AppleZulu

zoetmb said:

I doubt that the third chamber, which they claim is resting on 28 tons of concrete and with walls weighing another 27 tons is in any regular Apple office facility.   Anechoic chambers have their purposes, but since consumer devices must operate in different and frequently noisy consumer environments, I'm not sure how practical it all is.   But if they're giving a lot of audio engineers high-wage employment (I'm an ex-recording engineer), I'm all for it.  

And 1 Infinite Loop isn't going away.  My understanding is that it's Apple's leased facilities around Cupertino that will be phased out.   

That’s a truly baffling (pun intended) comment coming from an audio engineer. Why are studio monitor speakers used when recording, mixing and mastering music? Most consumer hardware lacks the flat frequency response of studio monitors. For that matter, why record in Abbey Road Studios or at Capitol Records in L.A., when consumer listening environments lack the acoustic perfection of those places? Oh, that’s right. Because you want to start with the ideal, and then go back and only tweak it a little if the finished product inexplicably doesn’t test well on crappy speakers in noisy environments. Do it the other way around, and you’re not going to get what you want.

This is not that hard. The HomePod will play anything that any other Bluetooth or AirPlay speaker will play, just the same way you play those other things on those other things. That’s the baseline. Pull up your Spotify playlist on your phone or computer, connect to HomePod via Airplay or Bluetooth and hit play on your phone or computer, just like you would to play Spotify through any other speaker. Oh, and reportedly, it will sound way better than most of those other speakers (though maybe not as good as your $5,000 maganpanar speaker set up). 

If you subscribe to Apple Music, it will play things from Apple Music via Siri voice command: Hey Siri, play the album “Abbey Road.”

If you have something that’s not in Apple Music, but you’ve uploaded it to the Cloud via iTunes Match, it will play things from your iTunes Match library via Siri voice command: Hey Siri, play the album “Rolling Stones Bootleg,” (or whatever you’ve named your bootleg collection of stones tracks).

lorin schultz said:

foregoneconclusion said:

zoetmb said:

And with all these devices, I don't know how we perceive going back over 60 years to mono sound systems is perceived as "optimized for music" unless one wants to argue that the largely crappy new music released today, largely created within ProTools, doesn't need stereo.

Common misunderstanding with the HomePod. It's not a mono device. The high/mid range will be reproduced in stereo due to the seven tweeters, while the low end will not (only one woofer). That's not a big deal for a mass market product like the HomePod. Most stereo effects do reside in the high/mid range, so although there is technically a difference with only one woofer, the non-audiophile is going to be hard pressed to find much of a difference with "true" stereo.

That's what Apple is doing, but the reality is that it doesn't actually work very well.

For stereo to sound even remotely natural to human ears there needs to be physical distance between the sources. This can be simulated with phase effects, but they don't sound particularly natural. It also gets a little weird as the listener moves around. That's fine on a laptop where the listener tends to stay pretty much dead centre, but may be an issue for a home speaker since the listener probably isn't going to stay in one spot.

Still, while those things may be bothersome to people for whom listening is a more serious experience, they probably won't be a problem for most people. A tiny little speaker isn't going to sound like real life anyway. The novelty of the effect may actually be perceived as a positive.

With the possible exception of binaural recordings played through headphones directly into the listener's ears, stereo is itself an artificial, simulated construct. When you hear actual sounds in your environment, they are not generally emanating from two points in front of you, a few feet apart. So even with a great recording playing through two high-end speakers set a number of feet apart, you are still creating a simulated sound field. I suppose if you're playing a recording that was made of two close-miked instruments and playback is completely separated to the two channels, you could reasonably reproduce the effect of each of those performers standing in the room exactly where the speakers are. Otherwise, stereo is itself a simulation, attempting to emulate a left-to-right soundstage with different things "placed" across it. From a physics and audio engineering standpoint, there's plenty of hinkiness involved in that process. Likewise in multi-channel surround sound setups, which simulate sound fields all around you. Dolby Atmos apparently opens up vertical simulation as well.

So all that's to say, the proof will be in the computational pudding, but the HomePod's seven tweeter array is no more of an artificial construct than is two big JBLs in each corner of your den. There are no doubt limitations to create stereo separation from the HomePod's arrangement, but I'm curious to hear how well they do with it.

GeorgeBMac said:

I've never understood Apple leaving the router market.
I get it that today's routers are probably a difficult market in which to make money.   They're a commodity. 
But, WiFi and related protocols are also critical to IoT and Apple's interconnectedness -- even the Apple Watch partially relies on it to talk to the iPhone.  And, potential seems to be growing rather than shrinking.

To me, from a strategic standpoint, it does not sound like a smart move.  Apple doesn't do too many dumb things so I have to believe that there is something to this story that I'm missing.  But, right now, it sounds like it is, at best, not a smart move.

Despite the repeated rumor site rhetoric, Apple has never indicated that they are leaving the router market. There was a report a long time ago now that Apple had moved its Airport engineering staff to “other projects,” accompanied by breathless speculation that Airport was being abandoned post haste. We’ll stipulate that the reports on staffing changes are accurate, because the AI editors have indicated that they confirmed this information with their own sources.

There is really no evidence for any of the rest of it, however. The full family of Airport devices continue to be available, not only online but in stock at Apple stores everywhere. There have been multiple firmware updates issued since then, including the one noted at the top of this thread.

If Apple was leaving the router market, you’d figure they’d have done so by now, and the current stock of Airport devices sold off or pulled from the shelves. The evidence, however, is that they’re still there and supported. And there are HomePods on the horizon, which, along with AppleTV, are kind of dependent on the existence of reliable networking devices. That, along with HomeKit’s niche as the more secure offering for networked home devices, would strongly contraindicate a strategy that includes abandonment of the router category.

Also, much as one might think Apple would like to replace time machine backups with a cloud-based, fee-based service, there’s a problem with that that lies outside of Apple’s control. With terabytes of data on multiple macs, iPhones, iPads, etc., in a given Apple-centric home, typical broadband services would create an impermeable roadblock, through monthly data caps and severely throttled outbound traffic. You aren’t going to replace your AirPort Time Capsule with a google router and keep that new MacBook Pro wirelessly backed up to the cloud through a typical home broadband service, even if you wanted to.

Apple does not typically hand over core functions to its competitors. For instance, they took a hit when they ditched Google maps to replace it with Apple maps, because they weren’t quite ready with their own version. They did it anyway, however, because they envisioned maps and geolocation increasingly as a critical core function of the iPhone. (Remember the first iPhone didn’t even have a GPS, so this was a mid-stream correction.) Home networking is a core function to HomeKit, AppleTV, and the HomePod. There is just no way that they’re going to necessitate hanging all those services and products off of competetors’ routers, with no control over quality and security. It just ain’t going to happen. Their challenge is going to be driving the people who don’t already have Apple routers into getting onboard.

So the most logical scenario is that while AirPort may be phased out sometime soon, there is likely an unannounced replacement in the Apple pipeline. A secure HomeKit router that would eliminate the need for separate bridges and base stations for all your cameras, switches, lights, locks, and garage door openers would be a very Apple-like approach to things, perhaps. We’ll see.

decodering said:

foggyhill said:

EngDev said:

foggyhill said:

Basically, a lot of people here don't seem to have a clue. The reason all those speaker/receive companies are consolidating is because people are tired of their really crappy sound no matter how much you pay for them. Why? Because the speaker and receiver part alone is not the issue. It's putting them in a particular environment that's unsuited for them, and not being able to adapt to the music or listener location that's the issue.

Apple is offering an adaptive to room, music, etc, minimum setup speaker.

None of those bozos producing traditional speakers or sound systems have the processing chops to do anything about this; they're as doomed long term as the traditional watch makers.

This post is a lot of nonsense. Seriously, what are you talking about?

Maybe learn English or stop posting then.

The room acoustics and ambient sound, setup and placement is crucial to the sound you get..

The number of people who buy speakers/sound systems and then put them in their room and it sucks ass and they are not satisfied is beyond measure.

That's why the whole industry is slowly being decimated and consolidated; people prefer portable sounds to the actual sounds these systems produce.

The only place where those systems still make some sense is in home theater installations were the shear number of speakers overwhelms whatever deficiency there is and high fidelity is less important.

That you ding someone for not speaking English well and then make a grammatical mistake in your first sentence is hilarious. Honestly, better etiquette would do wonders for getting your points across.

Anyway, part of what you are saying is true: Yes, acoustics and speaker placement can make a big difference in the quality of sound reproduction.

But to blame that for why people are turning away from better audio components is completely off-base. The real reason is that many people look at the price of what they're buying and the functionality that comes with that purchase and go for cheap(er) and easy. The majority of people have decided that portable solutions using Bluetooth and/or music streaming services that play lossy (AAC, Ogg Vorbis, etc.) files are good enough. For them, the balance of quality and price is fine. To be honest, some of these wireless/portable systems can actually sound decent, even if they can't really compete with what you can get from a system built to produce high fidelity.

There is still a place in our modern lives for better quality systems in the living room or wherever people listen to music, some of which don't actually cost an arm and a leg (although most do, which is the real reason why the industry is suffering -- there aren't enough people willing to pay several hundred or thousands of dollars to get better sound). But for many, many people, that is a secondary consideration to convenience and cost. And that is real reason why the audio industry is suffering.

There is a common mistake in conversations about trends in the quality of consumer audio. People want to compare the the current sound from iPhones, iPods, mp3s played through various earbuds to high-end home audio from days of yore, with the tube amps, and the boutique vinyl pressings, and the magnaplaner speakers, etc., and lament that trends in consumer audio are going down the tubes. The opposite is actually true. If the high-end audio business is suffering, it's because the low-end gear is vastly improved. Coming up through the decades, most home audio consumers were listening through handheld transistor am radios, cardboard box turntables with record stackers and two-inch speakers, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, mass produced vinyl gobbed up with dust and fingerprints, off-brand walkmans, boom boxes, and stereo component racks from K-mart. 

Compared to all that, the sound you get from streaming Apple Music on an iPhone through some stock earbuds or via Bluetooth and a beer-can speaker is orders of magnitude better. So is audio from a TV sound bar, coming from an AppleTV box. For a while in the 80s, people with component systems could get a graphic EQ with a white noise generator to try to manually compensate for speaker and room deficiencies. This fall, you'll be able to get a HomePod that does all that not just for EQ, but for room acoustics. The truth is, that thing playing Apple Music files will likely produce sound that's orders of magnitude better than even decent, moderately priced home component systems from back in the day. Yes, current audiophile stuff is still going to be better, but the average consumer probably isn't going to feel the need to make the investment, when they can spend less and get HomePod audio networked throughout the house.