redefiler

macgui said:

Fucking idiots on parade.

Of course people are going to complain when a characteristic is significantly changed, as they should. Frequency response is not subjective. Alter it and the resulting audio is altered. Whether it's argued to be good or bad is subjective. Whether it's there or not isn't. Some of you a) don't own a HomePod so don't care or b) are tone deaf and audio fidelity is lost on you.

Those of you complaining about users being upset would whine like little bitches if Apple put out a firmware update that gave a purple tint to your display. Or if it changed your monitor's resolution from 2560x1440 to 1920x1080. But not to worry as 'it's subjective'. 

I haven't heard either version of the HP yet. But while most people lauded the audio quality, a few people who took the time to critique the sound said that it lacked presence and the mid-bass crept up into the mid-range. This is common problem for a lot of modern small speakers— tailoring the sound to be bass-heavy at the expense of balanced frequency response.

Regardless of which version is preferred, anybody should be ticked if a change to their purchase, after the fact, negatively affected them. 

Uh... small, even medium range speakers cannot offer a balance frequency response.   They lack the physical ability to reproduce bass frequencies.  All of these little jive speaker systems use psycho-acoustical filters (tricks)  to make non-deiscerning ears think everything is ‘bumpin’.  It’s not.  This goes for all headphones as well, you need something 8” or larger to even play effectively in the bass range.  Hint: feeling bass is not the same as hearing it.

There’s a separate issue of almost universally hyped speech critical frequencies around 1.5-4khz.  Basically after years of collective heavy headphone usage  and resulting escalation of conversation volume/environmental noise, most of you have hearing damage in those areas.  Manufactures designing their systems to boost these frequencies is the same phenomena as Costco cranking the color saturation and brightness of their TVs at the door to compensate for extreme outside glare and catch the attention of even the most blind customers passing.  This has been happening since the 90’s for all major brand consumer audio systems.  Trusting people to parse this stuff is impossible thanks to decades of marketing hype, including anything from the  ‘audiophile’ community.

As for consumers splitting hairs over perceived bass response on these plastic ‘convenience’ speakers, based entirely on artificially boosted harmonics in the 180 to 300Hz range... that’s just Dungeons & Dragons level acoustic roleplaying fantasy.