Why don't HomePods buffer music?

[ric22]

Simple question. They have the hardware. But a slight stutter in the wifi or internet connection and they skip- meanwhile, my aging Samsung TV can happily buffer high res Netflix without skipping. Why the heck don't they buffer the music and pre-fetch the next song while they're at it??

 

[xraydoc]

Simple question. They have the hardware. But a slight stutter in the wifi or internet connection and they skip- meanwhile, my aging Samsung TV can happily buffer high res Netflix without skipping. Why the heck don't they buffer the music and pre-fetch the next song while they're at it??

A very good question!

 

[mfram]

Buffering introduces latency. Latency makes syrchonization across multiple speakers almost impossible. That's not what they want when trying to either do stereo pairing or multi-room pairing where everything should be in sync.

 

[ric22]

Buffering introduces latency. Latency makes syrchonization across multiple speakers almost impossible. That's not what they want when trying to either do stereo pairing or multi-room pairing where everything should be in sync.

Hi mate. How do you come to the conclusion that buffering or pre fetching would impact synchronisation in this instance, please? I just asked an engineer friend if they could grasp your suggestion, and they said they couldn't see how that could be the case. I'm not saying there isn't any logic, just that we can't see it... maybe if dealing with a live broadcast or changing channels I can see it adds complexity to synchronisation... but playing a song? Surely not? If anything it would demand less overhead to keep two devices in synch once the song was downloaded and sitting in the RAM?