GRACE NOTES

Last week Apple released its own Siri-powered speaker, the voice-assisted HomePod. It’s Apple’s attempt to muscle its way into a market already dominated by Amazon’s Echo with Alexa, and the Google Home. The HomePod is touted as an audiophile-grade speaker with excellent performance. Sound quality? Really? Let’s do a quick reality check on this.

One can almost blame Apple’s iTunes for single-handedly destroying the music industry and reducing sound quality to 128 Kbps of compressed music. And now, Apple is billing the HomePod as a music-centric system, with an impressive speaker array. It certainly might blow the pants off the competition when it comes to sound quality. However, a small single-point speaker will never replace the sound quality of a true stereo system no matter what magical sound processing you apply. Is Apple once again compromising sound quality for convenience?

Reviewers seem to love the HomePod. The Verge says, “It does manage to put other smart speakers like the Echo or Google Home to shame. “ And a reviewer from the Telegraph says, “So how does it sound? Very good indeed, at least when I heard it set up against the Echo.” Even What HiFi likes it. “In comparison, the Sonos Play:3 appeared uncharacteristically flat, while the Amazon Echo felt almost pedestrian.” Perhaps Apple head-honcho Tim Cook summed it up best: Apple is a company that deeply cares about music and wants to deliver a great audio experience in the home. We feel like we re-invented it in the portable player area and we feel we can re-invent it in the home area as well.

So, Apple is focusing on “sound quality.” Bravo, Apple, and bravo sound quality, right? Gimme a break. The sound quality you’re lauding here is compared to the Amazon Echo, which sounds like crap, or the Sonos Play:3, which isn’t their best product either. Let’s just congratulate Apple for using a few more speakers instead of one or two, and throwing in a small woofer to create a modicum of bass. This just shows how dismal sound quality has become.

All this talk about how Apple is focused on sound quality is BS. If Apple was really concerned about sound quality, they would have released a true stereo music system instead of one that artificially creates a stereo sound field. Sure, you can always pair two HomePods together, but with their pseudo-stereo imaging, who knows what the soundstage and imaging will be. At that point, you’ve spent $700 for a pair of small, wireless speakers, and few users, if any, will pony up the bucks for that.

Don’t even get me started on the processing the HomePod is doing to music to create a psycho-acoustic immersive sound field. Mix engineers spend hours painstakingly placing instruments across the stereo soundstage. Then Apple goes and blows it all up depending on how its internal processors determine it will sound best. When did recording engineers get outsourced?

When I worked in the studio, we always mixed on the best speakers we could. We had built-in main monitors, and we also checked on high-quality near-field monitors; for me, Yamaha NS-10Ms or Genelecs were ideal. My fear is that modern mixing engineers will be optimizing their final mixes to sound acceptable on a single little smart speaker with a mind of its own. How much more complacent about our playback systems can we be?

Look, I may be completely off base, and I hope I get a chance to review a HomePod. I will gladly eat some humble apple pie if its performance proves me wrong. I hope it does sound spectacular, especially since it’s bound to be a popular product. Apple might have big dreams for their HomePod, but isn’t it really just another nightmare for sound quality?