Apple HomePod – The Audiophile Perspective and Measurements

Stereo requires two horizontally displaced time-coherent sources. There is no other meaning.

If you're bouncing audio off walls you may get ambience, but you're not going to get a clean stereo image.

Also, the KEF speakers are hardly world beaters. They have a good reputation as PC speakers, but that's not setting the bar very high.

Professional speaker manufacturers like Genelec use a similar adaptive tuning system, and you can buy a microphone and software add-on to flatten the response of any speaker.

https://www.sonarworks.com/reference

The limitations are well known. The correction curve is level-dependent, because room resonance is a time domain phenomenon created by physical standing waves in a 3D space that includes damping elements, and you can't truly correct it with a frequency domain solution.

You can approximate a time-domain correction with convolution and some assumptions about the room geometry and acoustics, but it's never going to be perfect.

Bottom line: I'm sure the Homepod sounds very nice, and - as usual - it's innovating with technology that's been available elsewhere for a while, and made much easier to use.

But it's not magic, and it's not going to sound hugely better than a much more expensive true stereo system.

Of course that'll do just fine for a lot of buyers.

It's as objective as a subjective measurement can get.

It's not repeatable, and I don't know what units of measure could be used either.

>I'm an EDM guy and demand a certain performance to 20hz, which homepod lacks.

I've checked a lot of dance music and never found anything with meaningful 20Hz content. It's extremely rare for "deep bass" to be lower than 40Hz. The only genre I can think of that often has very deep bass is pipe organ music.

EDIT: Movie soundtracks also commonly have <40Hz content for sound effects.

I'm no audiophile, I do realize from reading speakers review in audiophile magazine that they tend to compare speakers in the same particular price range. The OP review seems to suggest that a dual HomePod stereo setup (about $700-800) could well compete with audiophile grade speakers in sub $1000 range. It is great feat by Apple if they can achieve it with their stereo release later this year. HomePod is "engineered" sound with its surrounding acoustic adjustment etc and I bet a large portion of audiophile prefers their gears to have a more faithful reproduction of source material. Anyway HomePod will not be the only gear for hardcore audiophile as they tend to have exotic source material equipment which HomePod can not accept. It is interesting to see in near future when dual HomePod can be used with AppleTV for movie viewing with simulated centre speaker and surround sound. I remembered Tim Cook said they finally cracked home TV few years back, maybe HomePod + AppleTV is the solution.

>(That is, I would expect audiophile-grade equipment to best mimic the monitors on which most recordings are mixed, which presumably is a flat loudness curve.)

Not necessarily, because that assumes the audio was mixed correctly to begin with. The audio will have to be played back over digital and analog broadcasts with varying dynamic range characteristics, not to mention various output technologies, including $5 headphones. And not to mention how the shape of each persons ear affects the response curve in different ways.

There is no way for an engineer to produce a rendition that sounds great in all of those scenarios, making 'mimicking the monitor' a pointless pursuit to begin with - even IF you were an audiophile listening to 400MB DSD files.

>Does anyone know why Apple finds it needed to further apply sound shaping to recorded sound?

I'd say the vast vast majority of people want more to have the audiophile label/association than actually listen to music with a flat curve, because most music will sound like crap.

Sorry for the rant :P