I hope this leads to some way besides Airplay to play arbitrary audio with no delay. If Apple had just included support for Bluetooth audio (or God forbid, an aux jack) I would've bought two full-sized Homepods to use as computer speakers two months ago.
No delay but Bluetooth audio? Is that that even possible?
I use Bluetooth audio a lot when only listening to media but try and use Bluetooth headphones while playing a MIDI instrument. For me I struggle when I try to do that.
My headphones are Audio-Technica ATH-M50xBT. They support Bluetooth 5.0
I’ve been using them with a wire connection to my MPC X when doing music but a couple of days ago I used my MPC X in controller mode connected to my 2018 MacBook Air, and used Bluetooth Audio to see what that’d be like. As mentioned I found the delay to be too high. I tried to lower the sample buffer size in the MPC X software on the computer but with lower settings I got popping and clicking sounds.
Besides, the buffer size settings in the MPC software were not the main contributor to the delay AFAICT. The default setting of 512 samples, when used at 48kHz will mean 10.67 ms of delay, which according to some sources online is at about the upper limit of what you’d want when playing an instrument. And some sources say that for sounds with a steep attack (e.g. drums) you’d preferably actually have sub 6-7 ms delay.
But Bluetooth 5.0 adds a minimum of 32 ms of delay according to what I read online, and they also say that more likely it will be as much as a couple of hundred ms delay.
All I know for sure is that when I tried to play instruments through Bluetooth audio using the headphones I mentioned and the MPC X connected in controller mode to my computer with the MPC software, the delay was sufficiently high that it became difficult to play.
Whereas with a cable connection to my MPC X in standalone mode with the same headphones the delay is low enough that I personally don’t notice it, even when doing drum sounds.
For hardware from Apple's walled garden, here's some numbers on AirPods latency:
> What about results? The first-generation AirPods, which use Apple’s W1 chip, measure latency of 274 ms. Second-generation AirPods, released earlier this year and powered by Apple’s newer H1 chip, drop the latency to 178 ms. And AirPods Pro, which use the same H1 chip, are even better at 144 ms.
I think what OP meant is that Homepod only works using the Airplay protocol, where the delay is 2 seconds. Very few macOS apps support Airplay 2 which cuts it down significantly.
What's the trouble with buying any of the competition, if you want those features?
You can get a Klipsch R51 PM for quite a bit less than the price of two HomePods. Better audio, Bluetooth, aux, optical, USB, even phono pre-amp in case you have a turntable.
I think they're (one of?) the only smart speakers on the market to automatically calibrate themselves to the room. I'm sure it's just some EQ and maybe a bit of phase adjustment, but the speaker doing it automatically for you whenever you reposition it is a nontrivial feature that makes the audio sound noticably better than much of the competition.
Yeah its pretty crazy how advanced its sound calibration is. It uses its microphones (six of them) to measure the response of the sound in the room according to where its placed, and adjusts itself on the fly so that it sounds as good as it does.
So if you pick up your homepod and move it in your room - say from in the middle of the table to near a wall, it will change its sound profile (after about half a minute) to lower bass and minimize reflective frequencies from the wall. Having an omnidirectional speaker blast into the wall would not sound good without that kinda calibration, as you would get reflective sounds from the wall and too much bass.
It does further calibration like this one put in a stereo pair to make sure _both_ homepods are outputting the best sound together.
The audiophile equivalent of this is getting a good mic, hook it up to your $5k stereo, and then use the manufacturer provided software to calibrate it. Then never move anything around your room again or hang new art of throw down a rug, because if you do that you have to recalibrate again.
The homepod is really some crazy audio engineering. One of apple patents describes some of stuff that probably went into the Homepod [1]. There is also a fun review [2] that was posted on the reddit audiophile back when the homepods first came out.
If you are technically inclined, this isn't that hard to do. You will need a calibrated mic, but result is you can do Sonos style adjustments to calibrate for a room on any set of speakers:
You can even bake the configuration into the HifiBerry DSP once done, it doesn't need the Pi attached to apply the room correction. The included HifiBerry OS software has a setup process that makes calibrating the room with mic just as easy as the Sonos system.
I was huge into Sonos ecosystem, but recent actions with how they treated owners of earlier equipment have left me cold on it. This works forever once set, assuming you don't move the speakers. Works with any old speaker/amp combo you can output a phono/optical signal to.
its purely opinion etc, but I am just as happy with results from this system with nice pair of bookshelf speakers as I was a pair of Sonos 1s, and it will work as long as the board lasts.
I am shocked hifiberryOS hasn't found more fans, its really impressive for what it does for little money with a supported DSP. The hardest part of this is cloning an image to an SD card, rest is plug and play. You could eBay the calibration mic once done too. If you intend to move your speakers a lot this is no good of course, but my experience is people often set these things in one place in their home.
I do have a solid calibration mic and have done this a handful of times with different speakers, but like you've said, I'm very much technically inclined and wouldn't expect the average person to be able to do it.
It's probably just a matter of time before pretty much every speaker can self-calibrate to some degree. Most mid-range bluetooth speakers already have a microphone and some basic DSP abilities, which is really all you need.
HifiberryOS is new to me and looks pretty nifty - I'll have to check it out.
The Sonos Move has "Auto Trueplay", which is the same, and allows Bluetooth playback in a "dumb speaker" mode.
Weirdly, not at the same time - Auto Trueplay is only supported in WiFi mode.
Do you the source code for the microcode running on your CPU or are you just going by the corporate advertising? :)
Obviously we have to put some trust in corporations if we're not to live a purely analog existence, and so it stands to reason that we can put a little more trust in a company whose business model is selling premium hardware (and which increasingly sees privacy as a competitive advantage) than a company whose business model is selling your personal data to advertisers.
I agree with your sentiment that there is no absolute here; however there is a difference if the whole machine is a blackbox or just the CPU and is sold by a listed corporation that is only accountable to their shareholders.
They see privacy as a marketing advantage, however they collect data as they see fit. It is also important to note, that they are indeed in the ad business and even if it is no match to their hardware business they are profit maximizing. So even if they don't sell your data now this can change and your record on that big corp will become known to whoever pays enough.
Side question: Does Google directly sell personal data to advertisers? (For Google applies what I said above anyway)
HomePods, for all their flaws, are very decent speakers in a small footprint. They blend in and are very minimalist, in my opinion, and that's important to me.
for all their flaws, are very decent speakers in a small footprint
This is an understatement.
I bought one just yesterday, and was very very surprised by how small it is. It just blends in unobtrusively with the room. It's like it's not even there. A pretty good step on the route to making computers blend in with the world.
If you're a tech nerd who is OK with wires and blinking lights all over your home, this won't be important to you. But if you are someone, or live with someone, for whom the aesthetics of your home are important, this is a very important feature.
There is a reason they call those "bookshelf" speakers. No great place you can put them outside of an office or a dedicated space you can give them enough separation.
Not to dogpile, but do you remember the 90s? In 1993, computer hardware that wasn't SGI wasn't allowed to be any color besides Beige, to the point that in the late 90s having a black PC was a design trend instead of the default.
computer hardware that wasn't SGI wasn't allowed to be any color besides Beige
I used to dream about one day pounding away on SGI gear. I eventually (early/mid-2000's) got moved to an office with meteorologists that had Indigos and Octanes, and I think Irisseseses. Blue was awesome. But then they all got replaced by generic Dell machines. Ick.
I remember back before all computers looked the same. Back when keyboards were vastly different between models, and would have blue or red or brown or very rarely green keys. Standardization? That was for the Telex at work. Computers were going to free us from that tyranny. Except they didn't.
If what you really want from your computing experience is freedom in the form of a colorful keyboard, there's options out there for you. Perhaps you would like to start with some cute pastels? https://thekey.company/products/dsa-magic-girl-keycaps-round...
It's a convoluted setup I'm not sure I'd recommend to anyone else! :) Still tinkering on it, but current rig is a Respeaker Core [0] running voice2json [1], which sends MQTT commands to a Mac Mini running mopidy [2], and the audio is routed through Airfoil [3] to multiple AirPlay speakers. (In theory, a Pi could drive all that directly, using shairport [4] rather than Airfoil.)
The major shortcoming is that Airfoil doesn't support Airplay 2, so it doesn't take full advantage of HomePod stereo pairing; and while the sync is perfect, it comes at the cost of massive lag (5+ seconds). Sounds great though!
The speakers sync perfectly with each other for pure audio, but the setup is definitely unusable for video or games due to the sync delay. It seems to work okay switching back and forth between AirPlay 1 and 2, so I can temporarily take over from Airfoil and use them as an AP2 stereo pair, in which case they sync well for video.
Supposedly Airplay 2 was cracked about a year ago, but there still aren't any usable third-party implementations. Really a shame that Apple hasn't opened up the standard.
My computer speakers live on a bookshelf in the center of my apartment, so I don't want them to sound muddy from the side that they're not facing. I wanted the Homepods because they're omni-directional, they sound great, and I think they're really cute! I would've happily paid extra for that set of traits, but Apple seems determined not to have me as a customer.
What I ended up doing is getting two of the Bose Home Speaker 500, which has sideways-firing speakers. I leave them in aux mode all the time and arranged them so that no matter which side of the shelf you're on, the left audio will be on your left side and the right audio will be on your right side.
One feature I like about HomePods and Airplay is stereo pairing. If you have two, you can link them, stream to one, and they automatically play in Stereo. Can other non-Apple alternatives do anything like that?
For me, WAF. I have traditional speakers/amp but they sit in my office. Homepods are unobtrusive, and I don't have to worry about positioning/directing them.
While bluetooth would be nice, I find Airplay a much better option. I currently hate trying to use bluetooth headphones/speakers between multiple devices and having to go to. settings to manually "reconnect" them. (Yes, even with Airpods).
If you mean the delay between asking Siri to 'play music' and music to start, that is annoying and should be fixed by Apple engineers at some point. Siri is just way too slow on the Homepod. I typically use my phone and just manage what is playing that way, which is faster and has a better UI anyways.
If you mean playing something with minimal latency between your source and the speaker, that is just not going to happen with any sort of speaker over wireless. Airplay is pretty good in that regard, but you can never beat just plugging in a line out to a full fledged self powered speaker, like the KEF LS50s or LSX.
