Article: Apple HomePod Review - An Audiophile Perspective

[wgscott]

Quote

Switching to Eddie Vedder's track Society from the Into The Wild soundtrack, I heard what could be the worst sound from the HomePod that I've yet experienced. 

 

Ouch.  

 

And, how could they ruin that song?

 

Thanks for doing this review. Sounds like you saved us all some agony and expense.  I was trying to figure out if I could use it as a voice remote control, but why bother?

 

I think Apple gives you 14 days right of return for a full refund, FWIW.

[wgscott]

4 hours ago, DarwinOSX said:

Consumer Reports has little credibility any more especially on Apple stuff.  They are looking for the same thing as many publications these days which is controversy leading to hits and page views.

 

 

That is absolute  and utter nonsense. They are a non-commercial organization whose only source of income is subscriptions and selling access to their content, most of which is behind a paywall. They have nothing to gain from hits and page views.

[wgscott]

@Sevenfeet:   

 

Since you hate flawed arguments, I think the thing to point out here is that your assumption that Chris is being unfair by comparing the sound produced by the Homepod to that of his "reference" high-end system misses the point.  Chris elsewhere says that a more reasonable comparison of products would be to compare to the "Klipsch: The Three" bluetooth speaker, or a Sonos.  The point of the "reference" system is to have a positive control for unadulterated high-quality sound, not to compare two sets of hardware per se.

 

Unless you have a way to play Eddie Vedder's "Society" that allows you to hear what it is supposed to sound like with a high degree of confidence, then you can't really claim that playback of the same tract through the Apple Homepod sounds distorted.  The high-end reference system allows you to do so with a much greater degree of confidence than, say, a Sonos or bluetooth speaker of comparable quality/cost.

 

As for the DSP, this result surprised me.  The measurement I glanced at made the room response look quite reasonable and flat.  What appears to be happening is that for an actual, known Apple music file, the DSP is adaptive.  It might be as something as simplistic as cranking up the bass based on the "Genre" tag, or it might do something a bit more sophisticated.  That hardly makes Apple the functional/moral equivalent of Volkswagen, and pointing this out isn't an accusation that Apple is cheating. Apple in fact appears to market this as a feature.  Chris is observing that at least in some cases, the adaptive DSP can go horribly wrong.