Apple's new 1 liter speaker: 10mm xmax woofer, 8 amps, 7 tweeters w/horn, 6 mics

[GTPlus]

Are you guys sure it is firing inside the horn? I was thinking they were firing at it. Similar what B&O does on their Audi tweeters. If it were firing into it how would sound get out it? It is sitting on the opening.

[mattsk8]

I was looking at a car at a dealership last week, and was told there was a phone app that could tell you where the car is, where it went, and how fast it was going. So, you can track what your spouse, or kids did with the car. That's a car that I will never own!

Thing is, even w/out that app your phone is doing exactly that. Supposedly it's so they can send the info to the other apps and whatnot to "better your cellular experience"... but the reality of it all is pretty frightening IMHO. I don't need people / things monitoring my every move just so I don't need to use my brain. Any car with a OBDiii computer can be accessed from the outside by a police cruiser... all in the name of public safety of course . Kinda makes me think of a certain Rockwell song .

I want to make a point that what Apple/B&O is doing to achieve variable directivity is far more complicated than an amplitude/phase shading arrangement. It is way more complicated than you can ever imagine. I do some crazy stuff for my speakers, but this is an order of magnitude more complicated than even what I do.

Best way to give an idea what it takes. Suppose you have a tweeter, you can use a second tweeter placed on the left to cancel out sound from the left of the main tweeter. Doing that is incredibly tricky by itself in order to get the frequency vs phase right for every frequency while accounting for the directivity vs frequency change of the tweeter and some other problems.

But now there is sound to the left of the second tweeter. So we use a third tweeter placed to the left of the second tweeter and do the same thing. But now you gotta make sure what you do on the third tweeter do not affect the response of the first tweeter.

Now imagine doing that for 7 tweeters, and having to account for 6 other tweeters while getting its own response correctly.

Now you finally got it right for one dispersion pattern. But remember, this is *variable directivity*. Now repeat that and do it for a bunch of different dispersion patterns.

I've actually listened to the Beolab 90 before and got the whole presentation from the B&O rep. I know they aren't using multiple volume knobs to get the variable dispersion they have. My comment about playing with tweeters in a horn was more for my own educational purposes, not so much an attempt to re-create the Beolab or the iThingamajig. All that said... if I had $90k to spend on some speakers, given the presentation I had, I would look to something other than the Beolab 90. They were too harsh and edgy sounding (kind of typical of B&O), and had an unnatural presence IMO. I'm not saying I could build better, just saying that for $90k I've heard quite a few speakers I'd rather own.

[Sydney]

... I know they aren't using multiple volume knobs to get the variable dispersion they have. ...

haha - that's so 20th century

[mattsk8]

haha - that's so 20th century

[Paul Carmody]

Are you guys sure it is firing inside the horn? I was thinking they were firing at it. Similar what B&O does on their Audi tweeters. If it were firing into it how would sound get out it? It is sitting on the opening.

That would be interesting as well.

See, the other thing that's puzzling me about that faux-cutaway photo is that I can't tell if there's an actual enclosure. They make it look like the woofer is playing into free space, which--as most of us are well aware is a way to kill bass response below the dipole peak. So if I didn't know any better, I'd just think that was just a port flare at the bottom of a cylindrical enclosure.

[hardcorecap]

reminds me of small scale synergy horn, like something Danley Sound Labs would make for home use

[Sydney]

Related

[turn2]

I was looking at a car at a dealership last week, and was told there was a phone app that could tell you where the car is, where it went, and how fast it was going. So, you can track what your spouse, or kids did with the car. That's a car that I will never own!

You can do that on a $99 handheld GPS. Our firm uses them to locate POI's in research fields, but it also tracks every move and step made by our interns.

[Pallas]

And like Amazon's Echo and Google's Home, it is listening to everything you say, and sending that to a giant computer farm which may or may not be recording everything you say, but is undoubtedly analyzing.

The nice thing about Apple is that sell products, not your information (so they say, at least). Amazon and Google subsidize hardware costs with their data-mining operations.

I wouldn't bring an Amazon or Google microphone into my home. But an Apple one (aside from the one in my pocket and the one somewhere in front of the fingers typing this message)? Maybe, even though I have yet to see voice-control for computers (or IoT generally) as anything but a solution in search of a problem.

Regardless, this little speaker looks like it might have potential for secondary casual listening systems. Ignore the voice-control aspects of it, and it's an interesting design Airplay speaker. It will be interesting to compare sound quality wise to the upcoming Riva lineup, Oppo Sonica, etc.

[DDF]

I'm definitely jealous of all of the engineering tools Apple have at their disposal. That said, it doesn't really make sense that manufacturers don't have, or don't utilize the advanced tools and custom components they have access to. It's a little silly that a DIY'er can do better than these manufacturers. It is not until the recent 2-3 years that companies really stepped up their game in audio innovation, and I'm glad this is finally happening.

Sitting in front of a phone right now (I was audio lead on it) with 56k, DSP based echo cancellation, DSP compression, DSP based multipartyconference bridge, eq'ed and soft limited ported speaker taking it down to ~ 100Hz in probably 1 cup enclosure.

The technology has been around forever. We had DSP (Moto 56k) based beam steering going at Nortel 20 yrs ago, along with speech recognition and a bunch of other tech used here, but there was no mass market application to commoditize it and make it commercially viable, at the time.

That said, this looks like a great implementation, cool design. Lets hope they tuned it so it doesn't sound like phat bottomed Bose.

[300Z]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArH41WyUt28

Saw this today...

[xmax]

Sitting in front of a phone right now (I was audio lead on it) with 56k, DSP based echo cancellation, DSP compression, DSP based multipartyconference bridge, eq'ed and soft limited ported speaker taking it down to ~ 100Hz in probably 1 cup enclosure.

The technology has been around forever. We had DSP (Moto 56k) based beam steering going at Nortel 20 yrs ago, along with speech recognition and a bunch of other tech used here, but there was no mass market application to commoditize it and make it commercially viable, at the time.

That said, this looks like a great implementation, cool design. Lets hope they tuned it so it doesn't sound like phat bottomed Bose.

The Tech is amazing but does it sound like a phasey nightmare?

[tktran]

Inside:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/HomePod++Teardown/103133

Allegedly it doesn’t sound bad. For 1L it’s probably incredible.

[neildavis]

Inside:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/HomePod++Teardown/103133

I like the amps they are using. The tweeters use the Analog Devices SSM3515 class D amps, which are probably the highest quality mid-powered IC amps available. I've used the analog input version (SSM3302) in a number of projects. The woofer uses the IRF (Infineon) PowlRaudio series, which are some of the best high powered class D amp chips.

[300Z]

https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/7wwtqy/apple_homepod_the_audiophile_perspective/

Someone did some testing already.