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Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

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Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#201

Post by drcongo »

byproxy wrote: post #172
AriaMinaei wrote: post #96

Speaking of smart speakers, I'm moving to a new flat and I'm looking for some good old dumb speaker setup. The smartest that I'd let it get would be a Bleutooth dongle. As a recovering Audiophile, I'm gonna stay away from r/audiophile lest they temp me to sell my kidney to afford that extra 5% in "acoustic fidelity." Seriously, I'm happy with the 95%. Now, how do I go about putting together that sound system? Or in A…

A pair of cheap(ish) active studio monitors will probably give you the best price:performance ratio: https://www.sweetwater.com/c405--Active_Monitors I can vouch for the JBL 305Ps sounding pretty damn good. If you aren’t keen on spending that amount, though, the Presonus Eris line looks decent, as well.

Studio monitors are maybe a bit specific - ie: flat response and VERY directional.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#202

Post by dkonofalski »

jsjohnst wrote: post #76
perardi wrote: post #46

Is it time to complain about Siri again? Sure is! I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old. I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics. https://imgur.com/q0H788Y The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in…

> Buy $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said, Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues? Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod m…

I used to have Wi-Fi connection issues that magically went away when I swapped my Linksys Velop network for an eero Pro system. HomeKit works every time now, there are never any unresponsive devices, and all my HomePods work great. I'm not sure this is a HomePod issue based on how immediately the router switch helped.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#203

Post by jdminhbg »

criddell wrote: post #198
yowzadave wrote: post #130

HomePod is the most annoying piece of technology that I still frequently use. I was an early buyer of the first version, but this update doesn't address any of the complaints that I have about it: 1. No audio line-in! It's a $300 speaker, it sounds great...sometimes I'd like to be able to just plug something into it. If you have a record player, you have to have a separate set of speakers for it, because this thing w…

Audio line-in would be nice even if it's just to get rid of wireless latency. If they had that, I'd buy a pair today just to test with my home office receiver.

Audio line-in doesn’t remove wireless latency if you have a pair of them, because they still need to talk to each other.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#204

Post by bjustin »

Hippocrates wrote: post #162
brutuscat wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might try it with the stereo setup for the home cinema tv setup. I agree on everything about Siri. Though in the kitchen I bought those 100 bucks Ikea Sonos made speakers that sound amazing too. Much cheaper... One issue though is that I can not pass thru audio over the Apple TV, so the cinema setup would only work when using the Apple TV.

This should work if you enable ARC (must be enabled on Apple TV settings, and on your HDMI switching device. You also need to use an ARC compatible HDMI cable and to be using the ARC port on your "switching" device, since often there is only one such port. This is how I have it set up and my HomePod outputs all inputs that come into my TV.

I’ve used ARC with a stereo pair via my Apple TV for a while now. It sounds amazing. I can even play FPS games on my gaming PC with the audio piped to my HomePods, through the Apple TV via ARC, and there is no noticeable latency.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#205

Post by densh »

AriaMinaei wrote: post #96

Speaking of smart speakers, I'm moving to a new flat and I'm looking for some good old dumb speaker setup. The smartest that I'd let it get would be a Bleutooth dongle. As a recovering Audiophile, I'm gonna stay away from r/audiophile lest they temp me to sell my kidney to afford that extra 5% in "acoustic fidelity." Seriously, I'm happy with the 95%. Now, how do I go about putting together that sound system? Or in A…

Klipsch The Fives ticks a lot of boxes in terms of ease of connectivity and sound quality.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#206

Post by dkonofalski »

CameronBanga wrote: post #143
trafnar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use mine all the time and haven’t had these issues. Just the occasional Siri misunderstanding. My family loves it for playing music and a few other simple tasks like timers.

Echo this - I have 5 of these OG HomePods across two different places, and they've always "just worked" for me. Great multi-room audio, fantastic sound, and good for tasks like timers. The biggest critique I have is that after relatively major OS updates, it may take a day or two it seems for them to get "in sync" and have stuff like multi-room audio work without funky issues. Mostly happy about this announcement bec…

This is mostly my experience with one notable exception. I can't get phone calls to work on my HomePods but they always work fine with my HomePods mini (ugh, I hate saying that). I have no idea what the difference is and no amount of resetting or restarting fixes it. I can never say "Hey Siri... call my mom" and have it work on the HomePod and starting a call on my phone and trying to Handoff to a HomePod fails every time. I have 2 of them so I know it's not an individual hardware failure. There's just something wrong with it and I'm guessing it's something iCloud related that is syncing the bad setting to both of them. Why the minis are exempt is a mystery to me.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#207

Post by criddell »

joshstrange wrote: post #145
plusminusplus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't link Spotify to it? What does the voice assistant on a speaker do if not "Siri play Shooting Star by Bag Raiders"? Surely you can link Apple Music?

I'm like 90% sure that's on Spotify. Apple opened up APIs to do this and Spotify refused to do it because... reasons.

The reason is that Apple wants a cut of the Spotify subscription money when users sign up for Spotify on an iOS or iPadOS device. IMHO, it's a bad look for Apple. They should either get out of the music business or stop taking a cut of the money from apps that compete with Apple services.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#208

Post by dkonofalski »

nerdjon wrote: post #157
adrr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would just name your homepods and ask siri where your phone is and it would reply "10ft away from you kitchen homepod".

What if your HomePod is against a wall and shares a wall with another room? I could see that confusing in my place where I have 2 HomePods in my office against a wall that is shared with my living room. Not discounting the idea, but without mapping I just see there being extra confusion.

The chip is directionally aware. It would be able to tell you that your item is in a specific direction. (e.g., using Find My will give you an arrow that points toward your devices)

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#209

Post by criddell »

brunoc wrote: post #67
sneak wrote: post #13

This is extremely exciting, given the audio quality of the HomePod 1. I had been buying new old stock of HomePod 1s off eBay to make sure I have 6 working ones (I use 3 different stereo pairs) for the foreseeable future. The only real downside of HomePods is that they don't function as bluetooth audio receivers (Apple proprietary AirPlay2 only) and that you need an Apple ID (as well as iCloud enabled on that Apple ID…

You can get a really, _really_ good pair of professional studio monitors for 2000$. I'll confess that I've never heard the HP1 but that is a bold claim!

It seems like high end speakers expect you to set up your room to best fit the speakers while the HomePod modifies its output to suit the room.

Re: Apple HomePod 2nd Generation

#210

Post by anotherman554 »

adolph wrote: post #175
dmonitor wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot get siri to text my Mom. I say “text Mom” and it would respond “what do you want to say to Dad?”. Both my parents are explicitly set to be Mom and Dad in my contacts, but Siri has its own logic for determining who I mean as “mom” or something. Siri is the worst part of the Apple ecosystem by far.

> Both my parents are explicitly set to be Mom and Dad in my contacts Maybe it would work if you set one to Mom and the other to Dad. I understand the intent of being inclusive, but sometimes one must pragmatically bend like a reed to avoid exhaustion.

I think you misread the parent post? Obviously if parent expects "text Mom" to call Mom, not Dad, then the poster has explicitly set one to Mom and the other to Dad.
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