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

After the update last night, I got the prompt on my phone for home theatre support. I didn’t see anything unusual on my ATV4K.

I didn’t get to test it last night, but I will tonight.
 
infinitejest said:
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...
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Home theatre in its' most basic guise is 5 seperate speakers and five seperate sound signals [3 in front of the listener and two behind the listener to give the listener the sense of sound passing over and around them, e.g. like a plane flying over you etc], a 5.0 system; more often or not as a minimum you would add a subwoofer [for bass], i.e. 5.1. Once you consider bigger rooms and things like Dolby Atmos you have more speakers at height in front and behind the listener, plus often speakers directly above the listener and more subwoofers. Home theatre as apposed to a real theatre [which might have 30-40 speakers to give you that big sound]

A mini connected to Apple TV or a TV is not home theatre..it would just be an alternate speaker to the ones in your TV and probably sound little better since your TV will have at least two speakers [left and right] so you would get some seperation and spacial awareness.
 
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Does anybody here mix different wired speakers for left-right stereo pairs? Say...an Klipsch speaker for the left speaker and a Kef speaker for the right?
 
Makes sense. They will have different acoustic properties. The stereo would not sound right.
 
Apple TV User said:
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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There’s basically zero chance that they’re enlisting the help of the TV’s speaker - the sound would be slightly different from every TV (one has more beefy speakers, another has crappy tinny speakers because they assume you’re going to get a sound bar, etc.), how would they balance that with their carefully controlled HomePod output? How would they account for the differing amounts of lag between the HomePods vs the TV’s speakers?

I see this “use two HomePods to play back 5.1, 7.1, or Atmos soundtracks” as a strong indication that they’re not going to do a “HomePod center channel” or a real “HomePod Home Theater” setup - this is all we’re going to get: bouncing sound off side walls to imitate real discrete surround sound. It’ll sound nice, but not as convincing as real surround sound. It seems they’re ceding that market to Sonos and similar. I’ll go back to hoping that Sonos and Apple work out real Siri / HomeKit integration for Sonos speakers.
 
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Rogifan said:
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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Say what? I'm not going to fit a soundbar in every room where I want decent sound quality. I fully agree that a HomePod Center or whatever they would call it and it might as well have an Apple TV built-in would make sense. But not as a replacement for the regular HomePod.

Unless the HomePod mini somehow defies the laws of physics and somehow manages to match the HomePod Big Boy in terms of audio quality and fidelity I would prefer to have the HomePod Big Boy in pretty much every scenario where I care about the sound. So only offering a soundbar and the mini, and no decent speaker for additional rooms sound like a poor choice.
 
vipergts2207 said:
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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Regular HomePod it’ll be then. 😊
 
Thats fine, we have to regular HomePods, we also have a sound bar that has been giving us fits.

So we'll order 2, probably more like 4, mini's, move the regular HomePods to the mantle to take the place of the soundbar and use the mini's throughout the rest of the house.
 
I'm excited that they are getting into HT and I think it will be a nice market for them. I think there is a decent sized group that would love to experience surround sound and would like more than what a sound bar gives you but aren't interested in drilling a bunch of holes in their wall. Apple's in a great position with the way everything integrates you could have an Apple TV as an entertainment/streaming hub, a gaming console and a wireless HT receiver and the cost of some of the equipment you could replace with it is a really good value.
 
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This is all really cool stuff especially with two home pods doing dolby atmos......now can they update the damn Apple TV sometime this decade?
 
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R3k said:
So a 5.1 or 5.0 system with Home Pod's mixed with Hom Pod Mini's is not possible? Shame if not.
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Who said it will never be possible? It’s just not possible YET. Do you know surround setup vastly different from stereo in its objective, right?
 
Keep in mind that Dolby Atmos here would really only consist of the object-oriented audio portion of Atmos. The HomePods aren't physically capable of mimicking height channels.
 
To bad i wont buy one as audio get out of sync all the time no matter what app i use on apple tv to watch video or movies not worth 400 for two if thats the case
 
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