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HomePod mini and HomePod Can't Be Stereo Paired, But HomePod Home Theater Support Coming Soon for Apple TV 4K
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Movie night in the backyard? On a campout? How about just a backyard party? Sure... I could run extension cords, but that's not a particularly friendly approach. Of course, this is a fringe scenario... and Apple doesn't do fringe.
From these perspectives it seems like a v2 is needed - these can't be done in software:
1. HomePod mini was released in Fall 2020 and HomePod is from 2017.
2. No UWB.
3. An A8 vs something more modern.
4. Only 1GB RAM.
5. I doubt Thread will be on the HomePod given it seems to need a separate transmitter.
In short, parity on some areas with the Mini, and updates for the rest of the components.
To me it seems like a no brainer to have an update for the old HomePod, whether it is a v2 or v 1.1.
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I was hoping to get a pair of minis for surround sound and regular homepods for front stage. Oh well.
Wonder if HomePod Sub will ever be a thing for true 5.1
Wonder if HomePod Sub will ever be a thing for true 5.1
There's a lot of things the consumer deserves answers for when it comes to big companies but this forum tends to feel a bit too entitled. Expecting a "big wig" to come out and explain speakers is being too entitled.
Can't you create a set of stereo pairs for each room, and then put all those speakers in the same room? So then you'll have say 2 speakers doing the left channel sounds, and 2 other speakers doing the right channel sounds.
They do need to be perfectly synched for that to sound right (no pun) though.
Actually this already works, as I'm using it today. The difference of lag is handled by the audio sync feature of the ATV. It plays a sound, which you measure with the help of an iPhone. It calibrates all speakers based on that.
In the ATV audio menu you can select which speakers you want to use for sound, and you can select all speakers that it found at the same time. With this setup I use the sound of my Sony A1 TV together with two HomePods. Indeed, of you don't sync it sounds horrible, but after you sync it's perfect.
My hope would be that they can use this exact setup that's already working today, but then use my TV speakers for center, and the two HomePods for left and right.
Wow, thank you for the great explanation! Makes a lot of sense now. I wonder why they didn't talk about this (or maybe I just missed it
).How does ATV detect available speakers?
Does it ask AV receiver, how many speakers are used?
Yes. Paring for a stereo pair is not available as in if you set a Regular Home pod and a mini in the same room and want one to act as the left channel and the other as the right channel that won't work. You can do that with two mini's or two regular, but you can't mix and match for that use case.
While I do not think that it makes sense to do stereo pairs with different speakers, if one is using computational audio to characterize both the room and the other speakers, it would certainly be possible to build a model that would make up for much (some?, all? most?) of the differences. Just as one can generate spatial audio with only two speakers using computational audio, one could build other models that did other things.
Do you have more than two ears?
If you are like most humans, you localize sound based on differences between how the audio is received in each ear. A pair of speakers with a good processing model can generate spatial audio (see the Dolby Atmos headphones as an example). It is certainly easier to do with more speakers in more locations (as one needs to do less work), but one can generate pretty amazing results with just two speaker positions.
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Get the Teufel 1,000 Watt bluetooth speaker. Connects to your car battery. So you can leave it running for hours if you let the car engine run. Comes with wheels because it's too heavy to carry. I think built-in batteries last about two hours.
HomePod is being called HomePod (2018) on Apple’s site. I wonder if an update to the original is expected. Adding the U1 chip to enable the better Handoff would be small enough to have been excluded from any announcement.
You need 5 speakers, not 5 boxes. The HomePod aims its 6 speakers into different directions. That and a powerful processor can do a lot of things.
They now have a calibration feature that should fix that. It is under settings->audio/video.
They need to allow the new minis to be surrounds and do a full system. Sonos better be worried because its likely coming.
HD can’t do Dolby so I’m going to bet there no hope.
HD can’t do Dolby.
That had nothing to do with your old TV. That was just an issue with using HomePods as your TV speakers. That’s largely been fixed with tvOS 14.