There has been much debate about the audio quality of the HomePod. The majority of reviews have praised the speaker for its sound quality (if not for its smarts), but there have been some dissenting voices.
Some audiophiles have been dismissive of HomePod – often, it seems, without having listened to it – but others have been impressed. And a new set of tests using professional-grade equipment found that the speaker fully lives up to the claims Apple makes for it …
HomePod uses beam-forming technology to adapt to its environment, cancelling out echoes and ensuring that it delivers consistently good sound no matter where the speaker is placed and no matter where you are in the room. Here’s what Apple has to say about it.
FastCo decided to put this claim to the test.
The speaker was set to emit white noise with an equal sound level right across the frequency spectrum. FastCo’s Mark Sullivan then used the test kit to measure the sound level from four different locations in the room.
The result, said NTi Audio, was as good as an audiophile would get from a conventional speaker setup after a great deal of effort.
The HomePod’s profile changed very little. The average variance for all audible frequency bands was less than a decibel–0.95 decibel. My NTi friends said humans can’t really detect changes in sound below a decibel.
Sullivan suggests that those dismissing HomePod’s smarts may just be thinking along the wrong lines.
While I think that’s perhaps being too generous to Apple, the point stands that audio tests all seem to support the idea that HomePod is a much better speaker than it has any right to be at this kind of price-level. The previous audiophile test said that it beat out $1000’s worth of KEF speakers (though others have since taken issue with his methodology). This one says it’s delivering audiophile-grade consistency.
For our own part, I consider it at least on a par with the Sonos Play 5, and wonder whether a stereo pair might go some way to closing the gap between ‘very good’ and ‘great.’ Jeff cited both pros & cons, but concluded it offered ‘by far, the best sound quality that I’ve ever heard from a speaker its size,’ and said that it was a no-brainer for anyone embedded in the Apple ecosystem.
