Apple HomePod Reviews Roundup: Irreproachably Good Audio, Mixed Verdicts On Smarts

The latest new product category from Apple, its hi-fi smart speaker called HomePod, is about to land and the first reviews are in.

What Hi-Fi is a good place to start. After all, this is a review done by guys who do nothing but listen to audio (and watch TVs and so on) all day long, so they know what’s what. It’s a publication that’s absolutely trusted and known for its expertise and comprehensive knowledge.

It begins in bullish terms:

Even by its own standards, the company has arrived late to the wireless speaker party. But being late is perfectly acceptable if you’re the life and soul when you arrive – and that’s pretty much the story with the HomePod. Despite some flaws and limitations, the HomePod is the best-sounding smart speaker available - and by quite a margin.

The review addresses one of the things that worried onlookers when they heard that the woofer moves by up to 20mm at times:

It’s all well and good having a bass driver that can shift some serious air, but keeping it controlled at the same time is a tricky business. The HomePod manages it expertly.

Overall, though the publication finds flaws, it fives the HomePod a five-star verdict.

Pocket-lint, wasn’t as positive.  Stuart Miles, founder of the tech site and a reviewer with wide and deep knowledge, liked the audio, but not the smarts. Things didn’t get off to a good start when the HomePod left a ring-shaped mark on his kitchen surface (oiled oak). Miles persisted, and found much to like in terms of the ease of set-up, usefulness of Apple Music and looks forward to the improvements AirPlay 2 will bring. He even liked the music playback quality, calling it

The best sounding speaker of its type

But it was when it was compared to other smart speakers’ smart credentials that Miles had issues.

HomePod's HomeKit skills mirror the experience on an iPhone or iPad, but at times feels light years behind Amazon and Google's offering. While Amazon is busy adding Skills on a daily basis and getting others to do the same (there are 30,000 and counting), Apple offers virtually no third-party support aside from messaging apps.

He didn’t like the way Siri sounded, either.

Siri, while sounding okay on the iPhone, doesn't sound like a native English speaker on HomePod. Compared to Alexa, Siri sounds horrid. Words are hacked together, things aren't pronounced correctly, and everything sounds abrupt. There's no fluidity or conversational flair. It's a talking computer without personality.

I don't agree with that, by the way, but certainly the clarity of the HomePod speaker puts every flaw into sharp relief.

It’s no secret that the HomePod isn’t cheap. Edward C. Baig discusses this at USA Today, comparing price to capabilities.

For sure, HomePod’s $349 price will be a disqualifier for some of you. The basic Amazon’s Echo costs around $100 and while Echo is in a lesser league when it comes to sound, if you’re a more casual listener of music you frankly may not give a hoot.
The Sonos One doesn’t sound as good as HomePod either. But it’s a very fine speaker that has earned high marks from reviewers. It costs just $199. Moreover, under a current offering you can get buy two Sonos One’s for $349, perhaps coincidentally the same price as a single HomePod. The idea is to turn them into a neat stereo pair.
You’ll similarly  be able to balance two HomePods next to each other for a complete stereo effect but must wait for a free software update from Apple coming later in the year.

Baig also points out that this is a speaker designed to appeal to Apple fans.

Also worth noting here: if you’re on Android you are fat out of luck—this is an Apple speaker that implores you to go all in on Apple.

And while we’re talking about that walled garden of an Apple ecosystem, Nilay Patel at The Verge has something to say about that. The headline: Apple HomePod review: Locked In, gives a clue here. Patel has no quibbles about the audio quality – which is beginning to be a theme here – but asks if that is enough.

While it’s true that the HomePod sounds incredible — it sounds far better than any other speaker in its price range — it also demands that you live entirely inside Apple’s ecosystem in a way that even Apple’s other products do not.

 
The question is: is beautiful sound quality worth locking yourself even more tightly into a walled garden?
Of all the reviews I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot, Patel has the best description of the HomePod’s beamforming capabilities, so I’d like to quote it at length.

When you set down a HomePod and play music, it goes through a number of steps to tune itself. First, it tries to create a model of the room it’s in by detecting the sounds reflecting off walls. It does this in two passes: the first pass builds a model to a high degree of initial confidence, and the second pass refines the model. This happens faster if you’re playing music with a lot of bass.
Then, it creates a virtual array of soundbeams using that seven-tweeter array. Placed near a wall, the HomePod creates three beams: one pointed out the front for “direct” sounds like vocals and guitars, and two pointed at the wall to reflect “ambient” sounds like applause and room noises. This is called “beamforming,” and it’s a nifty, complicated idea; Apple told me it has something like 200 patents for the HomePod.
So the HomePod is using all seven physical speakers to create an array of virtual speakers and assigning those virtual speakers different parts of the music for increased clarity and bass. It’s not trying to create wide stereo separation — later this year, you’ll be able to pair two HomePods for that — it’s just trying to get as much from the audio you’re playing as possible, while eliminating the effects of the room you’re in.
To figure out what to play on those direct and ambient soundbeams, the HomePod compares the left and right channels of the song and figures out what sounds are mixed more prominently and what sounds are mixed into the background. Prominent sounds are sent to the direct soundbeam, and background sounds are sent to the ambient soundbeams. Apple told me the process is similar to what surround sound systems have long done to upmix stereo audio so it plays on all your speakers, but it’s a very different application of that basic idea.
In terms of ideas I’m into, a virtual array of soundbeams that points guitar solos at my face is super high on the list.

Other recurrent themes are also to be found in this review, though.

Unfortunately, Apple’s audio engineering team wasn’t in charge of just putting out a speaker. It was in charge of the audio components of a smart speaker, one that simply isn’t as smart as its competitors.

And when it comes to comparing smart speakers Patel has a killer point.

If I had to bet, I would say that 99 percent of people will never compare a HomePod and, say, a Sonos One head-to-head in their kitchen. And if you don’t do that, you will never know that the HomePod can put out more bass and clearer mids than the Sonos One. You will instead think that the Sonos One sounds extremely good for its size and price while offering you the ability to use virtually any music service, including Spotify and Apple Music, and working with Amazon Alexa and (eventually) Google Assistant.

If you want to get to the crux of a review quickly, then that’s what this digest is about. But it’s also the key to Matthew Panzarino’s piece for Tech Crunch. Panzarino obligingly comes up with what he calls a four-sentence review (with appendices), which he begins, in effect, with his verdict:

Apple’s HomePod is easily the best sounding mainstream smart speaker ever. It’s got better separation and bass response than anything else in its size and boasts a nuance and subtlety of sound that pays off the 7 years Apple has been working on it.
As a smart speaker, it offers best-in-class voice recognition, vastly outstripping the ability of other smart speakers to hear you trying to trigger a command at a distance or while music is playing, but its overall flexibility is stymied by the limited command sets that the Siri protocol offers.
Buy a HomePod if you already have Apple Music or you want to have it and you’re in the market for a single incredibly over-designed and radically impressive speaker that will give you really great sound with basically no tuning, fussing, measuring or tweaking.
That’s pretty much it for my review. Everything from here on out is details…but I love details and if you do too, let’s talk about some. (Via Forbes)