While reviews of the HomePod have found that it isn’t as “smart” compared to the competition from the likes of the Amazon Echo or Google Home, what many are finding hard to deny is the audio quality coming from them. Considering its size, it seems that many are impressed with the sound quality that Apple managed to squeeze out of it.
However is it good enough to be considered “audiophile grade”? Apparently so, or at least that’s according to a post on Reddit (via AppleInsider) by user WinterCharm who conducted a very exhaustive “acoustical analysis” of the speaker. Now the analysis is very technical and if you’re unfamiliar with all these graphs and terms, it can get very confusing.
However one of the aspects of the speakers that WinterCharm discovered in their analysis is that in a graph of the speakers’ reproduction of sound, it was “near-perfectly flat”. This suggests that Apple did not try to artificially boost or modify the sound coming from the speakers, keeping it as neutral as possible and allowing the original recording to come through, which is a feature that audiophiles tend to prefer.
This is versus some speakers (or even headphones) that can sometimes be too bass heavy. To sum it up, WinterCharm writes, “Apple has managed to extract peak performance from a pint sized speaker, a feat that deserves a standing ovation. The HomePod is 100% an Audiophile grade Speaker.” Whether or not you agree with the analysis is up to you, but if you are interested you can head on over to Reddit for the technical details.