Key Features
- Review Price: £319
- Airplay compatible
- Available in white or space grey
- Size: 172mm x 142mm, 2.5kg
- Built-in power cable and power supply
- Bluetooth 5.0 and 802.11ac Wi‑Fi with MIMO
Update: Airplay 2 brings Multiroom audio and Stereo pairing to the HomePod
Apple recently released iOS 11.4 and with it Airplay 2. This provides some significant upgrades to the HomePod and makes having more than one in your house a lot more attractive. Multiroom audio and stereo pairing work well, but the same checks and balances need to be applied when considering whether a HomePod is the smart speaker investment to make. To my ears, and the ears of my team, the HomePod is the best sounding AI speaker around, however Siri frustrates as it doesn’t have the smarts, or impressive voice recognition, of its rivals.
How to set up and use HomePod Multiroom
Setting up a second HomePod is a doddle (as long as you are an iPhone user). Just plug it in, tap an iPhone to it and it’ll take all required settings.
To get your new HomePod to work as a multiroom speaker, or stereo pair, you’ll need to update it to the latest software version (11.4 at time of writing). Once the HomePod restarts it’s a simple case of opening the Home app and pairing the speakers with a few taps.
I had to tell the Home app which channel was left and which was right as it had them the wrong way around to start, but doing this was a simple process.
The HomePods need to be on same WiFi network to work as a stereo pair, which should be easy enough as they won’t be too far away from each other. That is a challenge if you have a large house and intend to get more than one HomePod for multiroom use.
For example if you use a WiFi extenders with their own SSIDs then the multiroom may not work in certain rooms in your house. Of course you could just use a second HomePod in isolation.
I use a mesh network, which essentially extends the same WiFi network across my house so that devices connect automatically to the best signal seamlessly. The HomePods had no problems controlling to each other on this network, even at a distance of more than 20m from each other.
If you’re planning to spread your multiroom speakers across a house with spotty WiFi then you might also want to consider investing a mesh network too.
Apple has made using the HomePod as a multiroom speaker a doddle, as long as you use the Apple Music app that is.
Siri may not be the smartest AI in town, but its multiroom is slick. Using multiroom is as simple as telling Siri “play this on all speakers”, or “play Barry White in the main bedroom”. You can volume control, pause and change music from any HomePod on your network. Crucially it doesn’t get confused. Summon Siri and the speaker that hears you most clearly expects it is the one that’s being commanded. It’s very slick, even with half a dozen HomePods connected to the same network.
The only slight annoyance is that you do need to be quite specific in your requests. With two HomePods set up, one in the living room and one in a bedroom, I had to be very specific. If I ask “Play this in the living room” Siri would reply with “I can’t find that speaker”. “Play this in the main living room”, though, gets results. It’s a small point, but one that shows Siri isn’t quite up to the level it needs to be to make it a seamless experience quite yet.
The Apple TV’s connectivity has also been upgraded with the latest software version. You can now select more than one HomePod to output sound to. If you’ve stereo paired the speakers it will output in stereo, alternatively it will pump out the same audio across devices. This is useful if you want to make some popcorn, but want to keep listening to the movie while doing it.
The HomePods work as brilliant TV speakers, as long as you use the Apple TV for all your watching needs. You can’t connect your TV to your HomePod without one.
HomePod Stereo Pairing
Stereo pairing is a real boon if you have a couple of HomePods near each other. Separation is spot on and detail is fantastic. It’s just as comfortable pumping out Moby’s bass-heavy early works as it is with Miles Davis jazz numbers.
Listening to Nirvana Unplugged in New York is a great demonstration of how the HomePods manage to keep background noise of clapping and cheers there, but don’t let it muddle or overshadow Cobain’s sensitive vocals.
The HomePod’s already wide soundstage is expanded further when you combine two together. They can fill a large room more than adequately and sound great wherever you’re located. The sweet spots are large and I found top volume too loud in the 25m2 room I was testing in. That’s not a problem I have with a single HomePod.
And as with a single HomePod there’s no distortion, such as clipping, even at full blast.
The full Apple HomePod review follows.
Why buy the Apple HomePod?
If you want the slickest smart speaker around, the HomePod isn’t it. But if you’ve totally bought into the Apple ecosystem and value audio quality above all, then the HomePod is second to none.
The price is a stumbling block, however. Add a little more to the HomePod’s £319/$349 asking price and you can actually buy two wireless Sonos One smart speakers. Individually they don’t sound as good as the HomePod, but they’re not miles off, and stereo pairing makes them very tempting.
Nevertheless, there’s one factor that gives me cause for optimism for the future of the HomePod. Apple tends to evolve software well after launching a new product. AirPlay 2, which has now been released, enables multiroom and stereo pairing. Another example is how far the new Apple TV and the accompanying tvOS have come since they launched in 2016.
However, as it currently stands, the HomePod is flawed.
Verdict
The HomePod sounds so good that I can forgive its price tag, but there are currently too many usability issues to rate it as a great smart speaker.
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