CNET smart speakers best sound overall: Apple HomePod

Apple’s HomePod, a breakthrough wireless speaker for the home that delivers amazing audio quality and uses spatial awareness to sense its location in a room and automatically adjust the audio, has been lauded for “best sound overall” by CNET.

Designed to work with an Apple Music subscription for access to over 40 million songs, HomePod provides deep knowledge of personal music preferences and tastes and helps users discover new music. HomePod features a large, Apple-designed woofer for deep, clean bass, a custom array of seven beamforming tweeters that provide pure high frequency acoustics with incredible directional control and powerful technologies built right in to preserve the richness and intent of the original recordings.

Andrew Gebhart and Molly Price for CNET:

Siri’s first smart speaker adapts its sound to the room you’re in and sounds fantastic playing all genres of music. Its sound quality outclasses the Sonos One and even squeaks by the similarly priced Google Home Max. Thanks to Siri, you can also use an Apple HomePod to control your smart home products with the sound of your voice, ask for help as you would with the other smart speakers and answer phone calls coming to your iPhone.

Then, there’s the newly released HomePod Mini. Apple’s smaller smart speaker offering costs $99 and sounds great. It doesn’t pack the volume and power of its older sibling, but you’ll get the same Siri smarts at a more affordable price.

When it comes to smart home, both speakers are limited to devices that work with Apple’s smart home platform, HomeKit. The HomePods have a few limitations the rest don’t, but that shouldn’t matter to you if you’ve already invested in Apple products and just want great sound quality.

MacDailyNews Take: People are constantly amazed at how good even one HomePod sounds, much less the aural impact delivered by two stereo paired HomePods (which has to be heard to be believed).