I'm not sure how much you can infer from my data. Use at your own risk.
Thank you... Looking...
I'm not sure how much you can infer from my data. Use at your own risk.
Which ATC model is that? Have you compared the homepod with it just for kicks?
Its the ATC SCM 7 V3, as for an early preliminary comparison, the bass on the Apple Homepod goes lower and has more heft.
The jbl lsr305p mk2 goes lower than my Atc Scm19 at half it’s size and does a good job at it, so I’ve switched to the JBLs for my living room setup. I swore I would never move away from the ATCs due their SL driver but I think they are getting left behind by active DSP speakers.
I love market disruptions like this. Dinosaurs need to evolve.
I did my own loudness compensation measurement of the HomePod @ 1m in my room.
The jbl lsr305p mk2 goes lower than my Atc Scm19 at half it’s size and does a good job at it, so I’ve switched to the JBLs for my living room setup. I swore I would never move away from the ATCs due their SL driver but I think they are getting left behind by active DSP speakers.
I love market disruptions like this. Dinosaurs need to evolve.
For those of you seeking data on the post-stereo, Post-audiophile environment. This is not in the category of other little speakers you talk to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/7wwtqy/apple_homepod_the_audiophile_perspective/
I get the impression that it is limited to Apple Mac users and restricted to receiving product from the Apple store thus not a universal product. Is that correct?
You need AirPlay, an Apple protocol. From airplay you can play anything.
FWIW Roon does airplay, I'm sure plenty of other things do too. Roon have work to do on the volume control by the looks of things, https://community.roonlabs.com/t/airplay-to-homepod/38530You need AirPlay, an Apple protocol. From airplay you can play anything.
Today I listened to Home Theater Geeks Episode 1, which featured Tomlinson Holman as guest and was recorded way back in 2009, before he joined Apple. His fingerprints are all over the HomePod:
I'm not making a value judgment about any of these things, but I'm sure all of them contribute to the HomePod's excellence for what it is, which is a speaker for background music played back at low to moderate levels. Many of the HomePod's features, valuable in the background context, are likely to generate distortion in the context of serious stereo listening--particularly the ambient/direct sound processing.
- The loudness equalization used in the HomePod is similar to that used in THX processing, adjusting frequency response in accordance with the Fletcher-Munson curves.
- The way in which the speaker steers "ambient" sounds to the rear tweeters where they are likely to be bounced all over the room and "direct" sounds to the front tweeters where they are likelier to go directly to the listener is reminiscent of the use of dipole surrounds in THX, which were intended to bounce ambient sounds around the room and ensure that no sound from the rear channels would reach the listener directly. Holman specifically mentioned his preference for dipole surrounds in the HTG podcast.
- The HomePod's use of adaptive calibration with microphones: microphone-driven calibration of course is used in the Audyssey systems on which Holman worked before he joined Apple.
- The HomePod's use of lots of tweeters that each reproduce different sounds. Holman's view is that more channels are always better, and he prides himself on his work on 10.2 surround sound.
I am quite confident that the ATCs owned by @Sylafari will go lower than the HomePod if EQed similarly.
The particular app doesn’t have to have airplay, your device does, so it will “see” the pod. If you have an iPhone, iPad, you can play any audio on the pod that you can play on the phone.FWIW Roon does airplay, I'm sure plenty of other things do too. Roon have work to do on the volume control by the looks of things, https://community.roonlabs.com/t/airplay-to-homepod/38530
...or all of the advantages of omni dispersion if placed for that.The direct/ambient thing has a rationale though. Not only the Apple guy, many other audio researchers have written about it lately. The idea is to recreate a larger sense of spaciousness and envelopment. In that sense, it can be said to be a way to compensate for what some people - including me - view as the inherent limitations of 2-channel stereo in recreating a threedimensional acoustic field. The advantage with separating out the ambient sounds, is that it may have a smaller impact on clarity, as the direct sound is still direct, compared to full blown omnis. Omnis can work very well IME/IME, but they need to be placed free standing with air around them. Apple's way of doing it will probably be more forgiving of suboptimal setups, while still providing some of the advantages of omni dispersion.
Roon is an app, not a device as such, it runs on windows or linux, neither or which are airplay devices, but they can send airplay data to airplay devices that receive and play that data.The particular app doesn’t have to have airplay, your device does, so it will “see” the pod.
...or all of the advantages of omni dispersion if placed for that.
Not quite, I would say. The off-axis response of the direct sound will still be different from the direct sound, which means that the ambient field will not be a perfect replica of the direct sound, unlike in really well-executed point-source omnis. But there is very little systematic research on the characteristics of omni speakers, so it's difficult to say how this affects our perception of the sound. Really curious to hear how they image when in stereo!