521: Dance Compatible
09 Feb 2023How the new HomePod compares to its predecessor and competitors, when to use soundbars, fruitful speaker-wire connections, and the kids these days.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco relives his middle-school years
- Follow-up:
- HomePod 2
- Siri speed test video
- And a related
#askatpfrom Justin Saucier - Sonos Premium Entertainment Set with Arc
- And a related
- HomePod 2 power connector
- A fix for tapping the HomePod near an outlet
- Siri speed test video
- Foo Fighters performed at iPhone 5 launch (via Sverrir Björgvinsson)
- Twitter shenanigans continue
- HomePod 2
- Marco’s HomePod 2 Review
#askatp:- Will large enterprises set up Mastodon instances? (via Gavin Whitaker)
- Why are Xcode downloads so darn huge? (via Nathan Roberts)
- How the heck do you search for code-related help for iOS/macOS stuff? (via Darin Kelkhoff)
- Queryable: iPhone photo search app
- Post-show: Audio is difficult
Sponsored by:
- Kolide: Cross-platform endpoint security for teams that value privacy and transparency.
- Pushcut: Triggers, notifications & widgets for Shortcuts, HomeKit, and online automation.
- Drafts: Where text starts. Get 50% off your first year of Drafts Pro.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- I’m too sexy for this song
- HomePod speed-test video
- #askatp: HomePods or soundbar?
- Sponsor: Drafts
- HomePod touch-delay setting
- Foo Fighters DID perform an event
- Twitter’s latest 🐄💩
- Sponsor: Pushcut
- HomePod (2nd-gen) review 🖼️
- Sponsor: Kolide
- #askatp: Big-co Mastodon instances
- #askatp: Xcode delta updates
- #askatp: Search terms for iOS dev
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Speaker wire
I’m too sexy for this song
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I might sound slightly hoarse tonight because I came from a not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very loud bar not a big party but a elementary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco school children’s dance
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh Elementary school dance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that a thing the earliest I can recall having a dance was sixth grade. Yeah Yeah, same but yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s apparently a thing. Um here and I I can say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am exactly as comfortable here as I was in sixth grade at my at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my sixth grade dance. Whatever that is in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person that makes them you know maybe incompatible with that kind of social situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does not change when you are 40. Whatever you were when you were how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old are you in sixth grade like 11, 12? Whatever age you were then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the same when you’re 40. That does not leave a person.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about your kid? Did Adam inherit your dance incompatibility?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fortunately, he seems to have taken after his mother in that way, which is of huge benefit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t wait to get home. And it’s funny, it doesn’t feel this way because we’re all staring at computers in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our offices and our houses and no one’s around, but in a way we are talking to 80,000 people. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s weird to think like I’d rather talk about, you know, computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a football stadium full of strangers mostly, which most people would consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a terribly scary thing, but I’d rather do that than try to dance in front of 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco children and their parents, you know, at an elementary school.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait a second, wait a second. Why are you doing any dancing at this? I thought you were just like the
⏹️ ▶️ John vibe is awkward and it felt like a place that you didn’t want to hang out, but isn’t it the kids supposed to be dancing? Aren’t you just like a
⏹️ ▶️ John chaperone? Like aren’t you just standing against the wall?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, except that there’s some parents who are like the fun parents, and they’re like dancing a little bit. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, tell me. I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not fun for the kids. Who wants their parents to, ugh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the good news is, this is an elementary school. The oldest anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is here is fifth grade. And so, no one is actually old enough to really be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like awkward about, you know, girls and boys and cooties and stuff. So the good thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that there wasn’t any of that really. So the kids are just like running around, you know, like lunatics, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just running and throwing balloons at each other. Did Adam enjoy it? Yes. Yes, and that’s what mattered.
⏹️ ▶️ John And did Tiff just not go? No, no, she was there too. Oh, she like it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She is dance compatible. And so she has a much easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Right, right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I am not. I am also not dance compatible. That is not my thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, perhaps with the appropriate amount of social lubricant, maybe a teeny bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but no, not generally speaking, that is not for me. However, I don’t think being the cool parent is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always bad. So I don’t remember if I mentioned on the show, but we joined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little community pool this past summer and it was really, really great for our family. You know, we got to meet some new friends,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, get closer with some old friends, et cetera. And early on in the summer, I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to not do the normal Casey thing of of just sitting on the sidelines being like, yeah, have fun kids, I’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you later. And instead, I was going to try to be the cool pool dad that will get in there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and rough house with all the kids and whatnot. And even though sometimes my back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked like it had been attacked by a bunch of feral kittens, because that’s effectively what was going on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, I thought being the fun, cool pool dad was enjoyable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that doesn’t require any sort of coordination at all, unlike being the fun, cool dance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad, which requires coordination and rhythm to things I have none of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, that’s the thing. I’m very coordinated and I have really good rhythm, and yet I still cannot dance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to save my life. Because I think it’s more of a mindset. It’s more mental, I think. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the mindset is that requires a person to be able to let go of their inhibitions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just dance their hearts out, I don’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily, or I have trouble shifting my brain into that mode. And no matter how much social lubricant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one has, which of course at an elementary school dance is none,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if that were there, like in situations where that is available, that doesn’t help me. I still cannot become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dancer for whatever reason. So it’s just, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do a lot of things. That’s just not on the list and I’ve learned to live with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve learned to cope with this lack of my personality that I have here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try to make up for it in other ways as best as I can.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the good news is I don’t think you’re gonna be onto too many more dances as your kid gets older.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I sure hope not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The good thing is I was able to use my skills in a much better way. Last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night, my kid brought home, he had a school project. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making public service announcements as part of their unit on making persuasive essays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So he wrote a script, basically, and it had to be a 90 second recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, oh man, dude, I got this. Like I got your back on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So everyone else was gonna show up with their voice memos thing. I had him use my good mic, because he wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, of course you can. And then he recorded 90 seconds max, and he was really happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the take, but it was like 15 seconds over. And I was like, well look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I record three two minute segments a week for this show. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what you’re doing and trust me, the easiest thing to do is just re-record it and just go a little faster, maybe cut a sentence out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here or there if you can. Why don’t you use smart speed? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey thought about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I kind of did. And so he said, can’t you just edit it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like, well, let’s try. What the heck, let’s try it. And so we shortened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the silences and took out one repeated word that was in the middle there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get to go 1.1 times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a couple of like breaths here and there that didn’t necessarily need to be there to sound natural. And I showed him like, oh, if it cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, it doesn’t sound natural. If you cut over here, it does. And 90 second limit, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time clock at the end said 129.996 and we’re like done. Oh my word. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, it sounds amazing because he’s like, you know, on my podcast, Mike. So, I’m like that I can’t dance to save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my life, but that I can really help you out, son. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think he’s going to be great on audio quality though.
HomePod speed-test video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow up because we have a lot of audio quality things to talk about coincidentally. And we have some HomePod 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow up and teaser spoiler even. Marco has his HomePod 2 review coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later in the episode after follow up. But before we get there, we have HomePod 2 follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like when you’re watching TV growing up and it’s like the story you all came here for. News at 11. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then eventually you get to 11 o’clock and they don’t get to it until like the last 10 seconds of the half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour segment. segment. It’s after the next commercial, after the next commercial, you’ll see when we come back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll hear all about this crazy thing you wanted to hear about. Yeah, fortunately, I have way more to say about it than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those old news shows. And we won’t make you wait until 1129. Hopefully not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. All right, so HomePod 2 series speed test done on video by Stephen Robles,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is also known as the Bearded Teacher. First of all, kudos to this unbelievably handsome gentlemen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for wearing a gorgeous shirt during the recording of this video. I am deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressed with his choice of wardrobe. But even with that said, the video was legitimately really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And so Steven talks through, somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he has like 17 different Sonos setups, including the setup that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my living room, with the exception of no rears, or he didn’t mention those anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But he tests that against the HomePod 2 stereo pair and makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some very interesting, but reasonable conclusions about, you know, what would you, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would he advise one to buy, depending on what you’re looking at. You know, if you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of a TV person, then you might want to go this route. If you’re more of a music person, you might want to go this other route.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was a really good video. I think it was like 15-ish minutes. Yeah, 14 minutes, 38 seconds. And it’s worth it. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should definitely check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I put this in here is because last week I complained that people, all the YouTube reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d watched, nobody actually tested how the new system on a chip affected the response speed of Siri, which seems like a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John important part of a product that mostly hasn’t changed, but one thing that did change in it was the SoC, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the old one was slow, so you should test that. And then that’s how I got sent this video. I said, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody did test the speed of Siri on the new HomePods. And you know who did it? wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John as Casey was alluding to before an ATP M1 Ultra shirt because he knows what’s up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Definitely knows what’s up.
#askatp: HomePods or soundbar?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we want to cover this related ask ATP that we were originally going to cover next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week? But I think it kind of slides nicely right in here Is that allowed John or do I need to wait until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put that there. No, I did Justin Saucier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote what a stereo pair of home pods be better TV setup than a soundbar I know John will scream true surround sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in case he loves the Sonos but purely comparing between a sound bar a sound bar Vizio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be specific so So as you expected, I cannot state enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much I adore my Sonos setup, but I will be the first to tell you it is heinously expensive. It is incredible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And- Was it more
⏹️ ▶️ John than $600 for the- Oh, yes. All right. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I haven’t priced it out, so I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize. Sonos doesn’t sell a lot of products for less than $600. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, you’re counting it because you got the sub with it too, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the back surrounds too or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is also correct. So- Yes, but that’s actually in some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways a perfect segue because what I was going to recommend and I’m gonna try to vamp a little bit while I’m looking up the price
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Sonos that sells a set of the Sonos Arc, which as we record is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their most high-end Soundbar, which is what I got and a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos sub and there’s two different subs I got the larger of the two subs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sub gen 3 and actually as we record coincidentally it is $200 off. It is generally listed for $1,648.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is currently on sale for $1,448. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this sounds phenomenal. And I don’t personally have any experience with HomePod, so I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make any sort of claims it sounds better or worse than HomePods, but it sounds incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s also what, like two and a half times the cost, two times the cost, or right? Then it’s two times the cost of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two HomePods. So it’s not cheap. I think there’s something to be said for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re doing a lot of home theater viewing, you might be better off with some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of, you know, soundbar with sub, but in, in, in, I’m kind of spoiling Steven’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video now, really, if you just want to get in the door at a semi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheap price and get easily 80% of the way there, even for home theater stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even I can concede that a stereo pair of HomePod 2s might be the better answer. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct me on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so like here’s the thing. So the problem with sound bars is most of them are
⏹️ ▶️ John bar shaped. So they’re not, they’re not that big. Some like the
⏹️ ▶️ John fancier ones have like, you know, what is the factors because that means you can’t have like speaker cones
⏹️ ▶️ John that are that big. And it’s very difficult to get any decent base out of like a two inch speaker cone, like depending
⏹️ ▶️ John how short your bar, your sound bar is, that may be a limiting factor. As you get fancier
⏹️ ▶️ John and fancier soundbars, a lot of them put like the big, uh, you know, the big cones facing up or down
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re actually fairly deep if they’re not that tall. Um, the very, very fancy soundbars are
⏹️ ▶️ John not small anymore. Like they’re just really big. And so you’re like, Oh, you can fit big drivers in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and they do. And they have a whole bunch of them and they’re all over the place. Right. Um, but for television viewing,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, with that aside, the main thing that I feel like you would want in a television
⏹️ ▶️ John viewing system, it has less to do with sound quality, which you can decide how much
⏹️ ▶️ John money you want to spend to get whatever sound quality you want, and more to do with you want all the channels represented. So
⏹️ ▶️ John for my, if I was spending my money and I was doing a television, I don’t think I could ever give up the center
⏹️ ▶️ John channel, which means you can’t just have a stereo pair, right? You have to have a left and a right and a center, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you should probably also have a subwoofer, and then you can consider whether you want the back surrounds or not, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is something that HomePods can’t give you, because you just got the two of them
⏹️ ▶️ John and the two of them does not even give you a center channel right let alone and they have plenty of bass or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John now the thing is if you have a cruddy soundbar two home odds will probably sound better even despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the cruddy soundbar has a quote-unquote center channel sound bars are usually about the width of your TV so you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John get that much stereo separation because how far can the right and left be from each other not much farther than the width of the soundbar
⏹️ ▶️ John and when they do have a center channel a very cheap soundbar will have a center channel made of these tiny little speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John that are just right. And so in that case, you would say, oh, two home pods does sound better
⏹️ ▶️ John than this cheap soundbar, but the cheap soundbar probably cost less than two home pods. So it’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of a complicated question. But in general, what I would say is if you care about television and movies,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get a two channel setup. Everything now has more channels than that. You want center left and right
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, preferably some kind of surround if you can manage it. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course as we know, you know, like anything that was that was shot to be 3d capable You should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also be viewing on a 3d TV because just because that capability is there you need to have that It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always better right 3d
⏹️ ▶️ John TV is terrible, but surround sound is good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is that? That’s interesting Why
⏹️ ▶️ John why why is that because it’s good because it sounds good because it’s it’s what you have in movie theaters people
⏹️ ▶️ John like it It sounds good. It is not annoying it makes the movies and the television shows better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And everything about a movie theater experience is better. So for instance, you have to make your home smell like stale step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on popcorn. That’s not all we’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John so even just for things that you don’t care about, like forget about the word surround. Like I don’t wanna hear things behind
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Forget about that. Just right in front of you sound. Having a center right and left is better
⏹️ ▶️ John than just having right and left. Because the shows are mixed for center right and left. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John mixed to be put out that way. So all the sound is coming from the front of you. No weird bouncing off anything. But even just
⏹️ ▶️ John in that scenario, that’s how the shows are mixed. They’re usually mixed with also backs around stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John too. Anyway, so the reason I say, give all those caveats about cruddy soundbars is it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John universal. It’s not like you should always get any soundbar over any pair of haws, because you shouldn’t, because cheap soundbars
⏹️ ▶️ John do not sound good. They won’t have bass and the HomePods do have bass. You know, a cheap soundbar
⏹️ ▶️ John will barely have any separation because the bar is not very long. And you know, maybe, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the center channel is probably really cruddy quality because those usually aren’t upwards or downwards facing, so they’re coming right at you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not a universal, but in general, look for discrete channels. Now, the obvious, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re wanting to actually spend a little bit more money, the Casey setup is good if you don’t want to spend
⏹️ ▶️ John money on a receiver, or if like Casey, you have an ancient receiver that can’t handle this, because you don’t need a receiver in that Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ John setup. It does all the stuff for you, right? But kind of like when you go sort of the top end of
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be Macs, but these days PCs, a modular system where you buy a receiver and then you buy speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then that’s all modular and you can mix and match. I can pick a receiver based on capabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can pick speakers of sizes and shapes and costs to fit my setup, I can change those speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John over time, I can swap out the receiver and keep the speakers the same. A modular system is going to cost more, but it gives
⏹️ ▶️ John you the ultimate flexibility of deciding exactly how much money you wanna spend for how big a speaker for which role. And
⏹️ ▶️ John any modern receiver has more channels than, you know, just enough channels to fill your entire room depending on where you
⏹️ ▶️ John can put speakers and where you can’t. So that’s how I feel about HomePods as
⏹️ ▶️ John TV speakers. They’re probably better than your cheap soundbar. They’re way better than what’s built into your television.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s possible for you to get discrete channels for your sound, that’s what I would suggest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree with you, but for slightly different reasons, of course. The functionality of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sending the audio back to the Apple TV via eARC and then that wirelessly sending it to the HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over some kind of protocol, that’s going to introduce, obviously, a few problems. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is gonna be, there’s gonna be some latency. And I have not tried this setup yet, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard the latency is okay, but it’s always gonna be there. It’s always gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, a little bit worse than other speakers. And that might be okay for like movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and TV, because you can adjust, you know, delays here and there. It’s not gonna be okay for anything that you need to be low latency in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real time, like for instance, games. Like if you have a game system connected to your TV, you’re not gonna want any additional latency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added by the audio. And so that’s gonna be a problem. Number two, it’s just gonna be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated and potentially buggier. This is the ability to be used as TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers is not the main role and selling point and focus of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod as a product. And so maybe you can do it, but if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really what you’re shopping for, you should probably go a different direction to something that’s actually made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more for that purpose because your life will probably be simpler and better and more reliable in the long run. Like for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted to buy a computer to primarily play video games on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can be a Mac. You can buy a Mac and Macs can run games. Like that’s a thing that can happen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re better off buying a gaming PC. You know, like, so, John. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do it with the Mac, but that’s not really what it’s made for. The HomePod is never, that’s never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be like a main priority for them. It’s never gonna get like all the testing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world. It’s never gonna have all the capability in the world. Down the road, a software update might break it in weird ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe your TV speakers will be broken for a month while they fixed it. Like, you don’t wanna be in that world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re buying specifically to be used as TV speakers, get regular TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers. Now, whether that’s a soundbar, which I still hate that entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product category and term and everything. Soundbars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same way that like, when Steve Jobs was first talking about apps in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store and he kind of talked about them almost like diminutively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh they’re just apps, just snack on these apps. The way he was speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about them didn’t show a lot of respect for them or reverence to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, it was more just like here’s these little things that kind of don’t matter, here, snack on them, good luck with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what soundbars are to the entire world of home theater audio. We’ll just give you a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound bar. Yeah, here have a sound
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. There are high-end sound bars now, believe it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. They are very
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive and they are actually pretty good. Like I said, they are actually pretty good because they’re really,
⏹️ ▶️ John really wide. So you actually get stereo separation and they’re big. So they have large speaker drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John in them. So what they are essentially is speakers, the enough of the guts of a receiver to make them work,
⏹️ ▶️ John all shoved in one thing. So it’s not, most of them, I agree, most of them are not great, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there are actual ones if you spend a ton of money and you have limited space that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Soundbars are the point and shoot camera of the home theater audio world. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the built-in speakers on the TV that you get for free with no space. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do kind of remarkable things considering the limited space and front facing grills and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they tend to be lacking. Like, so you have the built-in speakers on the TV. Then you have this huge quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gap and then you have like a nice speaker system where whether it’s two channel, three channel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five channel, 19 channel, whatever it is, you have like, there’s that big gap in size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity, cost, you know, between TV speakers and then a full blown separated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker system with a receiver. Soundbars try to be in the middle of that, but they have a very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Most soundbars are not that much better than the built-in speakers of your TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also are way, way worse than a big system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you can do the big system and it doesn’t have to be a high-end big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, it just gets bigger. You have to have generally some kind of receiver or amp, and then you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have, you have to buy separate speakers and even though I’m a two channel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 2.1 person, I love having a subwoofer and the two speakers. That’s a great system for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know John espouses the, at least having a center channel And I can see the reasons for that. It’s kind of a preference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And so I see that both ways. And again, John was right, you know, with HomePods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you can’t expand that system, whereas with anything else you can. But what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody will tell you, all the people who are soundbar apologists, they’ll tell you, oh yeah, get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soundbar, it’s okay. But if you really want the best setup, also get front, left, and right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separate speakers, and rears, and a subwoofer. Well, if you’re doing that, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the soundbar is, is an extraordinarily expensive crappy center channel with an amp in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re better off separating out those roles. I don’t think they’ll tell you to get
⏹️ ▶️ John and left with a soundbar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I think you’ve jumped off the ship at this point. I mean, I understand the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re making, but, and I agree wholeheartedly, by the way, that your average soundbar, from everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve experienced, sounds like garbage. I completely
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think it sounds way better
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than most TV speakers. Like there is a jump between TV
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers and even the worst soundbar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, but that’s a very, very low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, not for many people. Like, it turns out, like, I mean, look, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, everyone is picky about different things, but like, for most people’s needs, a soundbar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t that much better than the built-in speakers on most decent TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a lot of mosts. There’s a lot of qualifying words there, I know that. But for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soundbars usually do not pull off what they purport to pull off. What they purport
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this is going to be a relatively small-ish, relatively simple-ish thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to be way better. And of course, they play all the same tricks as HomePod. It’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just have this one thing in the middle and we’ll bounce sound off the walls. And none of that really works very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can always tell, oh, this is all coming from the middle. It’s not fooling anybody. You can’t beat physics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What people think they are good at, they’re not that good at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I think it’s one of those things where if you are willing to spend the money for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, like John has been saying, a properly good soundbar, then it can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be done well. Although I will say even the ARC, which is the most fancy soundbar that Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes, it is pretty tinny without an attack.
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not, that is not an example of a high end soundbar, by the way. Okay. Well, then what would you? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fancy ones are substantially more expensive than the Sonos ARC and substantially larger
⏹️ ▶️ John and usually do come with a subwoofer. They just, I mean, they’re not cheating. They just have tons of speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers, widely separated with high quality and the built-in guts to amplify them and make
⏹️ ▶️ John them sound good. And they have some smarts to make the aiming them around the room. Like the bouncing
⏹️ ▶️ John is never going to make it sound like it’s coming from behind you behind you, but the very best ones sound like they’re on the side
⏹️ ▶️ John of you, which is much better than only being in the front.
Sponsor: Drafts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by drafts. I gotta say I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy to have this app sponsoring us because drafts is I think one of the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for iOS. It’s just amazing. So drafts. This is more than just another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes app. It gives you a new approach to entirely how you use your iPhone, iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac, or Apple Watch drafts starts as a low friction way to capture your thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Super easy. You just launch it and start entering your text. No more fumbling around to find the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right app or the right folder to create a note only to find out you know later on you forgot where you were doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or or you lost your train of thought or whatever. Drafts is optimized for fast capture. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just open it up, boom, start typing. And then once you’ve captured your text, Drafts’ customizable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editor gives you a familiar place to hone your thoughts. They have great markdown support, tools for arranging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines, and of course your choice of fonts, sizes, and other editing options. So you can really make Drafts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your go-to scratchpad for everything from journals and checklists to even drafting emails.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you’re ready to do something with your texts, drafts, powerful actions are there for you. And you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much everything under the sun, send emails, messages, post to social media, including great mass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on support already. And drafts integrate with hundreds of popular apps and services, making it easy to fit into any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflow. You can also extend drafts yourself with ready to use actions from the drafts directory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can build your own they have extensive community forums to find help and a huge user guide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge directory, you know, there’s a huge community around this app. So you can really fit it into your workflow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The possibilities are endless with drafts. Drafts is always free to use. So download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it today. Try it in your doc for a week, you will find you can’t live without it. You want more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drafts, you can unlock the power features, things like themes, workspaces and custom actions and more with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drafts Pro. And for for limited time, you can get your first year of drafts pro for only 999. It’s 50% off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For details on that visit get drafts.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to drafts for just being an amazing app and for sponsoring our show.
HomePod touch-delay setting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vortec writes with a recommendation for what happens when you accidentally tap a HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near an outlet. Well, it turns out accessibility is for everyone as we know, but often forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can go into touch accommodations and then have a hold duration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume this is specific to the HomePod. I don’t have a HomePod, so I can’t try this out myself. But anyways, you can set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hold duration for a very small amount of time. In this screenshot, Vortec I could set it for 0.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds and that will presumably stop an accidental touch. And you can always make it longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, this, you know, this, this is better than nothing, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if only there was some way, if we, if we had designed some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John input device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t be done where you could, you could maybe brush against it or dust it without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actuating an action. but if you wanted to create the action, there wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be any kind of weird gesture or delay. You could just maybe like push it. I don’t know if there’s- How about
⏹️ ▶️ John we add a camera to look at your eyeballs to tell if you’re looking at the button. And then only if you have like
⏹️ ▶️ John your eye if it’s focused on the button, then it will activate the button. Cause that’s the only thing I can think of. Same with
⏹️ ▶️ John car interior designers. We need to have buttons on the steering wheel. It’s not like people’s hands are gonna be near that area frequently,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So we can just make those touch buttons. I’m sure that’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I just like, you know, This makes the HomePod a little bit less annoying to use, but the fact is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually do use the top tap input as a quick gesture to play pause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to go next track, you know, double tap. I actually do that on a regular basis. So I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the interaction with it worse or slower or more annoying. I just want it to ignore accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input. They’ll add forced touch
⏹️ ▶️ John sensors to it. It’s still not a real button, but it has forced touch, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to press real hard. Yeah, it’s like, they’re putting all this effort into things like, you know, this would be so much better It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just a button. You just make a button,
⏹️ ▶️ John an actual button that moves up and down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s even cheaper. Like, I don’t, it’s just, it’s like, it’s what they have now is worse
⏹️ ▶️ John in every way. And it’s not, it’s not like it’s gonna wear, it’s not like it’s gonna wear out like a mouse button from
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds of thousands of clicks either. It’s not like you’re sitting there hammering the top of the home pot all day long. I know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it doesn’t even have to be a good button. Just put a button on it. Jeez.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ugh. Well, you know, my, uh, my Sonos speakers, they have, they have buttons that you can press.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know! Just saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the touch sensors on the top of the Apple devices, you gotta go for this
⏹️ ▶️ John variation of the frequent internet meme. Did a cat design this?
Foo Fighters DID perform an event
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving along, Severier Bjorkvinson, I’m sorry if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s wrong, I’m doing my best here, points out and reminds us that the Foo Fighters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did perform at an Apple event. It was the iPhone 5 launch event and even provided a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube link that we will put in the show notes. Good, I’m glad we’re all excited about that.
Twitter’s latest 🐄💩
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so Twitter’s still a mess, as it turns out. So on February 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter Dev, which is the Twitter account that represents, I guess, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer relations in so much as such a thing exists. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they tweeted on February 2, starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead. Over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hundreds of millions of people sent over a trillion tweets with billions more every week. Twitter data are among
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the world’s most powerful data sets. We’re committed to enabling fast and comprehensive access so you can continue to build with us. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be back with more details on what you can expect next week.” Well, those details still haven’t arrived as we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record, which is super fun. However, two days later, the chief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idiot in chief wrote, responding to feedback, Twitter will enable a light write-only API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for bots providing good content that is free. Well, thank you. That really clarifies things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good content. Dare I ask, what is good content, King?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like this is one of those things where people focus a lot on his individual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco words or the individual details of the policy. But what you need to do is take a step back here and look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the big picture. This is an unreliable platform run by unreliable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco erratic leaders. And so this is not a place to build anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you already built something there, this is like, you know, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many recent warning signs that you should probably look to move whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is you need that for to move that role somewhere else. Because this is just, it’s an unreliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform. You cannot build on this platform anymore. And if you’ve already built there, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a matter of time before anything you built there or invested in there is arbitrarily and capriciously
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’s not like charging for API access is a bad idea. perfectly good idea. It’s all about the way it’s been done
⏹️ ▶️ John and the sort of lack of understanding of the sort of value ecosystem that the API has provided for Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s existed for so long, a lot of the value on Twitter is done by people having fun
⏹️ ▶️ John bots that, you know, make little accounts that you can follow or post the weather or show pictures of cats. Or I
⏹️ ▶️ John follow one that does a calendar accurate retelling of
⏹️ ▶️ John snippets of Lord of the Rings. So like when October happens in the book, you know, there’ll be a tweet on that day
⏹️ ▶️ John in October saying where the characters are in the story or whatever. That’s all like extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John low volume, silly, frivolous stuff that’s getting by on the free API, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then of course, there are there are bots that abuse it and do bad things. And then there are things that are actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, using the API thoroughly. And it’s like, any it’s not this is not the first site to have
⏹️ ▶️ John an API, like this is a known thing that’s been around for ages, and Twitter has history behind it, you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John monetize the API, you monetize the big ones that you know, can pay, you allow the Lord of the Rings
⏹️ ▶️ John bot to continue to exist, and you have a free tier for the with low with with low limits
⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody else to do. And you come out with that plan, you know, with ample warning,
⏹️ ▶️ John with a clear explanation of what it’s going to be and the pricing structure and everything like that. And of course, they didn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. And so it’s not the fact that they’re charging for an API, it’s not the fact that they’re killing the whole free API,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s the fact that they just have no idea what they’re doing. They’re just blundering through like a bull in a China shop,
⏹️ ▶️ John just unknowingly destroying value scaring people away, frightening developers into
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, Well, I don’t even want to deal with that. So I’m just taking Twitter support out of my app. All the people who had bots are
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Well, you know, I was already kind of sketchy on this place. But now it’s just like, whatever, I’m just going to give up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if I want to have my fun thing, I’ll go somewhere else. It’s just, you know, typical
⏹️ ▶️ John Elon Musk’s Twitter behavior, which is even if you are kind of sort of on the right track for something that might
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly be a good idea, do it in the worst way possible to get any benefit you might have. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John this still does not solve the giant money problem they have because charging for the API, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John how much they charge, there’s just not enough money at this point to ring out of Twitter in the next year to be able to service
⏹️ ▶️ John their debt or whatever. So typical comedy of errors going on over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He’s an incredible businessman, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John let’s not forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moved to Dawn was killed for unspecified rule violations. Surprise, surprise. Tibor Martini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, and this is the creator, according to Twitter, the app has violated Twitter rules and policies. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell much more at the moment since the email they mentioned never arrived in my inbox. I try to get more information from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter, but they already mentioned that it may take a few days to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a few days to get back to them. But by the time they get back to them, the free API will be turned off anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, your app is dead no matter what. But that’s what people were saying. Moved to Donnas, that thing lets you find your
⏹️ ▶️ John followers, find people you follow on Twitter. If they put a Mastodon address in their
⏹️ ▶️ John bio or in their name somewhere, it will find it and then it will let you follow them using your Mastodon account. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of tools that are like that. This was one of the better ones. We talked about it in the past in the show. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point where these things, they weren’t banned, no, they were doing the thing where they weren’t letting you put Mastodon addresses in your address.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard to keep track of all their
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, one of the people like, oh, they killed the API so they could kill
⏹️ ▶️ John these migration services. I’m sure they enjoy the fact that these migration services won’t be able to exist on the free
⏹️ ▶️ John API anymore, but these people could in theory just pay for the API if they wanted to continue this. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ascribing to them some master plan, like they’re there going, ha ha, we’re gonna do this thing. Same thing with the bots,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is to get rid of the bots. Are you kidding? If there’s anything in the world that is going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John HTML scraping of your website to get around API limits, it’s spammers. Don’t worry,
⏹️ ▶️ John spammers will be fine. They don’t need your API. and they’ll just find a way to pay for your API with stolen credit cards anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll have fun chasing them around. Solving spam is easy. Just end the free API. You’ll never have
⏹️ ▶️ John spam again. I’m sure that’ll work great. But yeah, this thing got suspended, who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John why. Like Mark was saying, you’re not dealing with,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s not an individual, but if you were to personify Twitter, you’re not dealing with an adult here. You’re not dealing with a professional adult.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things are gonna happen and there’s not gonna be any explanation and there’s nothing you can do about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John is just like a completely unreliable flaky other party that is
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna ban you and not tell you why and tell you they’re gonna tell you and not ever send you that email. They’re just gonna flake out on
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Like the whole company is like that. So it doesn’t take much of interaction like that
⏹️ ▶️ John to make people think, yeah, screw this. I’m like, I don’t need to deal with this. I’m just trying to make a,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to make a fun Twitter account that posts pictures of kittens every day and I don’t need to deal with my thing getting banned
⏹️ ▶️ John and them telling me they’re gonna tell me what I did but they never tell me and I try to get back to them They don’t have a communications department and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just whatever. It just makes people not want to deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for what it’s worth, Mastodon Flock, which is similar to Move to Dawn, is still working. Also, breaking news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via Smythe in the chat. Paul Haddad of Tapbots just tooted that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime in the last couple of hours. TwitterDev finally announced some more details. This is breaking news. Do do do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do do do do delay the new rules for four days. A free bot level of up to 1,500 tweets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month for a single authenticated user. And Paul surmises that probably means no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read access. You can only post. $100 a month for low level of API usage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tier. So $100 a month if you want to post is what we’re assuming. That’s not factual,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s what we’re assuming. And then the premium API, which is the expensive one that had prices listed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes away in favor of the enterprise API, which is even more expensive one that didn’t even have prices listed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Paul continues, before anyone asks, this does not mean third-party clients are coming back. If anything, it is the exact
⏹️ ▶️ John Having no read access kind of kills the, well, it doesn’t entirely kill the, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the move to Don type scraping things kind of need read access in addition to, well, I guess they don’t need write access,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the write-only ones is like, oh, you can contribute content to this black hole, but you can’t actually read from it. But like, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Ask ATP- Birdhouse
⏹️ ▶️ John would be okay. Our Ask ATP scraper that was looking for the Ask ATP hashtag
⏹️ ▶️ John and putting it into Google Sheet, That just uses read, it doesn’t use write at all and that thing would still be screwed. Not that we would ever
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for access to that anyway, but yeah, whatever. And this set of rules or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine if you had like an adult come up with a plan for the API before you started announcing
⏹️ ▶️ John things, before you started canceling the API and had like an actual plan and put it together and rolled it
⏹️ ▶️ John out smoothly with warning ahead of time and a PR push and marketing, you know, like a real grownup
⏹️ ▶️ John company, but that’s not the way any of this works. Imagine.
Sponsor: Pushcut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by push cut a powerful iOS and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad OS automation utility for shortcuts and HomeKit designed for automation power users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like many of you push code allows you to send custom actionable notifications to any of your devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create custom widgets, run back automations and even use dedicated device to run shortcuts at any time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is so powerful. So for instance, you can send yourself custom notifications triggered by shortcuts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomeKit or IFTTT. You can target specific devices among your fleet, so you can skip your iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you like. You can run an action in response to these notifications, including shortcuts. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do things like keep track of the progress in your 3D printer with images and turn off the power when the job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is done. You can create custom widgets with Pushcut. You can create custom UI from scratch or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use one of the many examples they give you. This is home screen or lock screen widgets. They can include content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your calendar or anything else on your device with shortcuts, photos, data from the web, and you can update the widget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in response to shortcut automations, or Zapier, or anything else, notifications, whatever you want to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can customize your home screen, so you can have, say, a widget that tells you whether your front door is unlocked, or your blinds are closed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get information on the next F1 race. You can count down until your next vacation and have that be on your lock screen every time you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at your phone. And the automation server function allows you to use a dedicated iOS device to run shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever you like without confirmation prompts. This is very, very powerful. You can trigger these at certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intervals, specific dates and times, or in response to a webhook or responsive to home kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s amazing what you can do with push cut. They also have a background triggers. So you can do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use location and custom notifications to prompt you to run a shortcut or choose a home kit scene or open a link.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can do things like start a workout 10 minutes after getting to the gym. Or remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to check your shopping list when you pass the store and it’s during its opening hours. Or instead of notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can run background actions such as shortcuts on on your automation server, as previously mentioned, or even a webhook. There’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much here. Go to pushcut.io slash ATP to find out more about how pushcut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can improve your automations and customize your iPhone and iPad. Download pushcut and start your free trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now at pushcut.io slash ATP. Thank you so much to push cut for sponsoring
HomePod (2nd-gen) review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you’ve bought one to seven HomePod 2s. Please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco tell me- I’ve bought two HomePod 2s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please tell me, are they worth the money? Are they good? Are they bad? Are they better than the ones? Have they solved all your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems? What’s the situation?
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, before Marco starts, I have a comment on the picture that I’m assuming he will make the chapter art for this
⏹️ ▶️ John little section here. You posted a bunch of pictures of your little HomePod testing area
⏹️ ▶️ John that slowly gained more and more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pods. They kept multiplying. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See the little baby ones next to the two parents. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now obviously this is not, he doesn’t have an anechoic chamber in his house. This is not super scientific testing,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. Even down to the point of like some people saying, well, you know, audio devices take a while to break in and if
⏹️ ▶️ John you just got them today, like you need a week to break in and it’s like, whatever. But this is not, we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going super scientific here. But I will say that even from the very first picture, when I saw that you had arranged
⏹️ ▶️ John the right and left old and new HomePods and little stereo pairs next to each other,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess you can tell me, but like, they’re pretty close to each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my recollection is the HomePod Ones at least did something where they like sprayed out
⏹️ ▶️ John sound and then saw how it bounced back to figure out how they’re supposed to, they would, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust to their environment, right? But the environment is weird when you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod, the right to two right ones right next to each other and the two left ones right next to each other because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an apples to apples comparison because the environment for both of them is different.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the right ones has something to its left and one of the right ones has something to its right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the reason I arranged them this way and you’re right on a bunch of things that I’ll get to but the reason I arranged them this way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so that each pair would have the same amount of space between it because otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured like, you know if I had like, you know, the new ones on the inside and the old ones on the outside, then it would be unfair.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, I get it. You want the stereo distance to be the same. Yes. But like the distance to
⏹️ ▶️ John its neighbor, and here’s the problem. Like you can’t like just, well, why don’t you just have two of them and then swap them out? You want to be able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John like A-B testing, like immediately, you’re not like, oh, let me just lug a bunch of bricks, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not ideal. The second thing is that, and this is an accurate test for Marco’s environment for sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I always think about this when I see a HomePod set up. You’ve got them on a counter with like a backsplash,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s not an ideal audio environment. A speaker that is like inches away
⏹️ ▶️ John a stone backsplash or whatever. But that’s how they’re gonna be used in a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John places. So it is a representative test for Marco’s environment, but again, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not an anechoic chamber where you have this beautiful isolated speaker. So
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say this is a challenging scenario for all the little felt-covered orbs involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think also a challenging listening scenario because you can never know how much of what you’re hearing is a result
⏹️ ▶️ John of the devices versus the result of the devices either not adjusting for their environment or badly
⏹️ ▶️ John adjusting for their environment. And finally, how much of what you’re hearing is just a result of like, look, sound is gonna be bouncing
⏹️ ▶️ John off marble that’s two inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind it. And it’s not a marble, it’s quartz. We have a marble table, like the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco circular marble, and it’s like the biggest pain in the butt. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never get marble anything. Quartz is so much better. Anyway, so, and you’re right. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think a huge disclaimer here that all of these, I think except the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Minis, but all the, so I have in this test two old HomePods, two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new HomePods, two HomePod Minis, and a fourth gen Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Echo. I only have one, because the second one died after like two seconds, because they’re garbage. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worst built Amazon thing I’ve ever had. Anyway, so, and I tested them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in stereo pairs and in single configurations, except for the Echo where I only have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, so I couldn’t necessarily repair of that. A huge disclaimer here that, again, besides the HomePod mini, which I think doesn’t do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the other ones, maybe the Echo, do some kind of sound processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on whatever surroundings they sense. Or like the HomePod, for instance, has a microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside of it that tweaks the bass response, I think. And it also, it does measure reflections
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. If you shake a HomePod while it’s playing, it has accelerometers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to detect that it’s been moved and it will kind of like reset itself and like readapt the sound briefly. It sounds really weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try it. Anyway, with all that said, these are all speakers that use a lot of software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing. What I try to do when I’m judging, like does, you know, does this sound better than that or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how does it sound better? I also have to consider the fact that not only are people’s environments different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the state of the software is going to vary over time. And so it might be adjusting for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my room that somebody else wouldn’t have. And it even might be like that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a software update, they’ll tweak the mix slightly over time as well. So that’s a huge disclaimer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I’m really judging here is to some degree how they sound now, but also you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell when you’re judging a speaker or a headphone, you can tell, or microphone, even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can tell like what you can fix in EQ versus what you can’t. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at a frequency response graph, this, you’ll see these in review sometimes where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll have like, you know, like 30 hertz on one side and like, you know, 16,000 or 20,000 hertz on the other side. It’ll show a logarithmic graph, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see a little wavy line. It’s usually, you know, it’s supposed to be somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flat. In practice, usually you see like a slow hump up on the bass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side and the left side, and then all the way on the right when the high treble frequency you see it goes zigzag, zigzag, zigzag, kind of and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall off at the end. A frequency response graph is the kind of thing where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can use EQ to tweak things about that that you don’t like a little bit to some extent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But where EQ doesn’t help you and processing doesn’t help you is in other areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sound design. And you’ll have to forgive me, I’m not a speaker or headphone designer. So I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit about this stuff because this is like a world that I’m a big enthusiast about, but a lot of the science
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. So with that disclaimer in mind, and I’m sure we’ll hear from people who design speakers in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience. So with that being said, so other factors, for instance, things like distortion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco characteristics, or like weird, you know, phase interference issues you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with certain designs of, like certain physical designs of the enclosure the speakers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, the drivers, how they’re arranged. There’s all these different other factors, and a lot of those can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be corrected in EQ. So what I’m judging here, this is a huge preamble, I know, this is almost John level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of preamble. What I’m judging here, I’m trying to listen to like, what is the speaker capable of? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then what is it doing now? As like kind of two separate things. because what it’s doing now could be adjusted with software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, what it’s capable of, for the most part, can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of these frequency response curves and phase stuff or whatever, one of the things that that Dirac Live
⏹️ ▶️ John software that I’ve talked about in the past, like an app that you run on your Mac or PC that talks to your receiver, that
⏹️ ▶️ John measures your speakers with stereo, with a microphone that you put where your head would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes these frequency response curves and it will level them out with very detailed EQ and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will also tell you these speakers are out of phase, there’s destructive interference over
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Like that’s what those applications do because you can’t really do it by ear. You need sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John equipment to do it. And like, if you have your speakers wired
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong way, if you have your subwoofer phase switched the wrong way, if your crossover is in the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John spot, the software will tell you because you might not know what you’re supposed to, I certainly don’t, what I’m supposed to be listening for
⏹️ ▶️ John or I hear this, I know this wrong, but the software will literally tell you until you get your thing sounding
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as it possibly can with your equipment, which is actually fairly challenging. Presumably, HomePods are doing something
⏹️ ▶️ John similar internally, but all they can do is change the sound that comes out of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they ever demand that you move them. Like, hey, nobody puts HomePod in a corner. What am I doing? I’m in a corner
⏹️ ▶️ John and a picture frame is blocking me. My HomePod is, by the way, behind a bunch of fracture pictures of my dog because I don’t care what it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John like. And I bet it hates that because it’s like the worst environment. Like it’s in a corner. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. It’s like, listen,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m listening to podcasts on you, HomePod, and most of the time you do nothing. And usually you can’t even turn off my lights, so shut
⏹️ ▶️ John up and take it. But anyway, the D-Rack software does help
⏹️ ▶️ John with stuff like that. And it is fun to kind of tweak manually, but the HomePod is like, I’ll do that all for you. And presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John it does a passable job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one other quick thing, John just mentioned the alleged phenomenon of break-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco periods for headphones or speakers, this has been pretty widely discredited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a thing that’s real. What is real is that your perception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the sound adjusts. So it’s not that the speakers are being broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, it’s that your ears are being broken in, like your brain’s being broken in. That’s what’s actually happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if there is something about a particular transducer that is different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what you are used to before that, over time, you get used to that. you stop hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as like, oh, that’s weirdly harsh or different. That just becomes what you think of as normal. It’s almost like the way, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your eyes perform automatic white balancing. You know, it’s the same thing for sound. Your brain’s being broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, how I was A, B testing them. What you wanna do if you’re comparing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers like this, you want to be able to play the same thing on all of them and to be able to switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between them as quickly as possible. If you have to like unplug stuff, start something, start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, like it becomes much harder. Like if the difference between them is more than a couple of seconds, it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much harder to remember how that sounded and try to compare. You can’t rely on memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for much here. You have to be, it has to be quick. Being able to transition between them quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how you can really tell the differences. And when you can do that, the difference has become very apparent. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way I do this, I use AirPlay and I play to all of them at the same time. And I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I, as a group in the AirPlay selector, and then you drop down the place such as you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco individual volume sliders for each speaker and I just would drag to zero the ones I wasn’t listening to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and drag up the one that I was testing and then quickly swap that you know drag that one down drag this one up
⏹️ ▶️ John did you do the thing where you drag all the sliders down except for one pair and then shake that
⏹️ ▶️ John pair and then drag all the sliders down except for another pair and then shake that pair because what you want them to do is
⏹️ ▶️ John to adjust to their acoustic environment when other speakers aren’t playing in their face you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what I mean I did not do that I probably should have done that but I didn’t but again I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again I want to not lean too heavily on the on the specifics of whatever the adaptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EQ processing is doing at that moment because again that can change that changes a lot with environment
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s gonna change the sound of the speakers so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust me it doesn’t change sound like this all right so my opening so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first let me cover the you know the the non sound aspects first aesthetics physical design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new home pod compared to the old one is very similar overall looking. You would only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice the differences if you saw them side by side for the most part because it still looks like approximately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same size cylinder. It has the same material on the outside, at least the white ones. I don’t have the black
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it skinnier or is that just an optical illusion because the top disc is bigger?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it just, if you look at the measurements, they’re very similar. Like it’s slightly shorter. It might be a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit fatter, but it just, it looks like the same kind of object. You know, you could change them out and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less observant or less caring members of your household wouldn’t notice. Until you touch the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The biggest difference you’ll notice is that the top screen, the quote screen, the top LED
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color visualizer thing, now goes all the way to the edge and is bigger. It is also kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s inset instead of being convex, but that honestly doesn’t matter in practice. It may be it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collect dust a little bit differently, but otherwise, you know, as you tap it to dust it off, you’ll blast your Foo Fighters at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night again. But anyway, with the previous one, when it was totally not playing anything, like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting there idle or off, you wouldn’t see the plus and minus that indicated the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons. They were themselves individually lit little white LED things that would turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off, so it would just look like a flat white surface. The new one, the plus and minus are permanently etched in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, so they’re just like, you know, they’re drawn on the top, so you can always see the plus and minus. Some people saw this as a downgrade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see this as a positive thing, because If you nudge your HomePod on the counter as you’re working on your kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco counter, accidentally, and you want to reset it and make sure it’s aligned correctly, you can just look at the plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and minus, it’s always there, and you can say, oh, now it’s straight, okay. So that to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an improvement. The wider color panel of the LEDs on top, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s an improvement. When it’s just playing, it does the same thing as a HomePod Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have a HomePod Mini, it’s that same pattern. So when it’s just playing, it’s showing this kind of like, soft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white glow from the middle and that’s fine. When Siri is processing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s attempting to do that kind of Siri like multi-color pulsing logo thing and it does it across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole service and this is now a pretty big service and so it kind of looks garish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think this panel needed to, I don’t think the LEDs needed to go all the way to the edge the way they do now and if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were looking to cut costs somewhere I don’t know why they didn’t cut costs there because that that seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve no real purpose except looking garish during serial requests and showing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird rainbow light show at a scale that I don’t think it was designed for. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better on the smaller ones but it doesn’t it doesn’t look good on the big size.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting this is like a thing that Apple hasn’t done in ages and
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t really do that much before which is have lights on their devices try
⏹️ ▶️ John to imbue some kind of personality. We’ve talked about the breathing sleep light that way back when on the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John or the glowing Apple logo on the back of the old laptop screens. In general,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple wants to do something to imbue a device with dynamic personality, they use a
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and still on all the HomePods, no screens. And I can’t recall the last time
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw them say, okay, we’re not gonna have a screen, but what we wanna do, what they wanna do is like if you hold
⏹️ ▶️ John down like the power button on your phone and you see that Siri colored blob thing, this is like, well, if we
⏹️ ▶️ John could, we’d show the Siri colored blob thing that’s our branding for Siri. When you’re interacting with it, whatever that colored
⏹️ ▶️ John blob thing that waves around, it’s a cool little animation. Why don’t we show that? Well, we can’t, we don’t have a screen. Well, can
⏹️ ▶️ John we show like a really blurry version of that with just a bunch of RGB LEDs under like
⏹️ ▶️ John a translucent frosted surface? It’s like we could, but I feel like that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John accomplish the branding because it’s like, it reminds you of the branding,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like the branding is trapped underneath quality glass and you can’t really see it. And the second thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what value does that add? Does it look good? Does it put on a laser light show?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it indicate something to you from a distance any more than like just a single LED would or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a strange gesture to spend that much time and space on a thing that isn’t a screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not particularly against it. Like, I mean, I don’t mind it on mine or whatever. It just reminds
⏹️ ▶️ John me of an older Apple that wanted to put these type of sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like a appearance personality, dynamic appearance personality into their
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware that is not a screen. And we keep waiting for a HomePod-like device
⏹️ ▶️ John with a screen on it, but it’s not this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To some extent, I actually don’t mind it not being a screen just because in most contexts where you’d put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things, you don’t really have a lot of visibility onto that top surface anyway. Like it’s not like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t see it from across the
⏹️ ▶️ John Having a screen face the ceiling is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know? Right, so anyway, so that’s the physical stuff aside. I did replace the power cords with nice shorter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones now. They came in today and I’m super happy about that. That’s nice, but anyway. So, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the sound. This is what everybody wants to know. Does it sound better? And frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the reviews are like, yeah, it sounds pretty much the same. It doesn’t. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not sound pretty much the same. It sounds surprisingly different. Much more different than I thought it would. I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start easily. The bass. It is lighter. The bass is lighter. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are asterisks on this. In general, the new ones have less bass at medium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to high volume, and they have actually a lower maximum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume. The old ones go louder. Now this is all relative. These are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really impressive for their size, and anything else that’s anywhere near their size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when you compare them to other multi-hundred dollar premium, you know, smart speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or self-powered speakers, usually what people compare these two are much larger than them because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things the things that cost $300 are usually much larger than them but in this size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class they do shockingly well at base and volume if you have a large room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again going back to the home theater thing it might not be enough that being said for their size still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great still plenty of base but it is definitely a reduction in base strength from before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a medium to high volumes Now, at lower volumes, it seems like there’s plenty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bass there. And what I think they are doing, a lot of people don’t realize this, but in any kind of speaker that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of, you know, processing going on, that isn’t just like an amp connected to some wired speakers that you turn the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knob and it gets louder, in most other like modern powered speakers that have their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of DSP stuff built in, many of them will actually dynamically ramp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bass down as the volume goes up. and there are multiple reasons for this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two key ones are number one, it sounds really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have relatively strong bass when it’s turned down lower. It sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a more premium, nice, rich experience. But if you take that exact same amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bass that’s down low, and you’ll see this in Bose products, this is a common thing, or any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fancy power speaker brands B&O, B&W, Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might even do this in some of their power stuff. I’m not positive on that but anything that does processing on the sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at low volumes the bass will be proportionally much more strong than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you turn it up a lot it would sound ridiculous if the bass was that strong at the high volume so they actually ramp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it down. Part of that is because again it sounds better that way makes it sound better at lower volumes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without having the negatives of very loud bass of like when you turn it up you wouldn’t want it to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know be really boomy and like vibrate things in your house or angry your neighbors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else. I think it’s doing that to a pretty strong degree. I haven’t measured that. I didn’t have time or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equipment, frankly, to measure that. But it sounds like it’s doing dynamic bass roll off as the volume goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. And I think for a product of this category, that’s the right choice. The other reason somebody might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not want to have bass that strong at high volumes is it takes a very powerful amp to deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high volume bass. I think in a lot of these products, the amp just does not spec for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much power. The old HomePod had a custom designed main woofer amp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried to look up the specs for it, nobody really has them because it’s a custom design chip from this company. As far as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could tell, no one has figured out yet what the chip is in the new HomePod. So I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find any information to compare, like does the base amp actually have less wattage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or less power potential in the new one? I would speculate that it probably does.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, this is why if you have a individual component set up and you have a receiver that puts out however
⏹️ ▶️ John many watts per channel, the subwoofer that you buy will plug into the wall because it has its own
⏹️ ▶️ John amplifier. Yes, powered subwoofer is the way to go. Yeah, right. Because it doesn’t like all
⏹️ ▶️ John the two things in receivers. One, no matter how much power per channel they say in the receivers, like whatever, 150
⏹️ ▶️ John watts per channel still is a hangover of historical things. things, that number you see, like 150 watts,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s for two channels. They don’t, if you put seven speakers, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get 150 watts on all seven of the speakers. The math doesn’t add up real fast, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for historical reasons, because stereo receivers used to just be like that, that is still the standard. And not
⏹️ ▶️ John only that, but the manufacturer won’t even tell you how many watts you get if you hook up seven speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And then yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 0.1 for the subwoofer, that’s a powered subwoofer, that plugs into a different outlet in a wall, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got its own amplifier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other thing to consider, like, you know, when, by saying it has less base, that even could be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this could be software. It has an internal microphone to measure the bass response and any kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, resonances and stuff. It might just be throttling its own bass to prevent like vibration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff. So there’s all sorts of things that go into this, but, so in short, it sounds compared to the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds like there’s less bass at high volume, but at low volume, it sounds about the same and might even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. It sounds very pleasant on the bass at moderate to low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volumes, I’ll tell you that for sure. So anyway, that’s the bass. The mid-range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the treble. This is now, we’re moving into the tweeters. And by the way, this is one of the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons why the HomePod Mini, which only has one speaker cone in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it uses a quote, passive radiator design for the bass, I’m not entirely sure what those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, But the mini effectively is one speaker cone in there like one driver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the home pod as we know has the one big four inch woofer that faces I think up from that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the middle and then it has formerly seven now five tweeters around the are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the bottom and the whole reason for this is To separate these out if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want something to be able to produce bass You you need a pretty large speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cone that moves in big waves forward and back. That’s how you make good bass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a very large speaker cone has a lot of mass to move and if you want to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that produces very good high frequency sounds like in the treble range, you actually want as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little mass moving as possible because you want to be vibrating really small really fast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s kind of impossible to physically design the same speaker cone, like one speaker cone, that that does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good bass and really good treble. That’s why when you have a nicer speakers, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to have more drivers and they cover different size classes basically. You might have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few woofers or one big woofer and usually you have like maybe a mid-range driver, maybe a little tiny tweeter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you’ll have just a woofer and a tweeter, but that’s why they’re separated. And so you might think that when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go from the old HomePod with the seven tweeters to the new HomePod with five, you might think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would hurt its treble performance some meaningful way and I can tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the treble and the mid-range sound way better on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new one. It is the opposite of what you think it would be. The new one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treble and mid-range sound awesome. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge snob for these things. I don’t care that much about bass. I care a lot about mid-range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little bit about treble. I care about vocals sounding smooth, guitars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounding smooth, and having them be present, having them be right there hitting you in the face in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle of the mix. Oftentimes what cheap crappy speakers and headphones will do is they’ll have kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a weak response in that kind of mid-range vocals and guitars and pianos kind of area. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost gets pushed back in the mix so you don’t hear it too much. You know, they’ll like crank up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco response for the bass and treble so that it kind of, you know, kind of masks the crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distorted, harsh mid-range they have in the middle there. And I don’t like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to hear really clear, crisp vocals and really strong, smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guitars. That’s what I want in my music. That’s my favorite part of the music. Very very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few speakers or headphones are able to deliver that very well. The whole reason I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my KEF, I don’t know what it is, that series of the Q150, the Q350,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have the best midrange I’ve ever heard in a speaker. The whole reason I love my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculously old, super high needs, Hi-Fi Man HE6 headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because they have the best midrange I’ve ever heard in headphones. These new full-size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePods have really great midrange. Smoothness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco detail, lack of harshness, lack of distortion in the midrange. It’s amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these new HomePods. And so this makes vocals sound better, pianos, guitars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the kind of, you know, the main like middle of the frequency range, those all sound really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. What I’m trying to get away from, like when I talk about mid-range distortion, what this kind of sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like is, you know those bands came out like in the early 2000s where it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like they’re talking through a phone, is it singing like, I can’t even do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, like the, is it the strokes, the killers or whatever, those kinds of bands, And they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it intentionally, you know, that was part of their style, but it sounds like kind of a crunchy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filter on the vocals, or it’s kind of like you’re talking through an old telephone. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of sound effect. Crappy mid-range on speakers and headphones makes all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vocals sound a little bit like that. It’s like a little bit of distortion in the mid-range that does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound good. And the opposite of that is when things sound clear. It just sounds like someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there singing in the room with you. In audio terms, people talk about, they use the word transparency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what you want, and unfortunately this is kind of a, it’s a tricky term because everyone’s definition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of transparent is different in audio, but the idea of transparency is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t notice the speaker, you don’t notice the headphone, it just sounds like the music is there in the room. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t imparting a bunch of, you know, filters or effects or noticeable artifacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the music. It is just, it sounds natural. That’s how these sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the mid-range and the treble. Way more than the old ones. And the old ones sounded great overall. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you do a side-by-side comparison, it’s no contest. Mid-range and treble are way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way nicer and clearer and better on the new ones. Frankly, I’m blown away. I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy with how good these are in that area. Again, if you compare these, put on whatever track you like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you really want to hear the kind of differences, put on a track that has like a singer with a piano
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, or like a singer with a guitar, like one of those, there’s not a ton going on. You can just hear that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you will hear, there’s a pretty substantial difference between the two. And so whatever they did to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduce from seven tweeters to five, I can tell you not only is not a downgrade, it’s a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade. Like just overall the new HomePod in those ranges and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even frankly in the bass, it just sounds way better overall.
⏹️ ▶️ John What they might’ve done is bought five slightly more expensive tweeters instead of seven slightly less expensive tweeters.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what I mean? Spend
⏹️ ▶️ John a similar amount of money, but get a higher quality thing. And speaking of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re describing about the sort of the transparency of the mid-range stuff, I watched a review recently, they
⏹️ ▶️ John were reviewing receivers, believe it or not. Like, you know, they had a set of speakers that was the same
⏹️ ▶️ John through all the tests, but they were saying, with a given set of speakers that we think are these fancy high-end speakers, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the receivers were imparting a, some receivers would impart a personality
⏹️ ▶️ John on things like vocals in the mid-range or whatever, And they described it by brand, that some particular brands,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I think it was like Merant, some other fancy expensive one, had a more rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John sound. And they said like NAD was 100% neutral right in the middle and didn’t impart any
⏹️ ▶️ John personality on the sound whatsoever. And then they had the other end was like Sony Yamaha that was
⏹️ ▶️ John more of a sharp or sparkly sound.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If you had to, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know these words are so bad. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if you watch a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rock. I would caution that there is a lot of placebo effect in a lot of those kind of judgments.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but I know what they’re talking about. As someone who’s not an audiophile, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think everyone has heard something where the, well, you talked about it even with podcasting, it was sibilance,
⏹️ ▶️ John where the treble is too sharp, right? That is just too kind of spiky in your
⏹️ ▶️ John ears. And then the more rounded one, like Casey would like on vinyl, where all the edges are cut off of everything and
⏹️ ▶️ John it sounds like someone’s singing through a sock, but people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like it. Oh, right off. Because it smooths off all the sharp
⏹️ ▶️ John edges, right? You are the worst. It smooths off all the sharp edges. And then neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of people have bad things to say about audio devices that are like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John use something to measure it, like I’m gonna objectively measure the frequency response. Wow, look at this frequency response. It’s just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly, almost exactly level. It’s extremely neutral. It doesn’t impart anything. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like perfectly clean and you hear things through that and people go, yeah, I don’t like how much that sound.
⏹️ ▶️ John It sounds better on one of the ones that is less neutral, that does more to the sound instead of just having like
⏹️ ▶️ John a completely flat frequency response, but instead accentuates whatever part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John sound that they like. In your case, you like the mids and the highs. Some people might like it accentuated in the bass.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a neutral profile, whether it’s done with EQ or done with processing or done, you know, done
⏹️ ▶️ John like as part of the, just the nature of the set of drivers they have. The difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John with audio equipment is that, you know, it’s not something that you can measure scientifically
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, this one, this one has the flattest frequent response. for it’s the best or it has the least distortion, flattest frequency
⏹️ ▶️ John response, like it’s all scientifically accurate. And then you’ll put it next to something that just has way more bass
⏹️ ▶️ John than is in the original recording and people will like that better if they like bass. And in your case, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get the mids and the treble accentuated more than some people might like
⏹️ ▶️ John it, that’s exactly what you want out of it. So that’s why audio reviews are so difficult and that’s why they come with all these
⏹️ ▶️ John different words for it. And even in the receiver view, they weren’t saying that one of those, that spectrum
⏹️ ▶️ John was worse or better. they’re saying it depends on what you want. And the example they gave was the NAD one, which is super expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely neutral thing or whatever. They say some people hate that. Some people think it sounds quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John dead and they’d rather have one of the other brands that imparts more quote unquote personality on the sound,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what personality they want in the sound, depending on what part of the sound is
⏹️ ▶️ John important for them to hear. And honestly, for people our age and older, depending on what frequencies they can still
⏹️ ▶️ John hear. Right. Yeah. And their decrepit old age. That’s why very often young children
⏹️ ▶️ John have very different ideas about what sounds good and what doesn’t when it comes to music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Setting aside whether amps really make that big of a noticeable difference on the sound quality, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I question honestly, in my experience they really don’t, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John The receivers aren’t acting as amplifiers here, that’s because the receivers are doing processing. Oh, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Everything is doing processing now, so it’s not, that’s what they’re saying, that the processing that these things are, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just straight up, like it’s not like an analog amplifier where they’re measuring it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, right. And it’s funny, like, you know, there’s a long time ago, decades ago, I think, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Harman audio company developed this thing called the Harman curve. And this is through some kind of scientific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or survey-based method, whatever it was, they’d advise like, what people actually want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of an ideal frequency response is not flat. It’s not like perfectly even reproducing of all frequencies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a certain curve that people find most desirable. And they published this as the the Harman curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then, and over the last, you know, many decades, the manufacturers of audio gear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been slowly trying to make their stuff more closely match the Harman curve. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kills me because I don’t like the Harman curve. Like I find it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really boring. And it’s not that the
⏹️ ▶️ John Harman curve is arbitrary, but it is, it is subjective, right? It’s not completely
⏹️ ▶️ John arbitrary because I’m sure they did ask people what they thought sounded better, but people are different. People, first of all, people’s physical hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John is different, Second of all, people’s taste is different. So targeting a matching of any particular
⏹️ ▶️ John curve exactly is, you know, unless you know what your curve is and your name
⏹️ ▶️ John is Mr. Harmon or Mrs. Harmon, you don’t know. You know, that’s why you have to sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust the thing to your liking and listen to things against each other to decide which one actually sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John better to you. But there is some scientific basis, like the things you mentioned, distortion, or
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, for example, if you look at a curve and it just drops off before you even get close to the low frequencies, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know that’s not gonna have any bass or if it goes off a cliff before it gets to the highs that’s gonna suck too. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a room for a scientific assessment of the sounds that can and can’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduced by a sound system or sounds that can and can’t be reproduced by a sound system without massive distortion
⏹️ ▶️ John that destroys it. But once you start getting into the details of okay now I’m making a decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I want the Harman curve? Do I want something different than the Harman curve? What you want is whatever, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, frequency responses is desirable for you, you want to be able to hear that without distortion at the volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to listen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And, and, frankly, I have looked at so many frequency response graphs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to figure out like before I want to buy like a pair of headphones, like trying to figure like, is this what I want? It’s like, is this gonna sound good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. And it’s so rare, that my expectations from the frequency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco response graph have matched how happy I am with the actual thing when and I get it. All these other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factors are at play, so you really need to try this stuff out yourself. It’s really hard to get much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of a frequency response graph that could tell you, am I going to like this or not, or is this good or not?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you look at the frequency response graph from the Dave2D YouTube video, which we’ll put in
⏹️ ▶️ John did. It’s hard to see in that one we put in the show notes, but if you look at the actual video and you just look at HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two? Yes, and I see that, and it’s funny. So his conclusion, I like Dave2D,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s good, but his conclusion here was kind of like, oh yeah, they sound about the same, but if you look at this frequency response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graph, there are gaps of like five, eight decibels, like between some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the, like that’s, those are big gaps. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s- Like look right in the middle, look right in the mid range. The HomePod is an orange and there’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John dip in the mid range there, and then a little bit past the mid range, past one kilohertz, there’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John spike on the new HomePod. That to me is a big difference, because that’s kind of the area you’re talking about, isn’t it? Kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ John mid range, the middle of that graph, and the HomePod 1 has a big divot cut out of it, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod 2 is level and then has a big spike at the higher frequencies, and that is obviously the Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John spike. That’s the part that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like. And then as you get into the treble range, like above the 10K, you start seeing, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a 10 decibel gap, like in frequency ranges that are still audible. So like you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what I’m talking about in this graph. Like, you know, it’s not gonna tell you exactly how the thing sounds, you gotta hear it for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, Apple in recent years, you know, between, especially with the AirPods, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my case, I don’t have any real experience with the regular AirPods, because they wouldn’t really fit me, but the AirPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros in particular, and also even the AirPod Max, which I wish those were comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on me, because they sound really good, but Apple has really mastered a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequency mix that sounds really, really good, but yet not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offensive to pretty much anybody. It’s really, it’s a great kind of all-arounder. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Harman Curve, but it probably isn’t too far from it, if I had to guess. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it in front of me, but because what Apple, like Apple’s recent high-end speaker designs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, HomePod, they all, they sound really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Even like their built-in speakers on a lot of their computers now, like the built-in speakers on the studio display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or on like some of the laptops, like, you know, obviously within the realm of what you can do in those size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco classifications and the space you have in the enclosures and stuff and the budget, they do surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Like Apple’s really good at making stuff that sounds pretty good to pretty much everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is not Beats. Beats had a much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personality in their sound, that was much more bass heavy. They would frequently withdraw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mid-range. You could hear boom, boom. And sometimes I wish they would add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EQs to some other products, but in this case, with the exception of how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bass you want, and there is a setting that you can say reduce bass, which as far as I can tell, I tried it out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can tell, it seems to just be like a high-pass filter, like it just lets the running frequency above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe like 100 hertz or something like that, like it cuts out all of the bass below that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really don’t want that unless you’re in like a situation like maybe if you’re in an apartment with thin walls or you know, the sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco travels through the floor and you wanna be able to watch movies with it, you know, that’s a different story, but for most listening, I wouldn’t recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using that setting if you can help it. But that’s the only setting they have to control the audio of this product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wish there was maybe a little more control over the bass, because I would ask for a little bit more out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it sometimes. Some people would ask for a little bit less, and that seems to be the main holder. But again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, they’ve made a product here that sounds really great and really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pretty much everybody, I think. Now, a few more details on the sound before I move on. What I would describe it most as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is transparent. you really don’t notice the speaker. Music just sounds good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You do get, in a stereo pair, you do get the larger sound stage. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that’s a term of art in the audio world. Basically means like, how big does the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound source sound like it is? Like, does it sound like you’re hearing music from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge wide area? Or does it sound like it’s all coming out of like one little point, you know? And when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a stereo pair, physics are helping you a lot. This is why soundbars suck. This is why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco individual speakers are not as good as stereo pairs. What the hell Siri?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. Why is my watch? Oh, cause I’m moving my hand while talking cause I’m Italian. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, the soundstage on these, like how big the sound space sounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even on just one, even when comparing single speakers, the new home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pod soundstage is much wider, much larger than the old one. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hear the stereo pair, again, it’s not as big of a difference as when comparing individuals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because stereo again, it’s helping with physics there. But you get a larger soundstage. It sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco airier. It sounds like it’s coming from a larger space. That’s a very good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did one comparison because people have often asked if they already have a HomePod mini or if they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two HomePod minis because they’re so inexpensive. And then people have often asked, like, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, a single large HomePod or a stereo pair of HomePod minis?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did that test. The single large HomePod I would still prefer in most cases, just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the soundstage is actually not that much worse than two HomePod minis. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the audio just sounds so much better. The vocals, you know, the mid-rings, the treble, it just sounds so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better on the big one. So I would say compared to two minis, a single large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod is better for most people’s uses. When compared to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HomePod mini in a stereo pair. Stereo pair versus stereo pair. Again the HomePod mini, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small speaker. It’s very, very small. And again, there’s only one driver in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a third of the price, you know, about a third to a quarter of the size. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a fair comparison and it shows. The HomePod Mini is a great product for its price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and size, but the large HomePod totally destroys it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio quality. And that’s, again, that’s just the nature of this difference here. Like that’s a big difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in physicality there. The big HomePods have much larger soundstage, much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treble response, much better bass response, much smoother and better mid-range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the HomePod Mini has the problem I was talking about before, where the vocals and guitars are kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco withdrawn, they’re kind of pushed back in the mix, it just isn’t doing a good job of reproducing those. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the full-size HomePods are a large step above the minis. People often ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how the HomePods compare to just speakers, regular, like bookshelf-sized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers, or countertop or desktop monitors, whatever size speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think are similar to HomePods, which by the way, their HomePods are way smaller than most bookshelf speakers, But anyway, that’s beside the point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How they compare to bookshelf speakers. And I would say, I have heard better bookshelf speakers than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HomePods. I just said, my KEF-Q150s are better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounding in most ways. They also have way less bass. I need a subwoofer with them. I don’t need a subwoofer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the HomePods for the most part. And they’re way bigger, like way bigger. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comparing it to bookshelf speakers is not super useful because they’re just so much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and don’t need to be amplified and everything else. But then also, where the HomePods really shine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a situation like where I have them, where they’re on my kitchen counter. Well, I’m oftentimes not working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in front of them. I’m often working next to them, off to the side. The HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Minis do an okay job of kind of off-axis listening when you’re not right in front of them, when you’re off to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one side. But the full-size HomePods do a really great job of it. They sound really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when you aren’t directly in front of them. So if you’re in a situation like this where you have them somewhere where you will often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be right in front of them if you’ll be off to one side, the HomePods, the full-size ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are I think possibly the best products I’ve ever heard in this category. They are amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that, and they destroy almost all of the competition people usually would compare them to. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destroy them in off-axis listening. They’re so much better for that. It doesn’t sound like you’re listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a crappy treble-reduced side version of the sound. You just hear the music, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not as good as standing in front of them, but it’s still really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re radially symmetrical, that’s why. Like they are not directional. Like regular speakers have
⏹️ ▶️ John their speaker cones facing a single direction. That’s not true of the HomePods.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no sort of front, or despite Marco wanting his to be aligned or whatever, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no front or back. Like the base one is pointing either directly up or directly down, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John which. And then the five that are surrounded, they’re equally spaced in a circle. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the whole point of this device. That’s why these devices are, well, that’s why the HomePod anyway is round.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no wrong place to put it. And so it should be exactly the same no matter where
⏹️ ▶️ John you are, plus or minus the fact that you have it up against the backsplash or there’s a mixer in the way
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know, whatever. Like obviously physical obstructions are gonna cause it, but that’s why these speakers are like, look, just put it wherever
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in your house. And that whole thing of like, it’s saying, oh, I’m gonna play sound and figure out how to adjust myself
⏹️ ▶️ John half of that is figuring out which one of my tweeters is blocked by a wall. and I should maybe not send
⏹️ ▶️ John super amount of sound into that one tweeter because it’s pointless. It’s gonna be bouncing all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so when you compare HomePods to, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else, say the Sonos One, which is a common comparison, which I find massively overrated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sonos One is a totally fine, small, cheap speaker. It sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to the HomePod Mini than the full-size HomePod. Price-wise, it’s kind of right in the middle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I respect that. It isn’t $300, it’s about $200, so that’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s also as big as a HomePod. And I think if you’re gonna have that amount, that size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a countertop with the Sonos One, I think unless you want the Sonos ecosystem for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other reasons, I think the full-size HomePod for a hundred bucks more, you get a lot more than a hundred dollars worth of additional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound quality. And again, the Sonos One is highly directional. The HomePod Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mostly directional. It’s kind of, the HomePod Mini is kind of a, kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of mushes the sound. It’s not, there’s not a lot of definition there. What tends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be very directional is the higher frequencies, the treble frequencies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the HomePod Mini has such poor treble response that you don’t really notice as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s less important.
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t the HomePod Mini also radially symmetrical internally?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s just one driver. It’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John speaker. Right, but isn’t it
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing straight down?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I think you might be right. I forget, I think you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco forgot about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, obviously that’s not ideal direction for a speaker to be facing. Just like ask any person
⏹️ ▶️ John with a television with down firing speakers, which is very common these days. It’s not great. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the HomePod mini, if it’s directional, it’s just because it has no control over the bounce. Unlike the
⏹️ ▶️ John big HomePod, which can decide how much power to put in any of its five or seven tweeters
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing in different directions. What the hell can the mini do? It’s like, well, I have one speaker when
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s facing the direction it’s facing and that direction is down or up. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if it’s up or down. I’ll have to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it faces down. Anyway, you’re right. Yeah, I agree with that. Anyway, so again, this is an area where the HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really excel. And so when you’re looking at like, you know, what should you buy? What should you have for your area? Again, if you’re setting up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like a TV speaker system, you’ll probably be better off with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular bookshelf or other speakers, because you’re not gonna be watching TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from 90 degrees off axis. Like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like- I have an LCD TV. Yeah, like you’re gonna be watching the front of it pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much from the front and from enough distance that minor variations and being, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, a few degrees off axis here and there aren’t gonna matter. Whereas if it’s on a kitchen counter or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the smallest rooms of your house or wherever else you might use a HomePod or if you only have room for one of them, because, you know, or various,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you’d be only budget for one of them. It’s just a much more versatile speaker for many more different spaces then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit bookshelf speakers or other systems like that. So anyway, I’ll try to be quick here with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of these things. Let’s see. Compared to the Echo, the Amazon Echo, fourth generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was talking earlier about being able to EQ away certain flaws or not, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the common strategies that cheap electronic designers will use to make up for the fact that their speakers suck,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, they’ll use some kind of EQ, especially in treble. It’s commonly done in treble where,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the sound, when in the 80s and 90s or whatever, when you had the treble knob on your boombox,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you would turn it all the way up, and everything would sound kind of, you know, really crisp and everything, but it would sound a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little aggressively crisp, and it would, even that crispness would be a little distorted. It would not, it was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smooth or natural sounding, it just sounded artificially boosted too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how the Amazon Echo sounds. It sounds like they took a very cheap speaker, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used EQ to really crank up something it really was not able to do very well. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just sounds like a very over-processed, harsh, you know, sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound. It just sounds awful to me. I, like, the Amazon Echo, the original, like, cylinder-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one from a million years ago, that was a totally fine product for its time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are many better products now. And the modern Echo is not one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s better than the old cylinder, but it’s not as it isn’t as much better as you would think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did also compare Siri versus Alexa. And you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is again, so much variation here in general. And this will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will kind of speak to the Siri performance in the new HomePods. Like Siri has gotten way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster with the new SoC. It is just noticeable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like I measured, you know, we’re like we’re saving like five or six seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain responses depending on what you’re asking. Siri is now almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as fast as Alexa with most common things. There’s a couple of exceptions which I’ll get to in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part like so I would do things like I would say you know hey Dinga stop and measure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how long after from when I stopped saying the word stop until it actually stopped. How long did it take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with each voice system? I did a whole bunch of tests to make sure it wasn’t some kind of weird fluke. I did it in different noise levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether the music was playing loudly or not, how close I was, how far I was. Both the Echo and the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod and the old HomePod and the HomePod Mini all have really great microphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were all able to hear me ridiculously well even from like I would like walk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the other side of the floor and kind of just say at regular volume like hey thing stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just kind of see like while music was playing and see like if they could hear me and they did like it it was remarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the microphones on all of these are extremely good and can pick up you speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at normal volume even with music playing even from far away if you’re concerned about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy that should terrify you and that should maybe that should maybe sway you more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Apple direction I would say compared to the Amazon system for the police
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so anyway overall performance Alexa is still faster it’s and it’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consistent and it’s faster to do things like set timers. It’s faster to return knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s faster to begin music playback. Music playback is an area that I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with Siri because I would do things like, hey, hey thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play so and so. And it would say, okay, playing from Apple Music. And so the speed that it would recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I wanted and would give me a response playing so and so from Apple Music, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed matched Alexa in almost every case. Alexa was a little bit faster sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but usually matched it. But then Apple Music would take like 20 seconds to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start playing the track. So it would say, okay, you know, playing Weezer or whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then 20 seconds of silence and then it would start playing. And this is just one example
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of many, and this isn’t, that isn’t typical, but what is typical is random weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failures of Apple Music. And so I don’t know if that’s Siri, I don’t know if that’s Apple Music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably some of both if I had to guess, but the actual Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance of giving me responses, you know, listening, basic things like stop and pause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, Siri was almost as fast or as fast as Alexa most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that is very impressive. That is not how it always was. The old HomePods were way slower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and those delays would be even longer, so that’s good. The Alexa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device was also extremely chatty with trying to upsell me things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly. Yep. Everything you’d say, all right, here’s the time you said, by the way, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like shut up, I don’t care what else you can do. It always.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s time for you to reorder that weirdly shaped pasta again. Yeah, right. Do you want me to add it to your cart?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, did you know you can ask me to do so and so? It’s like, I don’t want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handheld through all of your new promotions, Alexa. Thank you, though. So yeah, overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri is now fast enough. Whether it can stay consistently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast, that’s the question. And HomePods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even had bugs with the stereo pairing still. HomePods have been around now for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time. They’ve had stereo pairing since, I believe, like the third week they were out or something. It was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. So they’ve had stereo pairing for a number of years now. It should be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not, it’s not rock solid. Even now with the new ones, the stereo pairing is not rock solid. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s way better than the old ones so far. I might limit the time with them so far, but that could change over time. We’ll see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you how that goes. But I would still have bugs, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them would occasionally just drop out of the pair and rejoin it a few seconds later. So one of them would be silent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then rejoin a few seconds later. Or when the song would change, like between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracks, only one of them would start playing the next song, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other one would jump in like five or six seconds in. And it’s like, you just, this is a brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new product, based on a, you know, five year old, four, four and a half year old product, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why? These products sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good in stereo pairs, I wish they would fix these ridiculous software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs that they still have with them. The performance papers over a lot of this. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still now, now it recovers faster from those bugs than the old ones did, but the fact that they still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those bugs is really disheartening because this is such a great product when you have them in stereo pairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it should work better. What year is this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the reason it’s so difficult for them to get it to work is kind of the same reason this happens with your AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are two independent little computers that have no idea, like they’re manufactured separately,
⏹️ ▶️ John You buy them, they have no idea about each other until you introduce them to each other and you have to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, there’s another one over there. You two coordinate with this third party source
⏹️ ▶️ John of audio or maybe just with each other to make sure that you are both playing and are both in sync. And we’ve all heard
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods where you put them in your ear and one starts playing the music before the other ones. AirPods are also tiny little computers that coordinate
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other to get in sync so they’re gonna play the audio. It’s kind of a little miracle that they work at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re also buggy as hell, by the way. My AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also incredibly buggy in that
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but because it’s a hard, it’s a split brain scenario to use like server
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have two separate little brains that have to coordinate. This is a problem that is avoided if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a central brain that then sends sound to the speakers that
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduce it, like in a traditional receiver with passive speaker setups. Now, I don’t think you want HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ John to be passive speakers. And for people, we’ve always been asking, well, why don’t they just put audio inputs on them? I think it’s not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John that simple because of the processing that goes on in the HomePods, that in the end, even if you had a central
⏹️ ▶️ John brain, still with the processing, if the brain was in the individual speakers, you’d have to move the brains into
⏹️ ▶️ John the central thing as well. But it’s like inherent in their design that you can just have one of these and it’s got all the brains and all
⏹️ ▶️ John the amplification or whatever, that when you get two of them, it is really trying to get two things
⏹️ ▶️ John to be synchronized down to seconds. I mean, this is arguably the- Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on though, because I can plug a turntable into my Sonos setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, and it will play perfectly synchronized, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I put the speaker in my hand, the speakers in the porch, the speakers in the in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the living room. I don’t I it does not compute to me how they can be so perfectly synchronized.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s that’s kind of arguably what the entire Sonos company, why does Sonos exist as a company
⏹️ ▶️ John is because they were dedicated to solving this very specific problem. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John solved it way before other people did, which is how do I to make the audio come out of all the speakers at the same time,
⏹️ ▶️ John even when those speakers are independent little computers. There is a little, I mean, I’m sure what
⏹️ ▶️ John they do structurally and architecturally is probably wildly different than what Apple does, if only because Sonos was created
⏹️ ▶️ John so long ago. And I do think they have more of a central, the ability at least to have a central
⏹️ ▶️ John brain thing going on. But what I’m getting at with the Apple thing is I’m not excusing their bugs. I’m just saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has chosen to try to solve a harder problem because of the way they have architected this
⏹️ ▶️ John product. If they were more fully dedicated to the idea that we want to provide
⏹️ ▶️ John a premium audio experience with more than one speaker, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would choose to do something different architecturally, whether that’s having the Apple TV contain all the brains
⏹️ ▶️ John and making the speakers more passive or selling an Apple receiver, or even selling an Apple soundbar,
⏹️ ▶️ John where at least the soundbar is not never going to miscoordinate between his right and his left speakers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel for the people trying to solve this problem, but they’ve kind of brought it on themselves by assigning to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have to say with the AirPods, it’s more acceptable for me for one AirPod to take a half a second to see the other one. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for a set of expensive speakers that I want to be a stereo pair, I find that much less acceptable.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should never do that. They should never, never. It’s like, I almost wish they had a mode where it said, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody gets to make any sound until you’re sure the other one is in lockstep with you. Just wait. And that would just make them even
⏹️ ▶️ John slower, which then you’d complain about that, right? But anyway, I feel like this is a big Sonos advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is a big advantage for dumbass speaker wire going to dumbass speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John from a central receiver where you will never have this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s entirely right. You would think like for these devices that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardwired to power, they always have power, they’re stationary, and they’re usually not very far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from each other. Like you would think that this would be better. AirPods are a much harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem because they have your head in the way in the middle between the two of them and your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head’s full of water and it blocks RF.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re taking them out of the case and before they were like off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like it’s, like the AirPods are in a much more high needs, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, demanding situation for this kind of coordination. Whereas the HomePods are just sitting on a counter, they’re plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, like always connected to wifi. Like what’s changing about this environment that they have to somehow drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out sometimes, like anyway. So the area of stereo pairing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still buggy and still needs work. But with that exception, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else about this is an improvement. Even that is improved. It’s just not correct yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still improved. Everything about this new HomePod is better. I am so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy they not only didn’t screw it up, but actually made it even better. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds so much better, and I thought the old one sounded pretty good. So this is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really great product. Not for every role, as I mentioned earlier, like this is probably not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your best home theater choice, but for the size that it is, and how simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and clean the setup is, and for all the different advantages it has in terms of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like not only the privacy angles I mentioned earlier with your Amazon police cylinders, or your Google creepy cylinders,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have this as a good option there, and to things like off access listening, where it truly is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better than everything else in its category. If you want something that is good looking enough to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your kitchen counter, and maybe needs to be, you know, maybe like, you know, partner compatible for aesthetics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also you want these different, these different capabilities that it has. There is no other option on the market or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other options are worse. So this is a great product. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely happy with it so far. It’s only been a couple of days with that disclaimer. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I expect that this is gonna be, this is gonna be pretty good for a pretty long time, I think, I hope.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited to receive my shipment of your old HomePods. What are you gonna do with all them? You
⏹️ ▶️ John got a lot of those old ones. I mean, it’s not granted some of them don’t work anymore. Yeah, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four, two of which work okay, two of which work less okay. So I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of maybe, I might upgrade one of the small rooms in my house to a full-size HomePod, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll set up the two old ones as TV speakers to our downstairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of secondary TV. Although that’s usually used for video games, that would probably be bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should do that so you can tell us how good the, speaking of stereo pairing and flakiness, how, what is the reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John like on that setup?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, yeah, we don’t use that TV that often, so, but, and when it is used, it’s almost always for gaming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is like not what these are good at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, no, just, yeah. That’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ John saying there was a latency related bug that they supposedly fixed in 16.3 or something, but yeah, I think that for things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are really latency sensitive, you really kind of need, it helps to have like the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I went through for all the struggles I went through to get my sync up, I had a central box that was controlling it
⏹️ ▶️ John all, including the video. And so, you’ve got the input lag of your TV, which
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re at the mercy of, and there’s not much you can do there except for go into game mode. But if you want something
⏹️ ▶️ John to align the audio latency to match the video, it helps to have sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John one traffic cop in the middle there. And you don’t have that with these two home pods just hanging off the end of your TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and as mentioned earlier, Like for gaming, you really want dumb ass wires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to dumb ass speakers. Like that’s what you want. When you want to minimize latency, you want wires. Simple as that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, thumbs up on the HomePod 2 and I’m really happy it’s here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is there anything that you feel is worse or degraded as compared to the last one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause this sounds like it was a freaking home run.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the exception of there being less bass at high volume. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seemed like a regression. But again, it’s at low to medium volumes, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And all the other aspects of the sound are significantly improved. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m willing to take that loss.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s awesome. I’m super impressed.
Sponsor: Kolide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Collide. You know the old saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Well, the traditional approach to device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security is that hammer, a blunt instrument that can’t solve nuanced problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even after installing clunky security agents that users hate, IT teams still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with mountains of support tickets over the same old issues over and over again, and they have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to address tricky things like unencrypted SSH keys, OS updates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or pretty much anything on a Linux device. Collide is an endpoint security solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s more like a Swiss Army knife. It gives IT teams a single dashboard for all devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac, Windows, and yes, even Linux. You can query your entire fleet to check for common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compliance issues or write your own custom checks. And instead of installing intrusive software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that creates more work for IT, Collide’s lightweight agent shows end users how to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues themselves. You can achieve endpoint compliance by adding a new tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your toolbox. Visit collide.com slash ATP to find out how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s collide spelled K O l I d e collide.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP. Thank you so much to collide for sponsoring our show.
#askatp: Big-co Mastodon instances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Gavin Whitaker writes, do you think large enterprises will ever set up Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instances and would there be business opportunities in doing so? Or would it be too much hassle to manage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you have previously discussed? I noticed recently that a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of our mutual friends, this is Jason Snell, Stephen Hackett, Mike Hurley,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have all been setting up their own bespoke Mastodon instances. I think using, what is it, masto.host,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m not mistaken, which is something, it’s less than 10 bucks a month if you want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very, very small instance, not a sponsor, maybe should be. But anyways, they’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and that I think makes some amount of sense perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for organizations, but I don’t think most organizations are going to care about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mastodon enough to have a presence, to be honest with you. I would be very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprised if most corporations are going to care. And if they did, I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there would be some particular instance that would try to cater to those sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of clients. But I just don’t see this happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if Mastodon ever gets enough critical mass that companies care that it exists, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not implausible, but hasn’t yet happened. I think The Washington Post is verifying their reporters’
⏹️ ▶️ John profiles, at least on Mastodon, so they get the green checkmark, you know, right. So there’s some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of awareness. But anyway, if Mastodon ever grows to the point where big companies
⏹️ ▶️ John want to be on it, I think the big companies will run their own instances just because
⏹️ ▶️ John the lesson they will have learned by this whole thing of like, we got to deal with this again. Why can’t we just be on Twitter? Oh, like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if Mastodon gains some kind of critical mass, it means things continue to go crappily over at Twitter. And they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be feel burned by that. And if the if they’re feel burned by that someone in the company will say, you we know
⏹️ ▶️ John the only silver lining to this hassle that we now have to deal with is that on Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have to have a repeat of the scenario where we invested all this time and effort into this thing. Like a lot of these
⏹️ ▶️ John companies have like, their only customer support is through Twitter, which is a company they don’t control, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John now they’re gonna be paying for API access and everything for their automated system to be able to talk to, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re gonna be cranky about that. And, you know, obviously it takes technical expertise and costs money to run an
⏹️ ▶️ John instance, but big corporations like to control stuff. That’s why big corporations will like to control
⏹️ ▶️ John their own IT, maybe their own email thing. That’s why Microsoft makes money. Like people run exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John in-house instead of outsourcing it to Google’s business thing. Cause they’re like, oh, we’ve got to control it all ourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think if Mastodon becomes popular, big companies will run their own Mastodon instances
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll like it. Like they will want to run it because they’re like, we controlled it just for our stuff. No one can ever kick
⏹️ ▶️ John us off. No one can ever, you know, like they could be defederated if they just do something super terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in general, I think they will want to run their instances not to be at the mercy of people like Elon
#askatp: Xcode delta updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nathan Roberts writes, I am always hearing how iOS developers have to redownload Xcode when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple announces new features. I don’t fully understand how you need to download the entire IDE rather than a set of updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to support new features. For those of us who are more familiar with IDEs like Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you elaborate on the integration between Xcode and developing for Apple platforms? Who would like to handle
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is an instance where Apple could provide incremental
⏹️ ▶️ John updates to Xcode, but they do not. All right, so Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John has, and has for most of its history, the ability to do incremental updates. You don’t have to redownload
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire OS. At various times, you’d need to redownload way more than you thought you should for the update size that they give you, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, over the years, there’s been various systems to send less than the entire operating system every single
⏹️ ▶️ John time. And Mac OS is way more complicated than Xcode, right? So they
⏹️ ▶️ John could do that. Is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco complicated. No, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS is way bigger, right? But they don’t do that. Why don’t they do it?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not important enough to do it. Like the number of developers versus the number of Mac users is a small
⏹️ ▶️ John fraction. The download size used to be reasonable. Now it’s like eight gigs or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but still it’s like, whatever. It’s just easier to make one, one artifact
⏹️ ▶️ John as they say, one thing that’s the same for everybody. You don’t have to worry about your update or going weird or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John They even got to the point where, You know, everything is packaged in the thing. And the first time you launch it, it says, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to install these SDKs? And then it does all the stuff where it does, you know, whatever it needs to do, like one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, that’s one chunk. So the answer is yes, they could do incremental
⏹️ ▶️ John updates. It would be less download time, but Apple doesn’t because it’s simpler and more straightforward. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the things that are annoying about Apple’s development, having to download Xcode and waiting for it to unXIP,
⏹️ ▶️ John unzip, takes a long time. long time. Maybe that encourages developers to buy faster
⏹️ ▶️ John Max. I don’t know, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal, right? Just don’t do it through the Mac App Store because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing. The Mac App Store does do Delta updates, but Xcode is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a large app with so many files in it. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John does it does it do Delta updates?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the Mac App Store, I think it does in general, but because Xcode is so big, it just it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter. Like it’s it ends up being slower than it would be to just download the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not because of the it’s not because of the the size because eight gigs is big. It’s because the number of files like
⏹️ ▶️ John just go you know do a find command on the Xcode app and see how many files are in there. It’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god. So it’s like it like whenever you have to like empty your recycle bin or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your trash excuse me. I forgot what platform is on there for a second. Whenever you have to empty your trash and there’s a version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode in there, it takes forever because there’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ John files in that bundle. I’m counting the files right now. That’s how long it’s taking on
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Just watching the command. It’s waiting. I’ll chime in when it tells you. Thanks for joining
#askatp: Search terms for iOS dev
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and Darren Kelkoff writes, I’m fairly new to iOS and macOS development. One thing I’ve struggled with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when I want to search the web for how to do a certain something in code for an app, that I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure exactly the best way to tweak my search terms to get hits relevant to a developer rather than an iOS or Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user. For example, if I wanted to add code to an iOS app to automatically run an iOS shortcut, if I search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, quote, iOS launcher shortcut, quote, the results are all about how to run shortcuts as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an end user. The best strategy I’ve used to date been to add the term SWIFT to my search terms,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was wondering if you guys had any recommendations or successful experiences to share. That’s my trick is add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SWIFT. But Marco, as the old hat of the three of us, what’s the right answer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, before he goes, I’ve got the number of files. Without cheating, you want to do Price is Right rules. What are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll say a million. Oh, come on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey now. One dollar. Price is Right rules. One dollar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You’re going to go one? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all kidding aside, if I were to get, I know to do Price is Right rules, I would guess one file, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s something to the order of 5,000 to 7,000 files, somewhere in that neck of the woods.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, your guess is 5,000 to 7,000, Marco’s is 1,000,000. Do you want to converse
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other to figure out why you’re this far apart and maybe think about which one of you is closer to right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m closer to right, Marco’s bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It includes all the headers and all the SDK files. That’s where I think so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the files are. the different device support it’s like there’s so much we’re talking like multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS’s multiple versions of those OS’s oftentimes being bundled like it’s just it’s a massive
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like if we weren’t playing by Price is Right rules I feel like Marco should
⏹️ ▶️ John win because at least he understands the scale of the problem. 5,000 files Casey I think Switchglass
⏹️ ▶️ John has more than 5,000. Are you kidding? 5,000?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoot I’m thinking no because what I was thinking of is when I empty the trash and no it is in the tens of thousands isn’t it I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s anywhere near a million
⏹️ ▶️ John now so I anyway the answer from the current version of Xcode this is on an Intel Mac in case it’s different
⏹️ ▶️ John is 398,311 oh that was way more than that ridiculous and cuz it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John really 400,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Marco pretty much doubled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it which is you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer orders of magnitude away than Casey I gotta pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention next time I enter the trash cuz that’s what I was thinking of is when I empty the trash after an Xcode update,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how many files does it say it has to delete? And I think it, well, maybe I’m wrong. I must be wrong if it’s really hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of thousands, but I thought it was somewhere between 10 and 30,000 files when I emptied the trash,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll try to pay attention. Well, anyway, I just counted them. And by the way, Switch Glass has 23 files, so sorry, Switch Glass, for
⏹️ ▶️ John saying bad things about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. I was gonna say, how did you get that? There’s no NPM in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep in mind also, the whole developer, library developer folder, there’s different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places that it puts files once you actually use it to do anything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t just the files in the bundle that it’s also dealing with. Like there’s also then all the, you know, the device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support and all that crap that gets spewed all over your desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it does it spew sim links these days? I never watched it what it’s actually doing these days. It used to be way more complicated, but
⏹️ ▶️ John but now it’s all in the bundle and then it does some the quote unquote installation stuff. I thought it might have just been a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John sim links that it sets up, but maybe it does spray files too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. Anyway, so to answer to answer Darren’s question about how to search for things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would, so my, there’s two tricks here. Number one is if you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s more like generic words you have to search for, you can always go to Stack Overflow. That, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, site colon stackoverflow.com, like that’s, that’s where most of the good answers for stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that are anyway, with the exception of there’s also, you know, sites like Hacking with Swift that have really good, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Swift tutorials and certain examples. Things like that. So like, there is some stuff out in the general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web, that’s good. But if you’re really having trouble finding things and you’re kind of name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colliding with common words, oftentimes restriction of the search or StackOverflow.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is oftentimes better. The other thing is, if you search for an API name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in particular, usually you’re good. And so oftentimes to find that API name, that might take a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco searching. But one thing I would try to do is search the Apple developer app, because or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documentation, of course, the Apple documentation. then you’ll at least hit upon a WBDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk or a code example or a documentation example, you’ll at least hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon something that will tell you the name of the API. And then you can search for the name of the API specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the web. And that will cut out almost all that other stuff. So that’s the real answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’ll cut out all the other stuff if you’re lucky. Back in the old days with name prefixes, you’d have NS in front of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now with Swift, where the thing is called view and stuff like that, then you have to And whatever proper nouns you can find.
⏹️ ▶️ John So add Swift UI, no space after the T and before the U Swift UI on word, instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of just adding Swift, I found these sometimes you can also throw an X code, but you’re trying to look for his words that
⏹️ ▶️ John you think will come up will come up in close proximity to that, like conceptually, that someone might
⏹️ ▶️ John mention X code in their question, especially if they’re a novice and don’t know the name of a thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re lucky enough to come up with an NS or UI, you know, UI table view, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John NS string, NS, like that will definitely get you, what you wanna do is you wanna weed
⏹️ ▶️ John out the non-dev answers because the problem is you end up with all these people putting questions
⏹️ ▶️ John that have nothing to do with development, have to do with using your Mac, and you don’t wanna see those. And if you have a word overlap
⏹️ ▶️ John with them, it’s very difficult. But if you throw in the word Xcode, no one’s gonna mention that in their question about iOS shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ John unless, you know, they’re actually developing it now. The problem is most developers, experienced developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John are not going to mention Xcode in their question probably. So yeah, it’s a bit of a challenge, but
⏹️ ▶️ John domain specific searches and even just doing stuff like Apple has dev forums, right? If you’re on that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re like, I don’t even know what word to search for yet. If you limit your search to the dev forums, either by using a Google
⏹️ ▶️ John site colon search or by using the dev forums on search, I don’t know if it has one, but I assume it does somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then that will let you find the proper nouns and then you go back to the bigger Google and throw in the proper nouns.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Drafts, Pushcut and Collide. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join atp.fm slash join. I mean, we’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, check podcasting’s
Post-show: Speaker wire
⏹️ ▶️ John So did your family listen to the cavalcade of fuzzy cylinders
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco well Or they just like
⏹️ ▶️ John ignoring you while you were there playing mad scientist and making the house noisy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were not a fan of this test And so I did it while tiff was working in the basement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Adam was at school
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I was wondering if they had opinions about old versus new or did none of them really care And they just want you to get this over with and
⏹️ ▶️ John get it back to just having a normal Kitchen where you can play music?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely the latter I I will occasionally ask,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, Tiff is usually pretty amenable to like, hey, try these headphones, what do you think? You know, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this was a larger scale thing that, you know, nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the house cares as much as I do. They just want things to work and be good and
⏹️ ▶️ John She took your AirPods Max though, right? Aren’t they like her favorite headphones now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, she wears them much of the day when she’s working up here because they’re just, they’re very comfortable on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco her and that’s great. I mean, and I even went, I figured like the AirPods Max have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been out for what, almost two years now. And so I figured surely somebody has made a wide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco array of third-party magnetically attaching ear pads that can go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them instead of the stock ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the part that was uncomfortable to you? Because I tried them on, I’ve tried them on whenever I’m in an Apple store just
⏹️ ▶️ John hanging out, and I find the headband to be the thing that’s objectionable to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it isn’t that the headband was pressing against my head. It was the AirPods Max, as we discussed at great length
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they came out and I kind of reviewed them on the show, you know, whenever that was two years ago, their main problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are weight. They’re very heavy and that makes it hard to make it comfortable for headphones. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impossible, but it is harder. And that their ear pads, like the contact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area that the ear pads touched your head was almost too narrow of a rim. And so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t spreading that weight across a very wide area. So it was like digging in almost to your head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I find them to be okay for a few minutes, but then if I wear them for like, you know, say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole morning, I’ll take them off and be like, I’ll have a headache and my head will hurt the rest of the day. Like there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like you don’t realize how uncomfortable they are until you take them off after a while. Then you’re like, oh no, I feel terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Tiff doesn’t have that problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people don’t have that problem, but it’s just yeah, whatever it is, they’re not comfortable on me. And apparently you for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because I was wearing him for 30 seconds in the Apple store and I was like hell no on this headband cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s and it’s a shame because they sound amazing. But I even tried like I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found finally there was like one company I found on all the internet, one company on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I found that had like third party ear pads for them and they are softer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they look almost like they’re made to look almost the same. So like they aren’t wider,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t have like you know the like there’s all there’s so many great aftermarket third party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ear pads for most regular headphones. They’re like like Brainwaves is a popular brand of them. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these companies that that make aftermarket ear pads and they’re like big and plush and they’re They’re really nice, and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a pair of headphones that isn’t very comfortable, I suggest you try one of these, like one of these ear pad things that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get on Amazon for like 25, 30 bucks. They’re oftentimes much more comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and much more plush and everything like that. And for AirPods Max, that just seemed not to exist. And so I did find this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one company that made this one, and it was a little more comfortable, but it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to make a difference. Like it was still, it was more comfortable, but it was still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very uncomfortable after a long time. So it’s a shame. I wish those fit me, but they just don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of third-party things for Apple products, when you got the shorter
⏹️ ▶️ John power cords, did you find ones that are color-matched and nice and pliable? I
⏹️ ▶️ John would like to see the setup of your, when you, again, get everything off your counters again and just set it up the way you want it. Did
⏹️ ▶️ John you find a nice cord that just is long enough to reach your outlets and isn’t stiff and weird and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found basic white, lamp cord-looking kind of ones. So, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic, you know, like two conductor, you know, standard, you know, white plug that comes straight out. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was hoping to get a right angle plug at least, if I could make it a little more flush against the wall, but, you know, I just did a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick Amazon search during last episode and just, you know, ordered it after the show. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they’re fine. You know, it was 10 bucks on Amazon for a two pack. You know, it was, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have one foot cables now, and you can see from the picture, like, they’re right next to the outlets. I don’t need a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of extra cable. And it was totally fine to just pop out the stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables, pop these in. It doesn’t look as nice, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they aren’t braided, and they have the regular cheap lamp plug ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are they kinked from how they were wrapped when they were packaged? No, they’re only one foot cables. They’re too short to have those problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re flexible, and it’s fine. It isn’t pushing them out from the wall or anything. So it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of that, I went down this little rabbit hole briefly and never actually ordered anything. I should revisit
⏹️ ▶️ John it. All of my speakers are connected with just plain old speaker wire. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all you need. Well, there’s lots of different ways that you can connect speaker wire to a speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the way I have done it is the laziest way, which is you just strip off a little bit of the insulation and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you twist the wire. So it’s a little stiff little thing. And then you, I forget what it’s called. There’s a name for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Someone in the chat room will say in two seconds, but there’s like a post with a hole through it and you shove the wire through the hole
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you screw down. A binding post. Yeah, and then you screw down the little thing and then it’s interesting. It’s fine, it works
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But the problem is it is like, you know, put the wire through a hole and you screw a thing. It’s in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s, you know, you’re pressing the conductor against the little metal thing with the screw
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, right? And that sounds fine, except for the fact the back of my receiver
⏹️ ▶️ John has lots of those things plugged into it because you’ve got all the speakers going there and each of them have two
⏹️ ▶️ John conductors and they all go to the back of the receiver and all of them are screwed into these little posts and those wires
⏹️ ▶️ John are all routed all around the room and then behind the TV and into the thing. And it’s such a pain
⏹️ ▶️ John in the butt to like, I don’t have enough slack to like pull the whole receiver out of the entertainment center,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you have to pull it out enough to be able to get to the wires. And God forbid you have to like turn the thing around and it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John so another solution that would solve this is that’s supported by lots of different receivers and speakers, including
⏹️ ▶️ John my receiver and my speakers is what they call banana plug, which is an actual plug that plugs
⏹️ ▶️ John into and out of that thing that you screw down. I don’t know if banana plugs are considered to be worse
⏹️ ▶️ John or better or whatever. All I know is that I don’t have them and I wish I did. But then I started looking into
⏹️ ▶️ John that. You can easily convert them. Yeah, no, you totally can. Like these are banana plug
⏹️ ▶️ John ready. I would just, all I’d have to do is buy some little banana plug ins. You just buy these things, they’re pretty cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, you take your speaker wires out, you probably cut them and strip them again or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you put them into the- You screw
⏹️ ▶️ John them in. Yep, and then you’re all set. But there’s like 17 different ways to do that. And there’s lots of very strong opinions
⏹️ ▶️ John about which ones are and aren’t good. And which ones are going to corrode and which ones are going to do this. Cause it’s audio. I’m like, which, how
⏹️ ▶️ John much of this is real and how much of this is people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you I’ve used these before. None of that matters at all because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great thing about speaker wire, you know, there’s all the audio files, you know, the, the, the high end audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, shops and blogs and magazines, they will tell you how much cabling matters. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really, really doesn’t. You could like you could like unbend a coat hanger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and run it to power your speakers And it would sound just as good as the like you know five thousand dollar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a foot you know gold infused You know never seen air It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much ridiculousness in speaker cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not worried about like the electrical conductivity I’m worried about physically speaking because it’s stranded wire my speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is stranded It’s not a coating or
⏹️ ▶️ John the solid conductor I’m worried about like it that stranded wire being crimped in some weird thing and then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John just cracking off and just my speaker wire Going pink and then no longer being connected because I put it into the banana
⏹️ ▶️ John plug and screwed it down too hard or something So anyway, I haven’t gotten around to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s way easier than you think it is. It’s really not a problem It’s very idiot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proof lots of idiots do it and they’re fine, you know, keep in mind with speaker wire Typically speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are stationary. And so, you know any crazy way you might hook up the wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not gonna be under a lot of stress because it’s not moving and flexing Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not the speaker and then I’m worried about it’s the receiver and I wouldn’t put banana plugs on the speakers because who Cares they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. I can see them. I can get to the back of the speakers real easily, right? It’s the stupid receiver and and the
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the thing that’s keeping me from doing it is like oh if I get banana plugs Now I have to get the back of receiver again
⏹️ ▶️ John And this time when I initially do it, there’s no banana plugs on it now So I gotta do the whole thing of like
⏹️ ▶️ John Finding a way to pull the stuff through and rotating the thing sideways and my stupid glass shelves that are
⏹️ ▶️ John on Like when you try to rotate the receiver the glass shelves go off the little nubbins that it’s supposed to be on and it crashes
⏹️ ▶️ John down it’s just It’s it’s annoys me so much like every time I see someone has an AV
⏹️ ▶️ John setup or they can just walk behind their equipment I’m like, oh my god,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how much I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love to have that Can you imagine just walking behind your equipment and being able to get access to all the back
⏹️ ▶️ John panels? I do not have that luxury It’s jammed into a corner that’s really hard to get to and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s such a mess So then every time I think about the banana plugs, I just look at my setup. I’m like, well, it’s working now Just
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t touch it. But yeah, if I ever have to go back there again I’m gonna order a mess of banana plugs probably and just
⏹️ ▶️ John give and the reason about plugs will help is that I can just yank The freaking receive around the banana plugs all pop up out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not they don’t work the way you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so there’s two things easy to get out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one One, banana plugs are huge. So they actually might not, like they’re way bigger than you think for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mixture. I have plenty of room behind it. They’re not going to hit into it. Okay. And then number two, they hold on really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tightly in the sockets. Cause they have like little like springy ends that kind of get compressed. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, that’s the banana, banana part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they don’t pop out easily. You got, you got to give them a good yank. And so I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to do what you think it is. And, and I don’t think it’s going to save
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe, then maybe I just reached behind there and pop them out because here’s the thing. If you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough slack to get them in or out, that means you have to thread, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I just said, it’s like it’s threading it through a hole in a post and then screwing a plastic thing down. If you ever look at the back of the receiver,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like a dozen of those right next to each other. So imagine trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John lay on the ground and shove your body into the AV cabinet and crane your head around with a light on your
⏹️ ▶️ John forehead so that you can shove in the middle wire of the center channel speaker between 17
⏹️ ▶️ John other ones with very little slack, shove it through a hole in the little post
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in the middle of that, and then screw the thing down, and it’s so hard to do. It is just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to, I need like a, what do you call it, endoscopy equipment, like the surgeons use, with like a fiber
⏹️ ▶️ John optic cable and a little thing, because it’s just, it is not fit for humans. And I guess the solution would
⏹️ ▶️ John be, just put seven feet of slack on all your speaker wires, but that ship has sailed, because I made a mistake when
⏹️ ▶️ John I laid all the speaker wire, and I do not have enough slack at the receiver end.
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t want to run all the wire again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d forgotten that you have a billion speakers and I only have two, so it’s different. You’re dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different degree of complexity here. So yeah, I’d say, yeah, go ahead and get them. But they’re very easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The great thing about speaker wire, again, speaker wire is so dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is so tolerant of mistakes or sloppy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. Literally, as long as the positive and negative wires aren’t touching each other and you’re not shorting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out, you’re fine. Anything else you do, it’s fine. You can use regular lamp cord. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, like, you don’t have to get fancy cable. You don’t have, like, if a few little strands break off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one of your ends, you don’t have the full number of strands to shove into the hole, it’s fine, doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so easy. You can do pretty much whatever you want and be as sloppy as you need to be. And again, as long as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not shorting it out, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what were we doing, ATP, when the mouse chewed through my speaker cable? Do you remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Might have been before we started the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey show. I don’t know, I don’t remember that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think so. I was shortly after I had first set up speaker wire in my house, maybe it was after I just moved in, we
⏹️ ▶️ John had a mouse problem, chewed right through the speaker wire. Oh, I’d be so mad. That’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, it chewed through one of the conductors of the speaker wire. It was like a clean surgical cut. Like you saw a speaker wire with
⏹️ ▶️ John the two little conductors, and all of a sudden one of the conductors just stopped. And it was like a three inch gap where there was none
⏹️ ▶️ John of that wire. And then it started again. I was like, well, how would I explain why the speaker? And speaking of the different things,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just had recently the thing where my tweeter stopped working on my standard channel and I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong and I eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John figured it out. It’s real important to have all those different cone sizes because if you’re missing one, you’d notice.