HomePod 2: A Definitive Audiophile Review

my review of the original homepod posted almost exactly five years ago I know I look different now okay it was lukewarm on the speaker that apple had spent six years developing I didn't love the price nor did I fancy the lack of a line input or support for Bluetooth audio the speaker's longevity was at the mercy of Apple continuing to support it because it ran Siri which I found to be even more limited than it was on an iPhone it made voice control the primary interface with this device frustrating the display wasn't really actually a display rather just an expensive light diffuser and for what and then third-party app support was weak repairability that was basically nigh impossible I wasn't a fan now lots of time has been spent in the recent weeks analyzing the product life cycle and Supply chains and covid Etc as the blameworthy reason for the OG homepod strange discontinuance but we're not really going to know why until an ex-employ writes a tell-all into 20 years frankly it doesn't matter why the OG homepod died the fact is five years later a new homepod has been released and guess what it still has every single one of the problems previously mentioned inherited from the original but while the new homepod isn't that different it's also not the same and it's better than I expected it to be laughs let's start with feature set because there's really only two things that the new homepod can do the original cannot first it adds a little bit of extra smart home know-how there's a thread radio built inside the new speaker that will control future matter smart home devices and there's also an internal temperature and humidity sensor that can be exposed to homekit these same sensors well they've been on the homepod mini since it started shipping a couple years ago but they've just recently been enabled via software now I will say that these sensors are weird there is a 24 to 48 hour calibration period before any data shows up in your home app that's after being set up or even moved inside of the same room or to a separate room that's kind of mildly annoying two days to wait for new data every time you move a speaker but it wouldn't be that much of a problem if they were accurate they're not I found the homepod mini to be acceptable it's within one to three degrees Fahrenheit of my calibrated probe but like dave2d I found the big homepod's temperature data was Far poorer than the homepod mini frankly it was erroneous enough that it was completely useless for most automations to make matters worse well you can hide these new temperature sensors from your home summary you can't hide them from room Pages like you can with third-party temperature devices so if you've already got a better Thermo sensor in the room you're in well too bad rather than displaying 69 degrees nice it's going to display a range that includes 69 degrees from your thermal probe and the homepods erroneous reading which is oftentimes five to ten degrees higher frustrating now where temperature fails humidity prevails the ladder sensor is actually very accurate and considering that a homepod mini is 99 for a speaker a voice controller a temperature sensor a humidity sensor and a threaded radio it's a pretty great deal given similarly effective temperature and humidity sensors are often fifty dollars by themselves the big homepod however is significantly less accurate be that from warmer operating temperatures from the built-in amplifiers I know not but it's disappointing to see for literally three times the price the second thing the homepod 2 can do that the original cannot is react to devices that have a U1 chip built in a year after it's released the first homepod gains the ability to suggest handing off audio when you approach the speaker with a phone but as someone who has actually had a homepod in his kitchen for years this handoff functionality was spotty at best often times it wouldn't suggest I-beam content when I was mere millimeters away from the speaker and other times I found myself in a different room entirely when the speaker out of your shot suggested on my phone hey why don't I take over the audio stream no the new homepod does as its little brother the homepod mini does wherein not only does the phone automatically pass off once you've held the phone close enough above the speaker but your lock screen and dynamic Island if you've got an iPhone 14 will actually display the homepods controls as you get close to it if you move to another room with another homepod that present room speaker will take over the card view on your phone it's really pretty cool and the new homepod even iterates on the homepod mini by gradually increasing the display light brightness on the homepod itself and presenting increasingly stronger haptics on your phone as you get closer and closer to the speaker before it finally beams the content over it's a small touch but it's really nice the homepod mini does not do this every other feature and I mean literally every other feature like the home intercom daily Siri updates multi-user support multiple timers which the iPhone still doesn't freaking support lossless and Dolby Atmos playback uh recurring home automations what else like confirmation tones which recently came in more those have all been brought to the original homepod over the years a device that is still currently supported to this day and receiving updates and while those new features have made the original homepod far more compelling than it was when I reviewed it at launched five years ago it has done so at the expense of consistency and speed while my first gen kitchen speaker has avoided the Litany of reliability issues that have befallen many a homepod it has not escaped the death grip of time when the OG homepod is working as it should be it's every bit as fast as the new one and frankly sometimes faster take a look hey Siri what's the weather for the last week the weather forecast next week followed by partly cloudy skies in the 776 years old hey Siri how long does it take to get to Best Buy in Murray traffic to Best Buy is like so it should take six minutes see the problem is consistency anyone who owns a homepod knows that frequently it'll take literally I'm not exaggerating 10 to 15 seconds to process and then subsequently fail a task that it can perform it'll tell you to ask again from your iPhone because oh I can't do that here it won't hear you back in it over mid-range ambient noise but it will also mistakenly think that you've called out to it when you haven't it'll say that it has triggered home kit scenes but then doesn't your lights are all still turned on and the worst part is that after it fails you can ask it again the exact same way and it'll go oh yeah okay and it does it correctly it's reliably unreliable the new homepod thankfully follows in the footsteps of the homepod mini achieving a significantly higher success rate it's still not perfect I've gotten long delays and query failures but they're rare one in 30 requests rather than one in three now Siri is still as dumb as a bag of hammers it's not any smarter and it doesn't do half of what you will ask it to but as long as you know how and what to ask how to talk to Siri it will respond successfully on the new homepod and from further away than the original was ever capable of hearing you despite having fewer microphones which is excellent it makes the experience so much less frustrating in November 2020 homepod version 14.2 added the ability to connect one or more homepod devices to an Apple TV 4K and make them the default audio output when using an Apple TV and while sometimes it took a second or so before playing or resuming content to account for AirPlay latency it actually worked really well a short while later Apple even added the ability to use the Apple TV itself as an audio return channel so for example you could play a game on your PlayStation have audio go through HDMI into the TV and then the audio would go out of the TV via HDMI to the Apple TV which would then be airplayed to a pair of homepods now with the original homepod there was a measured latency of about 120 milliseconds which was enough to bother me I don't know what kind of Wizardry the new homepod version 2 is doing because it's still running on AirPlay too but the latency is much much lower and unless I'm really paying attention to it it's really difficult to perceive any delay at all it works fantastically and as television speakers have stereo pair of homepods do a surprisingly good job particularly with spoken word being able to use the speaker's dsps to virtualize a center channel crazy well there's no speaker in the middle but it sounds like there is I have to think all of this work means something that Apple's working on some home theater sound bar thing we don't understand because the number of people that are actually going to be doing this is very very little now I do find that masculine and lower registered dialogue is a bit too boomy for my taste when listening with homepods especially when contrasted with something like the Sonos Arc is a little bit sometimes it feels like you've thrown a fabric over the speakers but frankly it's pretty close and for several hundred dollars less money than the Sonos Arc but where the homepods fall apart is Atmos content two speakers can really only do so much to emulate many speakers and while content is watchable Atmos audio through the home pods is just a little bit too kind of hall effect echoes super processed and unnatural for my taste and the virtualized surround effect is frankly just unconvincing I'm sticking to the Sonos Arc for all my home theater needs but one area where sound bars are notoriously bad where they struggle and the homepods definitely Excel is when playing back music if you've watched other homepod 2 reviews either on YouTube or read them elsewhere you've likely heard one of two common opinions concerning the sound on the new homepod that either a it is indistinguishable from The Originals or if not that very similar or two that the new one sucks as the Sheepish audio file let me provide a little bit of a different Viewpoint for starters the homepod 2 does sound quite a bit different from the original and in a blind audio test where we played the same song samples on each homepod back to back I was able to distinguish the two quite easily from one another I can already tell just from that Baseline so the one plane right now this is the new one right after that we played different song samples without comparisons between the two homepods I just had to hear a song and then guess which generation of homepod it was this is the new one the old one huh wow that's a lot harder than without a comparison play that song out of curiosity on the new one and while I was more accurate than statistical chance certain genres were just frankly much harder to guess than others what I'm trying to say is they're not massively different but they're also different the first generation to homepod had a very aggressive roll-off on the upper mids and trebles female vocalists brass instruments symbols and even pianos reaching higher octaves sounded veiled even the mids were often muddied by the mid base and low end verging on Distortion Apple addressed this and I recall this vividly and have gone back and found other people that corroborate this several months after the release of the original homepod like late 2018 by basically putting to my estimation a high pass filter on sub 60hz bass they basically kneecapped the low end and by so doing those buried frequencies that had been above one to two K well they started to claw their way out of their graves and you could finally hear stuff on the upper end but it did so by repressing the low end somewhat uh there was also marginal dynamic range lost and well not me many homepod owners did not like the change and complained now I have not measured the new homepod uh with equipment because frankly because of the DSP and phasing trickery so doing is extremely difficult but the rudimentary measurements that were taken by dave2d tell the story that my ears hear subjectively that story being that the new homepod takes the good from the OG's low end which is unsurprising given that it's an identical driver and has similar tuning but it massively improves mids and uh and highs I still think that the speaker is tuned to be a little bit too boomy too Bassy for my liking but horns snare hits cymbal crashes and Hayley Williams are all more breathy there's improved brightness and body and it does so without ever becoming thin or sibling like the original homepod sometimes did when you could get those trebles into the speaker in the first place and while the homepod 2's room calibration feature results in similar very impressive Sound Stage uh it's basically indistinguishable from the original in my opinion I did find that the new generation had far better instrument and vocal separation which was nice to hear and see so then why are some people saying that the new one sounds worse well primarily because sound is subjective but objectively the new speaker takes on a flatter sound signature than the original much of that warmth and darkness that was found on the 2018 homepod has been replaced with a more analytical more coherent more detailed upper end and for some people especially younger folk that are more sensitive to treble may find this change on the new homepod to fatiguing too harsh from three to six kilohertz abrasive and lacking energy now they're not wrong for disliking the new one but I'm also not wrong myself for feeling the opposite I do think that at the end of the day most people and by most I mean 90 would find that after using homepod 2 for a few days they wouldn't want to go back to the first gen if they heard it again and after rumors speculating the reduction in driver quantity was a cost cutting measure that would result in poor tonal performance I'm really happy to report that that is not the case it's a nice Improvement and a better speaker than the original that being said no matter how good your signal processing and the homepods is amazing no matter how excellent your room analysis the homepod is amazing you cannot best physics a Sonos 5 for example has three mid-range woofers at four inches I didn't fart that was the chair trust me there are two side firing 20 millimeter tweeters and there's a 22 millimeter center with a board that houses six individual classy amplifiers for every single driver the Sonos has a less sophisticated DSP it's 50 less expensive the drivers themselves are probably less expensive and it has fewer drivers overall but it doesn't matter it destroys the homepods too even when they're in a stereo pair size winds displacement is King the Sonos 5 is a better speaker furthermore the Sonos also appears as an AirPlay device and it can also be controlled via Siri and if you don't care about Native smart device support there are dozens of traditional stereo speakers under 500 that sound vastly Superior to both the homepod and the Sonos and for eighty dollars you can get an adapter that turns just about anything into an airplay speaker so if these options exist why would anyone buy a homepod because just like its predecessor the homepod 2 is a Marvel of engineering never before has there been a speaker this diminutive that sounds this good there's no need to be concerned with Acoustics or room placement you just plop it down and it optimizes itself to your space there's no calibration mode it just does it automatically in the background you don't even know and unlike the Sonos it's radial driver placement 360 Degrees those tweeters are aligned it allows you to put a single home pod in the center of a room and have it sound directional the same from any position which is unbelievable is the Ultimate Party speaker it is a device that will not dominate small apartments it seamlessly integrates into the Apple ecosystem for those that are invested in it it's not perfect and it's definitely not the best value but it is very good and it is not overpriced it's still not the product for me but while I had a hard time recommending the original homepod to anyone in 2018 in 2023 the home pod 2 will be enjoyed by just about everyone that tries it well folks let me know in the comments down below if you own an old homepod if you've bought new home pods if you're happy with homepod mini I'd love to hear what you have to say thank you so much for watching and as always stay snazzy [Music]

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 256,790

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, homepod, apple, homepod mini, homepod 2, homepod vs homepod 2, homepod 2 vs sonos five, sonos 5, best smart speaker, audiophile, sonos, sonos five, speaker, review, music, apple music, airpods, hifi

Id: oTaNDJIzI7w

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023