“I now have two HomePods which I use in my bedroom as a stereo pair, and I wanted a speaker for the kitchen to listen to music while I cook. But I didn’t want a Bluetooth speaker because their sound quality is limited; since I use Apple Music and iTunes, having AirPlay access was essential for me,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Intego. “Rather than spend the $350 for another HomePod, I decided to buy a Sonos One. At $200 (and I got it at the $25 discount Black Friday price), it’s more accessible; you can get two to make a stereo pair for just a bit more than a single HomePod.”
“The Sonos One is one of three devices from this company that supports AirPlay 2 (the others are the Beam, Playbase, and Play:5 2nd generation),” McElhearn writes. “It is about the same size as the HomePod but the main difference is its smarts: it offers access to Amazon Alexa rather than Siri. So if that’s a dealbreaker, then stop reading.”
“As I said in my review of the HomePod, ‘The problem is that it has only one sound color and that color is bassy.’ This gives music a ‘fuller’ sound, but it’s not always what the music should sound like. The Sonos One has the opposite sound signature: it tends toward the tinny end of the spectrum and the sound can be a bit brittle when it’s very loud,” McElhearn writes. “The HomePod uses its DSP a bit too much, trying to create a sound signature that works with some tunes, but that makes some types of music sound muddy. The Sonos One is more neutral, with less processing and ultimately sounds more like a standard audio system.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What the HomePod needs is an EQ option in its settings within the Home app.
Bloody hell MDN!
What’s with the great big video ads that jump up covering the comments?
Just when I thought you couldn’t plumb more depths of advertising depravity. You’re making this site worse and worse in your desperation to to shove adverts in our face. They even blocked me being able to write this, I had to wait for 30 seconds while the bloody thing played
By looking at your comments section it looks like you’re hemoraging readers. There used to be loads of comments per article but now the number is down by a large margin. I’d put that down to this site being so annoying to read.
Software defined perimeter = no ads of the kind you describe.
Specially on an iphone…its constant disruptions …
Pretty much 3/4 of the screens real estate is advertising..
But the slide up videos commercials are the pinnacle annoyance. (Imo they are so annoying they work agsinst the advertiser).
PS
i have not seen them on ipad
Man you got that right. I barely come to this app (stinks) or site anymore. Just read the headlines and get out. The advertising has killed MDN.
MDN is so bad on Safari that I had to switch to using Chromium to read this site. For a while, I was using Safari with a partial ad-block that disabled/removed the comments. It was a bummer, but it prevented a handful of MDN tabs from destroying my Mac’s memory/CPU usage.
Then, MDN got all “no ad-blocking allowed at all!” I actually had quite a few ads allowed, but there must have been some specific thing they required me to allow.
So, now I’m using Chromium, which is showing a bunch of ads, but not the experience-destroying ones. We’ll see how long that works before MDN decides to chase me away entirely. :-/
You are correct, sir. One of the worst sites I’ve seen- then again, so many others are also cluttered, repelling migraine-inducing messes. We’re overloaded enough as it is.
They’re running off their old audience and leaving behind the bots and trolls, since the trolls have a higher tolerance for this nonsense.
Part of the reason I think response numbers are down is that unless you keep the page open there is no easy way to be notified when new responses are added to the comment section. It used to be where you could check the checkbox to get email notices. That disappeared several months ago.
Amazon has a new product called Echo Input that can make any speaker an Alexa device for streaming audio. Apple only has the toilet paper roll in fishnets.
Could have gotten a HomePod on Black Friday for $259, as open box items on Woot. Just like new.
Everything is Broken.
I thought there were also options for using Google Assistant and that they were working on a firmware upgrade to support Siri on the Sonos One.