HomePod Are there still audio delays?

[senttoschool]

My OG Homepod died a few months ago.

I stream music using Spotify from my phone, iPad, Apple Silicon Mac to my Homepod. Usually, there was about a second delay between sound on my local device and the Homepod.

This delay also makes it impossible to watch a Netflix movie on my Mac and stream the audio to my Homepod which sounds much better than my 16" M1 Pro MBP speakers.

Has Apple done anything to fix this recently? How about the new upcoming Homepod?

 

[TorbenIbsen]

Two guesses. - We use Apple TV 4K connected to our TV and have two Homepod Mini as stereo speakers. That works without any delay. So perhaps the delay is "only" a Mac-related problem.

But there is another possibility I would check. - In my country (Denmark) we cannot officially buy Hompod Mini yet. So ours are imported from Germany (next door country). This means that our Homepod Minis cannot do any "smart" things, including not being able to use Siri. So it might be all those "smart" features which causes the delay. Perhaps turning off Siri and other smart features off will help? Obviously I cannot test this myself because there is no support for the smart things in my country yet.

 

[pup]

My experience has been that Airplay doesn’t do a great job of syncing and maintaining synchronization among various speakers. I had particular trouble with both a HomePod and an AppleTV when I was using them - no idea why but it must be something with the os. At its worst, the sound could be a half second or even more out of sync; and at best, you could detect, if not be terribly bothered by, a slight delay from one set of speakers to another. Usually, stopping the music and restarting it would re-sync speakers that had drifted.

I didn’t realize though how much this affected the music until I got rid of my last Airplay devices and was able to switch to the Sonos app rather than using Airplay. The difference in sound quality was noticeable - my wife even mentioned it without knowing that I had changed anything. Everything became crisper and a bit brighter and the sound going from room to room just seemed much more seamless. That leads me to believe that airplay even has a hard time keeping stereo pairs in alignment - certainly not to the degree of precision that Sonos’ protocol offers. This is all with a fully wired network, btw.

Anyway, all that to say that I suspect syncing inaccuracy is why apple hasn’t been able to offer a true home cinema solution and why syncing between source and speakers continues to be a bear for users like yourself. It’s frustrating though that Apple can’t even seem to get your specific issue right, since streaming audio to a single speaker from a Mac that has control over both audio and video should be a slam dunk.

 

[nutmac]

The answer seems to be Apple TV 4K. That is, if you stream video to Apple TV 4K, which in turn, is paired with HomePods, the audio and video will be in sync. But this setup will also require using a display device with HDMI connection.

 

[macpeach55]

Late to the party, but the lack of time alignment with Airplay is frustrating. I use the app Airfoil & it does a great job of aligning all the speakers in our place, plus the connection seems way more stable than Airplay - & it's especially nice for when you want to listen to something while moving from room to room.

 

[japanime]

Late to the party, but the lack of time alignment with Airplay is frustrating. I use the app Airfoil & it does a great job of aligning all the speakers in our place, plus the connection seems way more stable than Airplay - & it's especially nice for when you want to listen to something while moving from room to room.

Airfoil is great for audio-only content (Apple Music, Spotify, podcasts, etc.). But it doesn't help with the delay when streaming video.

 

[Minato1990]

This is ****ing crazy.
I have HomePod minis in our bedroom and I got a M2Pro this summer as a NAS server which was running headless, but I moved it to the bedroom with a desk and a screen. I tried connecting it to the HomePod minis and there's that delay I've been looking online and to see that its an issue that is still not resolved by Apple is ****ing bonkers like what the hell?!

 

[erihp]

part of the reason for the delay when using airplay 2 is so the protocol can sync playback across network latent devices and maintain a cache so all devices can start together.

this is most noticeable to me when i use Quanta to playback vinyl directly to sync playback across multiple airplay 2 receivers like airport express and homepod minis. put the needle down, then two seconds later, all speakers are playing the same stream synced together, its glorious.

using airplay for some sort of synced video playback? good luck.