I know it's got seven tweeters, Apple won't let you forget that, but how is subscribing to Apple's compressed music service to be pushed through a mono system of speakers going to "sound incredible?
You could check my earlier explanation of why this is not a "
mono system." HomePod takes a stereo input, analyzes that stereo "sound stage," and synthesizes it into an 8-channel system - each speaker in the box has its own channel.
Mono (when created from a stereo signal) is the sum of Left and Right - it is always less than the sum of its parts, because the sum of left and right includes the loss of certain frequencies from certain instruments... Sorry, I don't want to write a treatise on phase cancellation, but basically, summed mono sucks.
Speaking as a former audio engineer who produced concerts for live radio broadcast for 25 years, I had to accept mono as a fact of life - lots of people would be listening on crappy audio systems, and I wanted my sound to be as good as it could be on those systems as well as $100,000 audiophile systems. That meant doing what I could to avoid phase cancellation, and it meant checking my mix in mono and on crap speakers as well as my expensive stereo control room monitors. It was really nice to get compliments from audiophiles on the quality of my sound, but I also had to make sure the masses wouldn't tune out.
The audio industry has long taken advantage of the knowledge that our ears can more easily detect location from mid- and high-frequency sounds, but we have a harder time detecting directionality in low frequency sounds. That's why so many home theater systems have a single sub-woofer and multiple small "satellite" speakers carrying only midrange and highs. It's a highly economical solution to an otherwise expensive and space-wasting alternative - 5-7 large, full-range speakers.
In the case of HomePod, you can consider this to be the equivalent of an 8-speaker home theater system - mono woofer, plus 7 satellites - they just happen to be arrayed in a single enclosure. It's a similar approach to the one Bose has been using for several generations - adding complexity to the listening room sound field by mounting additional speakers on the rear of the speaker enclosure, facing the wall. The big difference is that Bose did this passively - no signal processing. Stereo in, stereo out. Apple, on the other hand, is throwing an entire computer at this.
As to "Apple's
compressed music service," of course it's data-reduced, for the same reason web sites post JPG images, not TIFFs or RAW. Bandwidth and storage space come at a cost, both in dollars and in real-world performance. Now, you may happen to be a cost-is-no object audiophile who believes he can detect every nuance and imperfection, but a mass-market product has to strike a balance in order to satisfy the largest possible customer base - if too many users can't stream the service because it demands too good a cellular (or even wifi) signal, then there are going to be a lot of unhappy customers.
In the end, music listening is NOT about technical quality, it's about music - composition, musicianship, arrangement, melody, lyrics, harmony, counterpoint... Someone who truly loves the music, for its own sake, isn't going to let themselves be upset by technical imperfections unless they're so glaring and obnoxious that they become distracted - say, the person sitting behind you coughing or opening a candy wrapper (or loud pops and clicks from a black vinyl disk) during a heart-rending pianissimo passage. What audiophiles typically complain about can be compared to the story of the Princess and the Pea. Sure, the princess may truly have been able to detect that pea under a stack of mattresses, but it takes a really special individual to lose sleep over it.