The HomePod is a speaker that is not designed to play music in stereo. But there are other music systems that are single speaker (single enclosure with 2 drivers) that can definitely playback music in stereo, and have a left and right channel. I’m not sure why you think there are no single speakers that can play stereo.
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Stereo-Like Sound With HomePods Coming Before Multi-Room Audio Feature [Updated]
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The HomePod is a speaker that is not designed to play music in stereo. But there are other music systems that are single speaker (single enclosure with 2 drivers) that can definitely playback music in stereo, and have a left and right channel. I’m not sure why you think there are no single speakers that can play stereo.
You mount any speaker on a wall and you'll get little to not much bass.. If its "little" i call it tiny.
Designed to be placed on the floor.. for real bass.
The only “single” speaker I have ever seen that produced stereo sound had tweeters, mid range, and woofers for each channel. The inputs on the back had both left and right input. So yes a “single” exists or existed that can produce stereo sound but that is not the norm when discussing a stereo setup.
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Are you telling me it's even worse than those cheap soubdbars that can create faux surround sound?
Well when you get up on a stage and start saying how it will do all these wonderful things. And say it will be out at the end of 2017 then change it to the first of the year. Then say that all the features the you talked about won’t be available until later in the 2018. Yes that is very poor engineering and product development.
And when they first came out with the iPhone they didn’t stand up on the stage and say how it’s going to do this and that then not have it available when it launched. But yes they have done many improvements on the iPhone over the years. But the is definitely not the same.
My explanation is simple. You either find a way to write good about HomePod or you are banned from the next product review.
Pretty much - it’s just not really made to be a TV speaker I guess. Apparently keeping it paired with an Apple TV is a pain in the ass as well. I sincerely hope they fix the latter issue though or mine is probably getting returned.
Ok. Then what's so magical about beamforming that Apple beating drum about. I thought beamforming allow for faux spatial sound.
You are confusing stereo with two channel audio. Two channel audio can work to create stereo, but it in itself is not stereo (rather two mono channels). Where stereo become stereo is when you position a sound in space, using panning to place it left or right (a combination of panning, volume, HRTF filters and cross talk cancellation techniques can be used to simulate depth and height). If you hard pan a sound into either left or right, that sound is now mono, as it comes from a single source.
Stereo is the multi-dimensional illusion of space and direction of sound. Using two channels (left + right) and two speakers is the traditional method of creating stereo which is why so many confuse the two. Quadraphonic sound (four channels, four speakers) or even multi channel, multi speaker surround setups are all methods of achieving stereophonic sound.
A two channel, two speaker setup is the simplest, but also the most primitive way of achieving stereo. The more you move out of the sweet spot (think a equilateral triangle between your head and the speakers) the less effective the illusion becomes.
As Apple stated, their aim was to eliminate the sweet spot by making a consistent multi-dimensional experience regardless of your or the speaker’s position in the room. And by all reviewers judgment they’ve succeeded.
I’ve stopped following Dalrymple on most things, but he’s a musician and obsessed with audio, so I trust him on this:
It’s hard to explain the sound of HomePod, but you get a feeling that the sound is enveloping you, even when using just one speaker. There is a sense that this is how the songwriter and producer wanted the song to be heard when they recorded it.
The other speakers gave the feeling that music was just being blasted straight at me and not allowing me to become part of the experience. HomePod sounds great wherever you are in the room—there really is no particular sweet spot to hear the music, it just sounds great everywhere.
People get far too hung up on their belief in what stereo means based on their conditioning. This is fine, unless you want to argue that the HomePod is mono (or to a lesser extent “not true stereo”). By any definition it isn’t, and what truly matter is what it sounds and feels like when you listen to music on it.The other speakers gave the feeling that music was just being blasted straight at me and not allowing me to become part of the experience. HomePod sounds great wherever you are in the room—there really is no particular sweet spot to hear the music, it just sounds great everywhere.
I disagree. There are many albums that were recorded to specifically play different sounds left and right. If you listen to many Jazz albums recorded live in a small club you can clearly pick out which musicians were to the right or left of the stage. So if you close your eyes you can recreate the small Jazz club experience.
So please answer my question from above. Do you believe that when listening to the Stones, Beatles, Live Jazz or The Doors albums you’ll hear the left and right specific sounds as recorded on the albums?
It beams the mids away from the walls and the highs towards them (this is an extreme oversimplification, it does a lot of audio processing and analyzes both audio channels to determine what’s intended for the center, among other things), but it doesn’t keep L and R separate. Great for music, not so good for TV and movies.
You are correct. Stereo system creates multi-dimensional sound in the limited space. HomePod, with a single speaker, does not create multi-dimensional sound anywhere. All they are trying to achieve is the same (mono) sound everywhere in the room. Good for background sound, inferior for quality music listening.
Does where the musicians are standing on stage really matter? As far as I know when bands perform live shows they aren’t pumping the drums through the speakers right side of the stage just because that’s where the drummer is. This doesn’t apply to the vast majority of music.
Recreating the atmosphere of a small club isn’t really the goal of this device. If that’s your goal you’re better off buying something else.
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Sort of, they are not trying to achieve mono sound - they are focusing on the idea of some sounds being closer to you and some being farther away rather than some being left and some being right. It’s apparently a great effect as a lot of people seem pretty pleased with it.
I was just illustrating that as a point that there’s more to stereo recordings than “soundstage” as discussed on this subject in the different threads. The point is HomePod cannot reproduce this experience with a single speaker setup.
No worries, thank you. I always try and will continue to do so.
Your snark, though, demonstrates lack of knowledge of the technology and its potential. Acoustic adaptive beamforming driving microphone (and speaker) arrays is pretty straightforward. And, has been in use for years using a variety of spatial signal processing algorithms and techniques, such as, for example, time domain based Frost beamformers, which excel in noisy multi-emitter environments where interference sources including room reverberation can be nulled, with SOIs extracted, characterized, and located. This is easy modeled and simulated using off-the-shelf computer-based tools.
I'd be shocked if Apple is not already pursuing this and many other adaptive acoustic beamforming techniques that will further HomePod development. HomePod's microphone and speaker arrays, in conjunction with signal processing algorithms running on Ax processors form the building blocks enabling this and many other potential features a reality. It's just a matter of imagination and time.
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I don’t think you quite understand what stereo is. So I will explain, again.
If you want to be basic, then yes anything with multiple speakers can be called stereo. But stereo is more than just multiple speakers, or multiple speakers pointed in different directions to sound a certain way.
A proper stereo or stereo playback generally requires at least a dedicated left and right channel (or 2 channels) so you can hear the music the way it was intended. Specific sounds are directed through left and right channels, speakers or drivers.
The HomePod does not have left and right channels and is not able to send specific sounds through the left or right side while music is playing. It would be impossible to do so, especially in the center of a room with people standing all around it. It would also sound incredibly awful if it started playing specific sounds through the left channel only while people stood to the front, back or right side of it.
So even though it projects music in 360° through 7 drivers, and it sounds great doing it. The sound it outputs is mono because it lacks stereo separation!
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According to this article it probably won’t be able to do it with two either.
This definitely "sounds" like a snake oil to me. All mutli-channel systems have a simple principle behind them. Beit a stereo or Dolby Atmos, they specify where the speakers should be located and then the record is mastered accordingly. With HomePod, we have a stereo record that HomePod is supposed to re-imagine somehow? How? Send 15KHz to this driver and 9KHz to this driver? Why? Sure, it can use the microphones to evaluate the sound, but they are all located in the same point which is different from the listener's point. It is just a gimmick (probably as good as iPhone's portrait mode). It can introduce some sound effects just like boomboxes did in 1970s (they had the same problem - small separation between the channels) but that's about it.
It is a gimmick, but people seem to like it so I don’t see what the problem is.
The difference between Dolby, DTS, etc. and the HomePod is that everyone else is concerned with reproducing the original source material, that doesn’t seem to be Apple’s goal here. They wanted to create something that sounds good.
I can only like your post once unfortunately. Beam forming is nothing special lol
If I understood correctly:
A single Homepod gets fed with a stereo signal (L & R channel) and that's why lots of people are claiming it's stereo combined with its beamforming-mambojumbo?
They are technically correct, since it does output both signals (channels), but the listener doesn't benefit, since he can't distinguish the two sources from each other (like "stereo smartphone" front facing speaker)?
And TWO HP are also fed with a L&R Signal? Both of them get L&R?
How does this benefit me in any way and why would anybody "upgrade" to two of them?
I don't get it...who would want to set up two speaker (tv for example) in the first place, if they mish-mash the channels?
Yeah, it gets louder and sounds "more filling", but I read comments from people here who wish they could connect 5 or 7 of them to get surround sound 0_o
How would this be possible, if every speaker gets the same ol' stereo signal?!
(Curious question, im not an audio guy)
A single Homepod gets fed with a stereo signal (L & R channel) and that's why lots of people are claiming it's stereo combined with its beamforming-mambojumbo?
They are technically correct, since it does output both signals (channels), but the listener doesn't benefit, since he can't distinguish the two sources from each other (like "stereo smartphone" front facing speaker)?
And TWO HP are also fed with a L&R Signal? Both of them get L&R?
How does this benefit me in any way and why would anybody "upgrade" to two of them?
I don't get it...who would want to set up two speaker (tv for example) in the first place, if they mish-mash the channels?
Yeah, it gets louder and sounds "more filling", but I read comments from people here who wish they could connect 5 or 7 of them to get surround sound 0_o
How would this be possible, if every speaker gets the same ol' stereo signal?!
(Curious question, im not an audio guy)
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The HomePod is a mono speaker. Whether it’s drivers and sub are on 1,2,7 or 8 channels, it still is a mono speaker. Simply because there is no stereo separation. What the A8, beamforming, spatial awareness does is measure the room, adjust the volume of the speakers, and direct audio through speakers outward into the room if the HomePod is placed in a corner.
Why is it so hard to understand that there is no stereo separation in the HomePod? There is no left, right or center channel for playback of music. I have explained before why it would be a terrible idea for the HomePod to attempt to separate left and right audio especially if it’s placed in the middle of a room with people all around it.
While we know the 4 sides of the HomePod because the cable runs down the back side. This is an omnidirectional speaker shaped as a bloody cylinder, so technically there are no sides to it! Apple designed it so that the music would sound the same anywhere in the room.
Apple done started the “stereo wars” on the internet.
It’s not possible in the current implementation and presumably (according to this article) the “FullRoom” implementation when it comes out won’t be either.
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