesterday Ip6 16 GB

free space is 6GB.. its slightly faster with better battery life than the previous one...
 
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