What surprises me most are the rave reviews in the absence of stereo (coming later), which I always thought was de rigueur for audiophiles. I look forward to those future reviews.
That's part of the point: it has a 7-tweeter 360º array that is used to add directionality to the sound. Obviously won't compare to a true stereo pair, but it's not nothing either.
Personally speaking, I'd take great mono over sub-par stereo any day anyway.
This is part of what I don't understand; directionality of sound is a concept understood to be in reference to the listener (or point of measurement). So what exactly is the homepod doing? Since the listener could always be moving within the room is it dynamically tracking and adjusting? I assumed it just optimized the sound for the room in a more generalized sense (i.e eliminating weird reflections, dead spots, etc)
I'm a bit surprised as well, but I've also recently realized how few songs actually benefit from having stereo mixes, given they're almost all added in post processing. It matters even less for a room-wide speaker, when the listener is not at a fixed point.
That said, stereo can matter, but only when the recording itself was done in stereo. Proper stereoscopic recording is pretty cool to listen to with headphones.
Personally I disagree on the stereo not really mattering due to post-production. Proper stereo imaging can really do wonders with vocals being dead center, for example.
I disagree as well. Any decent audio engineer will know that placing tracks, instruments and certain elements slightly, or widely, off-center is essential to a good recording.
Well, they are excited because the speaker performs excellently. I suspect many audiophiles will wait until they can get it to work in stereo, but when it does, the reviews should be the same since it’s just two of the same.
Also, I doubt most audiophiles would use it as their primary listening source, but it may be the perfect solution for additional listening areas.
There are 7 tweeters in each Pod. Not only does a single Pod do stereo, it will analyse the surroundings to make use of walls etc to make wider stereo than it could just do by naively choosing a side speaker.
Stereo requires two horizontally displaced time-coherent sources. There is no other meaning.
If you're bouncing audio off walls you may get ambience, but you're not going to get a clean stereo image.
Also, the KEF speakers are hardly world beaters. They have a good reputation as PC speakers, but that's not setting the bar very high.
Professional speaker manufacturers like Genelec use a similar adaptive tuning system, and you can buy a microphone and software add-on to flatten the response of any speaker.
The limitations are well known. The correction curve is level-dependent, because room resonance is a time domain phenomenon created by physical standing waves in a 3D space that includes damping elements, and you can't truly correct it with a frequency domain solution.
You can approximate a time-domain correction with convolution and some assumptions about the room geometry and acoustics, but it's never going to be perfect.
Bottom line: I'm sure the Homepod sounds very nice, and - as usual - it's innovating with technology that's been available elsewhere for a while, and made much easier to use.
But it's not magic, and it's not going to sound hugely better than a much more expensive true stereo system.
Of course that'll do just fine for a lot of buyers.
"Stereophonic sound or, more commonly, stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that creates an illusion of multi-directional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two or more independent audio channels through a configuration of two or more loudspeakers (or stereo headphones) in such a way as to create the impression of sound heard from various directions, as in natural hearing.[1]"
I'm inferring from that there are other methods to create an illusion of multi-directional audible perspective.
So, I guess it determines which direction to use for the left and which for the right channel based on closeness to the wall. If so, what does it do when in the center of a symmetrical room? Is there a weird border case where it starts oscillating between multiple states?
I love music but I don't consider myself an audiophile. After having written off the HomePod yet trying one for a weekend - I cannot wait for the stereo upgrade. It is astonishingly good as a speaker.
Same here. I love music and good sound, but I don't go down the audiophile optimization rabbit-hole – for many reasons, but mostly because one quickly gets to the point of diminishing returns.
I was surprised by the HomePod. It's much smaller than I had imagined, and sounds much better. I think I might get another one when the Airplay 2 update comes out.
I'm no audiophile, I do realize from reading speakers review in audiophile magazine that they tend to compare speakers in the same particular price range. The OP review seems to suggest that a dual HomePod stereo setup (about $700-800) could well compete with audiophile grade speakers in sub $1000 range. It is great feat by Apple if they can achieve it with their stereo release later this year. HomePod is "engineered" sound with its surrounding acoustic adjustment etc and I bet a large portion of audiophile prefers their gears to have a more faithful reproduction of source material. Anyway HomePod will not be the only gear for hardcore audiophile as they tend to have exotic source material equipment which HomePod can not accept. It is interesting to see in near future when dual HomePod can be used with AppleTV for movie viewing with simulated centre speaker and surround sound. I remembered Tim Cook said they finally cracked home TV few years back, maybe HomePod + AppleTV is the solution.
i dunno if this continues today, but before digital became prevalent there was something of a holy war in the audiophile community between mono and stereo. i know a lot of people still prefer the mono mix of sgt pepper, but that might be because the stereo mix of that particular album is actually inferior.
today practically all new systems marketed to audiophiles are stereo, but my guess is that most would consider faithful reproduction of the signal to be more important than the number of channels if they had to pick.
Personally speaking, I'd take great mono over sub-par stereo any day anyway.