
The Trouble with HomePod Reviews - kawera
https://mondaynote.com/the-trouble-with-homepod-reviews-585075add9d2
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nugi
Quality sound quality testing is rare, mostly due to the fact that most of it
is more marketing than reality (see beats headphones for example). Even the
audiophile units often perform the same as a simple yamaha unit, but boy are
they pretty, and made with exotic woods, solid silver, and handmade german
capacitors.

Concerning room tuning: A similar issue happened about 20 years ago with the
advent of this tech in car stereos. It isn't at all new, I still own an
Eclipse head unit with the feature. It will play a frequency sweep from the
speakers, and used the mics to localize (fade and balance), eq, and normalize
the volume.

The problem is, as the listener, we almost always prefer our idiosyncratic
music prefrences over a "flat" or generically "enhanced" eq and dynamics
curve. And at least in the high quality (as opposed to SPL/loudness) domain of
car audio, we have mostly moved back to manual adjustment. Many high end users
still use sweeps and meters, easier than ever with smartphones, but still fine
tune by ear.

Not altogether different than the tube vs solid state argument. Solid state
amps are measurably cleaner and clearer, with less distortion, and greater
frequency range. But the type of harmonic distortion produced by tube
amplification is almost universally preferred by listeners when tested.

For humans, tune for the human, not the room.

