Siri getting "better" or "smarter" doesn't automatically mean it will become more useful.
To me, it's no more useful that it was when it launched with the iPhone 4s.
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Professional-Grade Acoustic Tests Support Apple's Claims About HomePod's Superior Sound Distribution
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Siri getting "better" or "smarter" doesn't automatically mean it will become more useful.
To me, it's no more useful that it was when it launched with the iPhone 4s.
I really really like my HomePod but it’s probably going to go back, it just doesn’t have enough low end for me. I’m not sure why everyone thinks it has a to much bass, maybe they have been around a lot of crappy sound systems.
The audio is absolutely great but there’s just not enough bass, switching to my soundbar after listening to the HomePod it just sounded flat and lame. So now I have to find something that sounds as good as the HomePod but with more bass
The audio is absolutely great but there’s just not enough bass, switching to my soundbar after listening to the HomePod it just sounded flat and lame. So now I have to find something that sounds as good as the HomePod but with more bass
HomePod acoustic tests performed by Fast Company and published Tuesday appear to support Apple's claim that algorithms built into the smart speaker make it capable of distributing sound evenly throughout a room.
According to Apple's marketing material, music played on HomePod is evenly distributed so that it sounds similar regardless of where the listener is standing or sitting in the room. Apple also claims that HomePod's output remains consistent wherever it is placed in an environment, thanks to sophisticated always-on sound processing algorithms.
HomePod uses its six-microphone array to record the behavior of the sound waves emitted by the speakers, while the algorithms analyze the incoming data to adjust the output of the speakers and deliver a consistent representation of a piece of music throughout the listening environment. Another microphone deeper inside the HomePod picks up the presence of walls and other large objects that might interfere with the distribution of certain sounds, like the long sound waves of bass notes, and the algorithms adjust the output accordingly.
To test the claim, a HomePod was placed on a 30-inch high table by a wall and a white noise test sound was played through it that produces an equal amount of decibels throughout the frequency spectrum. This output was recorded from four locations in the room, and then each sound profile was compared to see how much variation occurred across the full frequency spectrum. The testing gear used in the experiment was loaned by Liechtenstein-based acoustics company NTi Audio AG.
According to Brian MacMillan of NTi Audio AG, which provided the testing gear used in the experiment, the HomePod's profile changed very little, with an average variance of less than 0.95 decibels across all audible frequency bands, which is considered below the threshold that can be heard by a human ear. Comparatively, the test team saw considerably more output variation from a Harman Kardon Invoke speaker, which had an average variance of 3.4 decibels.
The HomePod's sound has received praise by both new HomePod owners and media sites that tested the device ahead of its release, although Consumer Reports' doesn't believe the HomePod outshines the Google Home Max and the Sonos One. Other reviews have disagreed with that analysis, including an extensive, in-depth review published by a self-professed audiophile on Monday.
Article Link: Professional-Grade Acoustic Tests Support Apple's Claims About HomePod's Superior Sound Distribution
Boy you guys will go to great lengths just to prove the superiority of this speaker. What's the big deal?
Okay, can someone really explain this to me. I've had multiple conversations with dannys1 on here and others and I've yet to understand this flat speaker lingo. Some say it's not flat. Others say it's equalized. Apple claims it's balanced, I think. Are all these things the same or different things? Is flat/neutral/EQ/balanced all the same?
Another tech journal reviewing audio..
Except it wasn't a subjective review, it was a specific, objective test (they did perform a subjective review in a previous article). Tech journals use test gear all the time; they probably know how to follow the instruction manual for yet another bit of test gear.
In traditional audio testing, this would be considered a polar response test (measurement of on-axis/off-axis performance), similar to what can be performed on any speaker or, conversely, microphone.
CR might have performed this as a supplemental test, as they sometimes do to report on an unusual product claim, but they wouldn't have included it in their standardized test results, for logical and ethically justifiable reasons. And there have been plenty of times when CR has, at least initially, ignored unusual/unique product claims.
I recall Bose complaining of this, way back when, because a reviewer's standardized test procedures might not address the claimed benefits of the direct/reflecting speaker design.
Any true audiophile should be familiar with the problems of off-axis response in speaker systems (a.k.a., just how bad do they sound outside the sweet spot).
Experience with Apple it’s not the first time I’ve seen claims by Apple, if it was you would have a point.
"We recorded this from four locations in the room: 22 inches off the floor and 81 inches off the floor from the middle of the room (13 feet from the HomePod), and 25 inches and 81 inches off the floor 7 feet away on the same wall next to the same wall the HomePod sat near."
Read it again. As I said, what they did was test at two different heights at just two different locations.
All they were doing was testing to see if the white noise audio was the same at both two feet off the floor and about seven feet off the floor, at each location.
1. Apple has NEVER claimed that the LISTENER can be anywhere in the room. All they've said is that the HOMEPOD can be put anywhere. If you can find such a claim by Apple (NOT others), please link to it.
2. It is impossible to make sure that every location in the room sounds the same. (And again, this test was NOT REPEAT NOT about anything of the sort. It was ONLY about different heights at a location.
There's no magic that can make it sound the "best everywhere" The HP beams the foreground sound to the center of the room, and mixes up the rest to send to the sides.
What I think is happening, is that people are confused by the idea that the HP tries to create a similar audio experience no matter where it's placed. That is NOT the same as saying the audio experience is the same everywhere in the room. Again, that would be impossible (unless perhaps it was totally mono).
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I'll try.
There are two kinds of "flat" - a measured frequency response test result that produces as close as possible to a flat line on a graph, and the subjective perception that the sound is "uncolored." Well, there's a third kind of flat; uninflected/boring. That's not what we're talking about here.
All speaker systems are "equalized" - this is a function of compensating for the native frequency response of each component part, the design of the crossover system (equalizer that separates frequency bands for sub-woofer, woofer, midrange, and tweeter), the contribution of the cabinet design on frequency response (both on-axis and off-axis)...
A key goal in speaker design is to keep the speaker system within basic norms (relatively flat frequency response graph), while maintaining an identifiable brand, so that regardless of what speakers were used when producing the sound, it'll still sound reasonably good when played back in the home.
"Flat" is nominally a frequency response curve that looks like a flat line, except at the upper and lower extremes of response, where there's an inevitable fall-off in response. Flat, however, is still relative. It's fairly simple to produce flat response in electronics, such as +/- 0.1 Db from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. Presuming that transient response is also sufficient (again, fairly easy to do with electronics), that would produce essentially uncolored sound. However, speakers, by their nature, are held to a less stringent standard - say, +/- 3 Db from 20-20K, to allow for dips at crossover frequencies, spikes/resonances due to physical characteristics of cabinet, speaker cones, voice coils, etc., and fall-off at the more extreme frequencies. It's a lot harder to produce "flat" in speakers and microphones than it is in electronics.
Engineers and producers like to have a consistent point of reference when moving from studio to studio. They often bring their compact, "flat" reference speakers with them, to compare to the studio's main monitors. When an audio pro talks about a "flat" reference speaker it often means that the speaker lacks noticeable coloration, rather than describing the results of a frequency response test - two speakers with apparently identical response curves can still sound different (which is why subjective listening tests are part of speaker evaluations). This, of course, is a subjective judgement. One engineer's "flat" may not agree with another's.
I'd agree that HomePod has a colored sound. I find the coloration pleasing, another may not. Part of the coloration comes from the sound being atypical - highly processed. Since it's an atypical design, that's not a surprise. Unless and until HomePods and speakers of like design are widely deployed in homes, it's not appropriate to use them as a general-purpose reference.
Overall, the bass response is what's most remarkable. I'd like a more transparent-sounding high end, but still, it sounds remarkably good for both classical and pop, which is not always easy to do. Violas and cellos in chamber music recordings sound fabulous, rich and well-defined, very close to "live," which is often not the case. This may seem to be a comment on mid and bass response rather than highs, but highs are essential to provide proper definition.
I used HomePod last night when watching Wonder Woman on my 12.9" iPad Pro (AirPlay was very easy to setup). That was a mind-blowing experience. The bottom end was comparable (though obviously not identical) to movie theater sound, and for the first time, I was disappointed with the sound coming from that iPad.
My only complaint has to do with Hollywood sound mixing practice - they seem to add a fair amount of "bottom" to female voices, which coupled with all the room-shaking low-end sound effects of an action film can make those voices harder to pick out. I encountered the same problem on HomePod as I have in theaters. On the much thinner bottom end of the iPad, voice intelligibility wasn't an issue.
My instinct in the studio would be to reduce the bottom end of voices so that the dialog is more intelligible, but nobody in Hollywood is paying me to mix their films. ;-) So, for pure voice intelligibility, iPad wins. For "truth" to the original mix (for good or bad), HomePod wins.
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God, no no no and no again, it IS NOT. It's a traditional hifi speaker in almost every way imaginable.
It’s a speaker with one or two limitations (when using the apple ecosystem) why do people expect this to replace their iPhone?
It’s a speaker! And a great one at that
I totally agree but I think this would actually be a different product that requires a different form factor. Basically a sound bar version of the HomePod, where HDMI ARC input is needed. I don't know what the actual numbers are but it seems like people's typical media consumption is trending towards a lot more video and that means probably less music. The current HomePods just aren't suitable for video content in either form or function. But I'd be all over a compact sound bar style version of the HomePod focused on sound for video (as well as music, ideally). If Apple applied all this cool DSP and microphones and speaker arrays to Dolby Atmos/DTS:X, they could really make the killer sound bar. There's a lot of sound bars out there but most of them have some major issues: crappy sound, way too expensive (some are thousands of $), too bulky, aesthetically offending, poor software and interface, no Airplay support, abandoned after release for software/firmware updates meaning bad or no support of new or evolving technologies, or poor support for directional audio.
Indeed, it's like some company released a motorcycle, and everyone started complaining, "this car only has two wheels and no enclosed space for the driver and their three passengers!" along with "don't try to tell me it's not a car, I absolutely know it's a car - it has wheels and an engine, therefore it's a car!".
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Its mono only. Mono went out about 1967 or so. If it was all about the music then it would not sport 50 year old technology.
This method is flawed just as the other test was. You can’t measure the polar response of a speaker in an accoustically live space. This test is basically meaningless as it was done with a fairly inexpensive handheld RTA, with the areas measured only a few feet apart. You could probably put damn near any speaker in place of the home pod and come up with a similar result.
Correct me if I am wrong but you come accross as a buthurt.
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That wouldn't surprise me.
Trying to compare audiophile speakers to a consumer product like the homepod is THE absolute nonsense. Next time I know they will run tests against a Nautilus 800 pair! Try and compare the compact speaker that "sounds amazing" against any pair of speakers/cables etc. Not anyone accepts the mess an audiophile system creates and many value the virtues of a most portable and quality product like this one!
You certainly can test polar response in an acoustically live space (see my anecdote in the final paragraph). The test may be harder to interpret; off-axis reflections will muddy the measurement.
The primary reason anechoic chambers are used for measurement is to eliminate room acoustics as a variable. The trouble is, room acoustics are a major contributing factor in the real world. An anechoic chamber is an expedient, not the best test for the job. When it comes to level playing fields, a listening room is an undulating, links-style golf course, not a tournament-regulation billiards table. You can't play the 8th at Pebble Beach the way you'd play the 8th at St. Andrews Old Course or Augusta National (or any other course, for that matter).
As to whether a test of "damn near any speaker" could have delivered the same result, that would depend completely on the angles of measurement. Since most bookshelf speakers will have, at best, 120-degree dispersion in the upper mids and highs, moving beyond that sweet spot will inevitably show a fall-off that HomePod, with its top-firing woofer and 360-degree horn tweeter array, would not. Whether live room or anechoic, a traditional bookshelf speaker cannot have the same performance at 180 degrees as it has at 0 degrees. As I've mentioned several times, Bose ran into this issue in the early days of the 901. Some "real world" testers treated the 901s like bookshelf speakers, placing them against a wall to "standardize," killing the effect delivered by the rear- and side-firing drivers.
Yes, you can argue this was a relatively unsophisticated test with a hand-held RTA, but hand-held RTAs are built for real-world testing - concert and commercial public address system installations, home theater setups, etc. While there are bulkier RTAs out there that find their way into testing labs, I've seen plenty of pictures of testing labs that had affixed hand-held RTAs to microphone stands.
Many, many years ago, I taught an audio engineering course to public radio producers. I devoted the first couple of sessions to ear training, rather than hardware. "This is a bass note, this is treble. This is pianissimo, this is fortissimo. Listen to the 'silence' and tell me what you hear." One of the exercises was a demonstration of microphone polar response. I placed three mics on separate stands - an omni, a cardioid, and a figure-8. Each mic stand had a 3-foot string attached, so that a demonstrator could hold the string and move around each mic at a consistent distance. The guinea pig was instructed to keep up a constant patter as he/she made like an orbiting celestial body. The rest of the students, in the control room, were asked to describe what they heard. So, the first thing these neophyte engineers learned about microphone polar patterns was their real-world effect, rather than something they saw on a graph or had described to them in prose. "Wow, his voice is much quieter/duller there!" Simply restated, a test does not have to be sophisticated to be effective.
Fast Company Magazine ?? Marketing company. Trolling Apple for clicks or another homer
They didn't ignore Apple TV. That will require just a software upgrade. This is just v. 1.0. That's how companies bring products to market-- just focus on a subset of the customer base first, then expand.
[doublepost=1518718449][/doublepost]The HomePod is really making its mark on the audio industry.
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Whenever I’m watching something on my ATV using the HomePod as the audio source, it responds to “Hey Siri, pause” and “Hey Siri, play”
Thanks for this write up. I think I understand it for the most part. My only followup question is, forgive me if I missed this point in your reply, then what gives a speaker it's coloration?
The short answer is, emphasis of some frequencies, de-emphasis/deficiencies of other frequencies.
A "bright," "brittle," "hard-edged" sound is going to have emphasis in the upper midrange. "Warm," "mellow," "soft" might have some emphasis in the lower mids and either flat or de-emphasised response in the upper mids. Transient response also plays a factor - above-average transient response (as in electrostatic speakers) may be "crisp" or "transparent," while an age-softened paper cone speaker may be "dull" or "soft." Extended high frequency response will add some "air" or "brilliance." And while transient response and extended high frequency response are closely related (transients are, after all, high frequency phenomena), the question is whether the entire waveform of a transient/high frequency is cleanly reproduced - sharp edges may be rounded off.
In many ways this is little different than wine tasting - the senses have to be trained to recognize commonly agreed upon criteria. In the case of audio (vs. wine) it's far easier to point to test graphs that corroborate subjective judgements.
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