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HomePod mini and HomePod Can't Be Stereo Paired, But HomePod Home Theater Support Coming Soon for Apple TV 4K

Getting there, albeit fairly slowly.

And I'll add to the 7.1/5.1 dream - Apple TV to have an INPUT from another device. If I could hook up my cable box to the Apple TV (and therefore use the Apple TV as a source switcher) as well as have a pair of HomePods as Front L/R and four (or six) more HomePod minis as C and R L/R I'd probably be happy to sell the B&Ws, the Denon and the sub-woofer.



cjbryce said:
For reference I have large B&W floor-standers, KEF surrounds, a Cambridge Audio sub, and a fairly decent Arcam Denon A/V home cinema in my living room.

I've had a HomePod since launch day - they're not exactly out of stock anywhere.

I've really enjoyed using HomePod - the sound quality remains astonishing from such a tiny little device and it's more than adequate - the bass is punchy, mid-range and top-end are ok but do let it down a little bit on some male vocals - some form of EQ control will be welcome and will probably sort that out.

All-in-all suits my needs well - I have both Apple Music and iTunes Match and I use HomeKit a fair bit. Siri has understood 95% of my requests - it struggles a little with non-English musician names/track titles, all HomeKit commands work perfectly. I have no inclination towards using Alexa or Google and I'm quite happy with the Apple ecosystem/walled garden. I don't use Spotify or similar, but if I did, then Airplay isn't exactly the hugest hassle.

All in all I've been impressed. Impressed enough to have just returned from the local PC World/Currys with a second one, which I'll use stand-alone in the living room for casual music listening there until pairing arrives at which point I'll transfer it to the bedroom as a music/TV stereo pair (I only have Apple TV in the bedroom, not even an antenna for broadcast TV). So I'm now looking forward to iOS 11.3/AirPlay2 - hurry it up Apple.

Wishlist:-
  • HomePod in HomeKit scenes - "play playlist x/scary dog barking if motion sensor triggered", "play song y at 07:00 every weekday morning", "play jazz and set the lights at dinner time" and so on
  • HomePod voice recognition (enabling multiple accounts)
  • User-defined HomePod EQ

Dreamlist:-
  • Apple TV 5 with Atmos, optical in from my main TV which would then be the source switcher for cable/BluRay/other devices
  • HomePod Sub (although for my tastes, the bass on the HomePod is pretty damned good)
  • No speaker cables at all ever again :)
  • B&W floor-standers on eBay (OK, that might never happen - they really are very good indeed)
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dannys1 said:
What don't you understand. Multiroom audio works - obviously it can't be made into a stereo pair with a different sized speaker.
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I was confused — my mind went to somehow the two sizes not working together for playing audio on the same network. As for stereo pairing — seems natural that the two different sizes couldn’t pair.
 
So, I can't pair the mini with an Apple TV? Is is that what they mean by Home Theatre, which is only available for the regular HomePod? I don't get it...
 
gnasher729 said:
Multi-room: You have one mono speaker in one room, and one in another room. They don’t have to match exactly because you hear only one at a time.
Stereo: You have one pair in a room as a stereo pair, that is one speaker cares more about the left channel and one cares more about the right channel. You need identical speakers, or one would be weaker than the other. They must play at exactly the same time, or you hear that they are out of sync. And you can hear whether vices or instruments are on the left or the right.

Trying to get stereo out of one big speaker and one small speaker would be a very bad idea.
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This is not correct. AirPlay 2 will make sure that multi-room is being played back synchronised. You can have multiple HomePod's within the very same room without doing any kind of "stereo pairing" and they will still make sure that playback is being synchronised you don't have any delay on the playback from one speaker to the other.

What Stereo-pair provides is to make sure that your audio is split into two different channels. One HomePod will act as the left channel, the other will act as the right channel.

If multi-room acted in the way you described I would have tossed my HomePods out the window a long time ago as we play music in all rooms all the time and in our apartment you are fully capable of hearing HomePods from several rooms all at once so not having them all playing perfectly synchronised would be awful and basically useless.

This was the case with AirPlay 1.0 where there was nothing in-place to make sure that playback is synchronised between devices but luckily this a part of AirPlay 2.0 so all AirPlay 2.0 devices and speakers have a on-device buffer that will make sure all playback is being played at the same time on all devices when you send audio to multiple speakers/multiple rooms at the same time.


Most users won't have much use of a stereo-pair for music playback. Most "modern" music isn't really mixed in true stereo anyways so you will barely notice any difference between having two HomePod's in stereo pair compared to simply having two working separately.
 
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Takeo said:
in what world does 1 or 2 speakers = 5.1 or 7.1 sound. Ridiculous.
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One only needs 2 speakers with enough separation and the right audio processing to place a sound any where. One only has two ears, so to localize a sound, one only needs to ensue the right amount of delay occurs between the sound for one ear and the other.
 
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mnsportsgeek said:
But if the U1 chip is as big if a deal as everyone says it is, why would I get the old HomePod?
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Because it will most likely have better audio quality, fidelity and able to play much louder without distortion? I mean for all the reasons you would normally go with the better speaker.

If you don't really care for the audio quality and fidelity the mini would be the obvious choice at this point.
 
ascender said:
I'm guessing what they mean is some sort of implementation of spatial audio?
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If you have two iPods and a TV, then you have at least 3 speakers.

Hopefully then can do something smart with that, letting the TV speaker be the center one, and using the two HomePods with spatial audio for the other channels.

It would be great if you could add two additional HomePods though to such setup, or even two minis.
 
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RamGuy said:
Because it will most likely have better audio quality, fidelity and able to play much louder without distortion? I mean for all the reasons you would normally go with the better speaker.

If you don't really care for the audio quality and fidelity the mini would be the obvious choice at this point.
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I mean that if U1 is the future, then a new HomePod is almost certainly on the horizon. Just seems weird that everyone is talking about how much of a game changer it is and yet the $300 smart speaker doesn’t have it.

And Apple conveniently left it off the pretty chart
 
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HomePod Big Boy rev2.0 is most likely around the corner featuring Apple S5 SoC instead of the much more power-hungry and out-of-date Apple A8 SoC that is currently being used for the Big Boy and will most likely feature both U1 and Thread Networking. I'd bet the design and speakers will pretty much stay the same but the move to S5 SoC will help lowering the price somewhat and make it "feature complete" when compared with the HomePod mini.
 
cjbryce said:
Getting there, albeit fairly slowly.

And I'll add to the 7.1/5.1 dream - Apple TV to have an INPUT from another device. If I could hook up my cable box to the Apple TV (and therefore use the Apple TV as a source switcher) as well as have a pair of HomePods as Front L/R and four (or six) more HomePod minis as C and R L/R I'd probably be happy to sell the B&Ws, the Denon and the sub-woofer.
Click to expand...

You’d be far better off foregoing the center channel or using a regular HomePod. You want the three fronts matched in capability and the mini will definitely not match a Homepod. The center channel is the most important speaker when it comes to home theater.
 
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itsmilo said:
i dont even get what that means. What is stereo-pair and what is the difference to multi-room?

Like lets say I have a HomePod in the living room and a HomePod Mini in the bathroom and bedroom. Am I able to play the same song at the same time through all devices or not?
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Yes, you can play the same song, from a mix of HomePods and HomePod Minis, all at the same time, even in the same room. However, a HomePod and HomePod Mini in the same room will merely play “all” the sounds of the song.

Both speakers play left and right sounds, so your HomePod on the left will play the left and right channels, while the other HomePod Mini, positioned to your right, will also play left and right channel sounds.

The two speakers won’t be able to be set up so that one plays ONLY the left channel sounds, while the other speaker ONLY plays the right.
 
Disagree on using your favorite songs. You’ll get tired of hearing that song that wakes you up. Put on a song you don’t really care for instead.
 
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Apple should get rid of the bigger HomePod and replace it with a sound bar that doubles as an Apple TV (or at least would offer up the TV app). Roku has several sound bar products. I’m sure Apple could make one that has better sound quality.

www.roku.com

Roku Audio | Surround Sound Systems & Home Theater | Roku

Roku surround sound systems let you listen to your entertainment in premium audio. From streambars & wireless products, build your home theater system now.
www.roku.com
 
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scaramoosh said:
And will it have the unusable latency of Airplay? Seriously try and play games with it on your Mac, it’s so bad. Bluetooth is needed.
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That is because Airplay 2 is not supported by macOS. If you use any iOS device or Music app on macOS( which supports Airplay 2), you won't have the latency issues
 
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