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Comment by anfilt | Hacker News Reader

I will tell you the problem with it. It's 350 dollars, and at the point you are getting into the entry price for a pair of studio monitors.

The thing has 7 tweeters and only one woofer to cover the mids and bass. So you are not going to get a good left or right channel. Instead the left and right will be mixed into one woofer, and the reduced by probably 3 db to appear at the same volume.

This is no good for music.

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Near field studio monitors are good for making great audio in a small volume. With a well designed room they can work for larger areas. I use $2k of monitors to get really good reproduction in a volume of about 1 cubic meter. Outside that it gets weird.

The HomePod sounds good across two rooms with a volume of about 150 cubic meters. That’s pretty amazing. (80% open between the rooms)

A single HomePod gives an interesting stereo experience. There is some separation in the middle and high end. Lows don’t separate well. It is a pleasant listening experience, but not the same as well placed stereo gear with a listener in the sweet spot.

You can buy a pair of, say, Yamaha HS8 for AU$740, add a cheap secondhand sub for under $250, and they will do a mighty fine job in a living room, in my opinion.

For at least a little while longer, Massdrop is selling pairs of JBL LSR-305 equivalents for $179.

(Equivalent because they're marked as LSR-30x, are available only in glossy black finish, and pairs are matched to within 1dB of each other.)

So for half the cost of a HomePod, you get really nice stereo speakers, with built-in amplification, but no room correction, no Siri, and no built-in networking or microphones listening to you.

I am a happy owner.

But it has wires! You heathen!

The future is tiny speakers crammed in a tiny box in the corner of the room, "beamforming" 7 tweeters worth of tinny sound in every direction for $350!!

Get out of here with your properly placed stereo speakers!!

I don't think a single home pod claims to produce separate channels. Looking at their animation it distributes ambient sound throughout (I assume the stuff through the mid-range woofer) and focuses the highs into the center of the room (through constructive/destructive interference between the 7 tweeters I guess).

Not arguing it's a good or bad speaker. Haven't heard it and already have a nice speaker setup in my LR. Would be nice if the homepod had a sub out.

But why spend so much a mono channeled speaker. If you just want ambient music you definitely don't need spend that much money.

Interesting to hear you say this in light of all (at least all that I've read) very positive reviews of the sound quality.

What are your thoughts on the positive reviews?

Some of the reviews have been mixed. The Screen Savers tried a blind sound test of several devices, and there wasn't a clear winner, everyone had different favorites (which is probably not what you'd expect from Apple's marketing, I personally had expected an obvious improvement over competitors). Jumping straight to the results in the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqGvmf44FEk&t=7m04s

The Screen Savers aren't the only one to have done a blind sound test where the HomePod lost to the Google Home Max. Yahoo's David Pogue[1] and the Washington Post[2] also did blind sound tests.

[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/head-head-apple-homepod-reall...

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/09...

You can also just buy single monitor, and it will sounds good. However, you will loose the difference between the right and left audio channels especially if you mix the two channels into one.

I am saying for the money you could get a pair of monitors that give you both left and right audio channels and sounds good.

If your playing music, but not really setting up a listening environment why buy a 350 dollar speaker. Let alone one that downmixes stero to mono channel.

Are you going to get bass out of those monitors, though?

It's a studio monitor yes... They also often called reference monitors.

A studio/sound engineer needs to hear the full range of frequencies when mixing and working on a track.

If you need more low end than what a set reference monitors can reproduce that woofer in home pod is probably not going to do better.

My understanding going in, and experience with the studio monitors I have bought, was that they are built specifically for listening at optimal angles and distance only.

I have seen how sonos and other wireless products are used - to fill a room with sound. That's it - they aren't looking for stereo separation, they want a nice sounding... pa system.

There are needs beyond sound quality and price. I replaced stand-mounted KEFs with a Google Home because my baby seemed like she was going to climb the speakers.

To add to that list:

* It's not repairable

* It's got no aux input, so when they inevitably deprecate and remove the wireless protocol it uses, it's now completely uselss.

It's so funny how people aren't talking about those things. This is such a disposable product.

Also it won't work for video. For $350 you could buy a complete entry level surround system that would be so much better than this, and have the bonus that it works for video and won't be completely useless when Apple decides they want everyone to buy the latest shiny trinket.

But of course that doesn't fit into the Apple consumers' aesthetic because it has wires and the speakers need to be adequately placed, not one tiny box in a corner. Aesthetics over everything apparently.

Homepod is the epitome of form over function - so far from something I'd consider buying, it's crazy.

I think you are making the mistake of letting your own knowledge and needs dictate your imagining of how this and other products like it are used.

Do you think sono's are used as TV audio replacements (aside from the sound bar they now have I guess)?

Every single one I have seen in use is to fill one or multiple rooms with audio without having to run a bunch of wires. That's it.

No one is going to put a stereo system in their kitchen, but they will 100% put a single speaker that fills the room with audio.

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