robjn

These negative reports have pushed the stock down about 5% over that past week.

The analysts behind these reports give their ‘insights’ to their subscribers before they give it to the media. The subscribers can see the report is negative and sell stock before the market responds to the media reports. Then they can buy the stock back at a cheaper price ahead of Apple’s earnings report. When Apple give their report the contrived fears will likely be eased and the stock price might recover. If their game comes off as they plan, these market manipulators might come away with 5-10% profit.

Rather than being played, the media should expose the apparent manipulation. Instead they unwittingly facilitate it.

You write: it's not expected to boast an edge-to-edge design, due to limitations of LCD display technology.

Apparently there is next generation LCD that can go edge to edge and have rounded corners.

The HomePod is in some respects better than Stereo. The DSP respects the intent of the original stereo mix. For example, if it detects backing vocals mixed toward the left channel it will send these more toward the left tweeters. At the same time lead vocals will be beamed to the center of the room. This creates a sound stage intelligently from the stereo mix and it allows each of the 7 tweeters to be dedicated to reproducing a smaller number of sounds.

There is just one woofer in a HomePod but this fact does not completely destroy the stereo effect because the human ear and brain are not as good at detecting the direction of very low frequency sounds. Nether-the-less when two HomePods are able to work together they will do an even better job, especially if a track has a bass guitarist mixed to one side.

I can’t wait to hear it. I just listened to The Accidental Podcast which contained an awesome deep dive into the technical implementation of AirPlay 2. However, the guys on there seemed to base their expectations of the HomePod audio output on it’s size - this is kind of like thinking the camera in iPhone won’t be as good as a physically larger 1990’s era digital camera. Computational audio will enable HomePod to punch way above it’s size and it is a quantum leap forward compared to anything else in this price range.

Sonos is in full out panic!

rogifan_new said:

Have you seen how many people have Apple’s white ear buds sticking out of their ears? Sorry but most people don’t care that much about sound quality. 

Have you ever measured them?

I work in the pro-audio industry and the company I work for is working on high end earbuds.

I’m told that “Apple’s earbuds measure extremely well”.

This is a completely objective conclusion reached by specialist engineers.