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What a great show. While it's a bit sad to think that the upcoming third season will be the last season, it's probably a good lesson in taking the win and stepping aside while you still have your dignity.

This is also probably a good opportunity to link back to Apple insider's hilariously off-the-mark first review of Ted Lasso. 

After all the accolades, awards, and, well, large viewing audiences, it's a bit entertaining to read about how the "[p]remise of 'Ted Lasso' can't sustain a whole show," and is "just too thin for a ten-episode season," and that "It's also, sadly, just not all that funny." Not satisfied at criticizing what the reviewer felt were the show's shortcomings, he also had ideas of what it should be, instead: "The show might have worked better if the football coach had been, say, a good ol' boy type, or another type of stereotypically ugly American." Well, there you go.

Believe!

Wut? Reviewers don't "get" an Apple product?

I'll answer one question with my own speculation, because Apple will likely never answer it directly themselves. Why withdraw a product and then reintroduce it a couple of years later? It's an incorrect supposition that the "OG" HomePod was discontinued because it was a "failure." It wasn't a failure. It was actually a brilliant device with extremely good sound quality, and its computational adaptiveness to the room is something generally only available on much more expensive audiophile gear. My speculation is that its only failure was that its position in the product line was proving a barrier to broader consumer adoption of HomeKit as a smart home ecosystem. It's too expensive for most people to consider buying several to distribute throughout the home so that one is always within earshot for issuing smart home commands. Apple introduced the $99 HomePod mini to address that problem, but I suspect that the mere option of the better-sounding but more expensive OG device was causing too many to hesitate at committing to purchasing multiples of the mini. People would spend their budget on one or two OG HomePods for the sound and skip the mini. That leaves too many places in the house unserved by Siri. So Apple simply removed the OG device from the line-up with the typical lack of explanation. Freed from the other option, more people bought multiples of the mini, and suddenly HomeKit becomes viable throughout the house.

With that problem resolved, now the better-sounding but more expensive HomePod can be resurrected. The fact that they've redesigned it so that fewer tweeters and mics still yield at least the same (or better) sound quality means the price should remain stable for several years. 

Reviewers often don't get Apple products. At this point, there's a pretty well-established history of confused harrumphs, scalp scraping and confident pronouncements of doom for Apple devices. I think this is because, despite Apple's indisputable success at designing and selling things, reviewers and other members of the peanut gallery continue to expect Apple to operate just like every other tech company, and when they don't, there's little or no consideration that there is probably a well-thought-out reason as to why that might be.

Apple thinks strategically and makes decisions based on long-term objectives. They issue the SEC's required quarterly reports, but very little of their decision-making is directed at quarterly or even annual market volatility. Because of that, reviewers are missing the forest for for trees when they're looking at the discontinuation and reintroduction of the larger HomePod as two separate events based on short-term market considerations. Given Apple's years-long product pipelines, it's far more likely that Apple knew they'd be reintroducing the HomePod when they pulled the previous model. If it wasn't for the reason I've suggested above, it surely was part of some other, larger strategic plan. One clue: Just as a person named after their father can drop the "Jr." from their name whether father dies, Apple would likely have re-branded the mini as simply HomePod if they weren't planning to bring back the non-mini model all along.

cgWerks said:

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We always talk about ‘voting with one’s wallet’ but the industry can also force things like this. I’m not sure everyone was asking for high-quality amps to be reduced to junk, with a bunch of added ‘surround sound’ lights and whistles, but the industry kind of crammed that one as well. When you went to buy a new stereo, at least in a typical consumer electronics store, you had a choice between one piece of crap and another, for the most part.

At least we can still turn it off. For now, anyway. I wonder if it will end up impacting audio engineering such that it impacts the quality of a good stereo-mix traditional sound-stage?

I would argue two things here. First, for the average consumer, audio quality is orders of magnitude better than in "the good old days." An iPhone and Apple ear buds playing AAC audio is almost infinitely better than mass-produced cassettes and LPs played back on K-mart stereo rack component sets, or cassette Walkmans or even Sony "Discmans" played back through the crappy headphones that most people had. Audio from a HomePod is also much, much better than those K-mart racks or cassette or CD boom boxes, etc. Everybody wants to compare a phone and ear buds to audiophile gear from the 70s or whatever, and that's not the right comparison. The mass-market gear is way better than the previous mass-market gear, and the audiophile stuff is way better than the audiophile stuff, too. The setup in my own den is midrange gear somewhere in between, and the lossless and Atmos music played back from my AppleTV box can sound truly great.

Second, the 'soundstage' generated from a traditional stereo mix is in truth an even more artificial construct than something like Dolby Atmos. In fact, when stereo was initially being promoted as the new standard, many audiophiles objected to it as a weird-sounding artificial construct. Unless you're listening to acoustically recorded binaural audio through a pair of headphones, stereo does not exist in the natural world. Very few things you hear in the real world emanate from two fixed points 45 degrees to the left and right of dead center in front of you. A sound engineer blending audio between a left and right speaker to make it sound like the singer is in the center is a completely fabricated simulation. The singer was most likely recorded on a single monaural track with a single microphone. Splitting that between two speakers to center it, or a little more in one than the other to "move her around" is completely artificial. Sound engineers have gotten quite good at that, and at finding the compromises in this artificial simulation to make such things sound good even when coming from various speaker setups or in headphones, but it's always a deliberate compromise. Those engineers have to optimize a mix and master of the recording so that a single, finalized source plays back decently from an unlimited number of variables in the listener's setup. 

sflagel said:

I feel like I am the only one who doesn’t get it, but what is the difference between Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos Audio? 

And what is the difference on iPhones between the “Automatic” setting and “All”. It seems that “All” plays Spatial Audio on all headphones; while “Automatic” restrict Spatial Audio to AirPods and Beats; why?

Spatial Audio refers generically to all surround sound sources, including Dolby Atmos.

Dolby Atmos refers to an object-oriented surround sound technology created by the Dolby company. Normally when audio is mixed, the sound engineer decides exactly which sounds come out of which speakers (left, right, center, back left, back right, etc.). Mixing in Dolby Atmos, the engineer decides from which direction a sound should come, and the listener's device computes on the fly how to accomplish that, based on what speakers are attached and where they're placed in the room.

For headphones and earbuds, the computational work is done on the fly to create binaural sound. In short, you have only two ears, but you can tell when a real-world sound is coming from a certain direction. Your brain accomplishes this by sensing slight delays between when your left ear and your right ear pick up the same sound source, and by interpreting echoes and other effects of real-world sound bouncing around in your surroundings. Live sound recorded by two microphones placed into a mannequin head's ears that's then played back directly into your ears via headphones will be binaural audio, and your brain will be able to interpret not only left and right, but all directions for that recorded sound. 

Now, the computational power of your iPhone is able to recreate that effect for any surround-sound source that was mixed for multiple surround speakers in a room. Your iPhone sorts exactly where and when the delays and echoes should be just as they enter your ear canal. As a result, you hear the playback not just as let/right, but as spatial audio, all around you.

As far as the settings, Automatic works with Apple's buds or headphones automatically, because there is two-way communication going on between those devices. "Always on" is necessary to get spatial audio playback in standard wired headphones, because the signal is just one-way output from your iPhone to 'dumb' headphones. 

scampercom said:

I wouldn’t say I “hate” so-called spatial audio, I’d just say that in most cases it’s inappropriate or irrelevant to the way I listen to music. I listen—on headphones at least—because I want to hear the best mix the artist/producer is capable of, and that includes a _fixed sound field_ that plays as intended no matter what the orientation of my head is. If I want to roll around on the ground or turn around to do something else, I should be able to without the entire mix shifting. So I’d put it this way: add whatever gimmicks you want, but _always_ default them off Off, or allow me to switch them off. Not everyone wants to sit completely still to listen to music with the optimal mix.

You can turn off head tracking if you don't like it. Swipe down for the control panel while a spatial audio source is playing. Press and hold the volume slider. The spatial audio control button is bottom right. Spatial audio options are off, fixed, and head tracked. The fixed option keeps the Atmos mix stationary no matter which way you turn. Off sends you back to stereo. Try fixed before you write the whole thing off.