Amir Asias Beyond Surface

To convince journalists about the audio quality of its new HomePod smart speaker (here’s my review), Apple did something smart: Before we were given our review units, we were required to attend a listening session. Mine was held in Apple’s New York City public-relations loft, a mockup of an apartment.

Four speakers were on a counter against a wall: Sonos One ($200), Google Home Max ($400), the HomePod ($350), and the Amazon Echo Plus ($150).

The PR person could switch playback from one speaker to the other without missing a beat. They even had a halo light rigged to turn on behind whichever speaker was playing, so you’d know which was which.

There was not a shred of doubt: In this side-by-side comparison, the HomePod sounded better than its competitors.

Most of the reviews, including mine, said the same thing: that the HomePod isn’t as smart as the other smart speakers (among other problems, its voice control is limited to iTunes and Apple Music — no Spotify), but that it sounds amazing.

What Hi-Fi (a British audiophile site): “The HomePod is the best-sounding smart speaker available—and by quite a margin.”

Pocket-Lint (tech site): “The best sounding speaker of its type.”

The Verge: “It sounds far better than any other speaker in its price range.”

Tech Crunch: “HomePod is easily the best sounding mainstream smart speaker ever. It’s got better separation and bass response than anything else in its size.”

Still, when I tweeted about the test, a couple of people were suspicious of the setup, which of course was entirely controlled by Apple. What was the source material? What was the wireless setup?

An Apple rep told me that the test songs were streaming from a server in the next room (a Mac). But each speaker was connected to it differently: by Bluetooth (Amazon Echo), Ethernet (Sonos), input miniplug (Google Home), and AirPlay (HomePod), which is Apple’s Wi-Fi-based transmission system.

Since the setup wasn’t identical, I wondered if it was a perfectly fair test. (Bluetooth, for example, may degrade (compress) the music it’s transmitting, depending on the source and the equipment.)

So I decided to set up my own test at home.

The setup

I hid the four speakers behind a curtain — a sheet of thin, sheer fabric that wouldn’t affect the sound. It took me a Sunday to figure out how to get the A/B/C/D switching to work seamlessly, but I finally managed it: All four speakers would be streaming from Spotify, all four over Wi-Fi. I’d use the Spotify app’s device switcher to hop among speakers without missing a beat.

The speakers hidden.

I chose five songs, each with different styles, instrumentation, and sonic demands:

“Star Wars: Imperial March.” Full orchestra, full volume, full of brass.

“Havana” (Camila Cabello). Current pop hit. Distinct bass, drums, piano, and voice. Lots of rhythm.

Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major. All strings, full range of pitches and dynamics.

“Hallelujah” (Pentatonix). A cappella ballad, five voices, very exposed and close to the mikes.

“Helpless” (from “Hamilton”). Broadway pit band, pop sound, female harmonies.

In these kinds of tests, volume matching is incredibly important, for a couple of reasons. As Tom’s Hardware puts it: “First, if sources are at different levels, they’re easy to tell apart. From there, the test is no longer blind. Second, us humans tend to prefer (all other factors being equal) louder sources.”

For my dress rehearsal the night before, I volume matched them as best I could by ear.

The panelists at the dress rehearsal were my wife Nicki and my friend Mike, a professional guitarist who spent years as an audio technician for big-name touring bands.

I gave each panelist a score sheet, with room for notes, and asked them to rank the four speakers, 1 through 4, after each listening test. I sat at the laptop to control the tests; I played the same section of each song for about 20 seconds on each speaker. Panelists were free to ask for re-plays, or to hear any speaker again, or to hear two speakers in a different succession.

At the end of the rehearsal, I asked the listeners to choose a winner, based on how many first-place finishes they’d marked down. Both Nicki and Mike declared the HomePod to have the best sound, hands down.

The test

The next day, the Yahoo film crew arrived. Our sound recordist, Dave, used level meters to help me volume-match the speakers more precisely.

My five panelists included Darwin, a professional violinist who spends a lot of time listening to recordings on nice gear; Julie, an entrepreneur and homeowner who is precisely the target market for these speakers; Dana and Tori, high-schoolers who haven’t yet begun to lose their ability to hear high frequencies; and Rob, a sound technician for Yahoo.

I didn’t tell them which speakers would be involved. I said only that there were four of them behind the curtain, and I’d refer to them as speakers A through D.

I handed out their score sheets and began the test. Five songs, 20 seconds each, free replays when requested. For each song, I played the speakers in a different order (A to D sometimes, D to A sometimes).

The results

Of course, I knew what the results would be. I’d heard them myself in the Apple demo; I’d read the other reviews; and I’d done the dress rehearsal the night before. Every time, the HomePod won the match easily.

At the end of my own listening test, then, I handed out signs that said “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D,” and asked the panelists to hold up their winners’ signs on the count of three. I knew what they would say: “B,” “B,” “B,” “B,” and “B” (that was the HomePod’s letter).

That’s not what happened.

They held up their signs. Two of them ranked the Google Home Max (“D”) as the best. Three of them ranked the Sonos One (“A”) the best.

Nobody ranked the HomePod the best.

The speakers revealed.

The explanation

I actually have no great explanation for this outcome. Most of the panelists had ranked the HomePod (“B”) as first on some of the songs — just not most of the songs.

Rob: “For me, A, the Sonos, consistently had the most robust sound of all of them.”

Tori:  “The Sonos won two of them for me. ‘B’ [HomePod] won the ‘Star Wars.’”

Dana: “’B’ [HomePod] won one of mine. I felt like ‘A’ [Sonos], a lot of times, sounded a lot more sharp.”

Julie: “I picked between B and D [HomePod and Google Home Max] as being the two best. B and D were pretty clear. And C [the Amazon Echo] came in consistently last for me.”

Darwin: “I actually found A [the Sonos] to be the one that I hated the most. B [HomePod] did win one for me. It won ‘Havana,’ because it had a better low end. But I generally picked D [Google Home Max], because it had a clearer, nicer range. As a classical person, I definitely would go with D. But if I were listening to more pop stuff, I could see where ‘A’ [Sonos] could win.”

So what are we to make of this? Why did none of my panelists rank HomePod a solid  No. 1, when most critics all do (and so do I)?

Was something wrong with my setup? Well, no, because the night before, using the same setup, Nicki and Mike both ranked the HomePod No. 1.

Here are my theories:

Different music is different. My panelists all conceded that there was some variation depending on the material. “Honestly, they were pretty on par,” Rob said. “I don’t know that one stood out that much more than the other.” “It was much different with different music,” Darwin added. “It varied a lot for me, depending on the song,” Tori agreed.

Different people are different. I said that most professional critics ranked HomePod as No. 1, but not all of them. Buzzfeed’s young critic, for example, concluded: “Ultimately, none of this is a hard science, and audio preferences are highly subjective. Reactions to its audio quality from the four people who listened to it for this review.. were mixed. The HomePod outperformed other speakers in some situations and not others.” And the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern wrote, “The HomePod’s bass is impressive for the size of the speaker, but in many songs, it’s far too front-and-center in the mix.”

Nobody else did blind tests. As far as I can tell, none of the other critics who declared HomePod No. 1 actually set up their own blind A/B/C/D tests. Maybe their conclusions wouldn’t have been so emphatic if they had.

Apple’s setup was different. Remember, Apple’s four speakers were each connected to the source material differently: Two wired, one over Wi-Fi, one over Bluetooth. Maybe that wasn’t an even playing field — and for sure, it wasn’t a real-world playing field. Most people, most of the time, just connect these speakers to their Wi-Fi networks and stream music from an online service.

What I can say for sure is this:

The Apple HomePod generally sounds better than any other smart speaker—but only somewhat, and only in direct A/B/C/D tests. If you listened to the HomePod, Sonos, and Google Home an hour apart, you’d never be able to declare one a clear winner. (Everyone agrees that the Amazon Echo Plus is the loser in this roundup, but then again, it’s $150 and the size of a Pringle’s can; it’s not a fair fight.)

You can get two Sonos Ones for the price of a single Apple HomePod. You can use them as a stereo pair, or put them in different rooms and control them by voice. And you can have your choice of 42 music services (Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, etc.) — not just Apple Music. And you can use all of Amazon’s Alexa voice commands (and, soon, Google’s commands and even Siri’s commands!), meaning you can control a vastly larger range of smart-home devices than the HomePod can.

Everybody’s different.

Music gear (and listening tests) are famously contentious; they’re probably responsible for triggering more flame wars online than abortion and gun control put together. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Apple’s test and mine in the Comments!

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here.  

Read related

Apple’s HomePod speaker: Either way late or way early

David Pogue’s sneak preview of the Apple HomePod

A new analog glitch piece inspired by my love of vintage space travel.

Vintage tech and 1960s space-age sci-fi were huge inspirations for me in originally developing these analog glitch methods for How To Destroy Angels in 2013. I’ve always wanted to pay a proper homage to it in glitch form.

By the way, all prints in my store, including this one, are 25% off today (OR buy-3-get-1-free)

‘One More Time With Feeling’ Documentary

In July 2015, the goth-noir Australian rocker Nick Cave experienced the unspeakable when he lost one of his twin sons at the age of 15. His son Arthur fell off a cliff in the sleepy seaside town of Brighton, England, and he died from head injuries. Cave had already written the batch of songs that would appear on his next album ‘Skeleton Tree’, but was midway through the recording when the incident occurred. After taking 6 months off to grieve, he asked his friend and filmmaker Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, “Killing Them Softly”) to film the remaining recording sessions and original interviews to create a documentary about the album and its circumstances. More pragmatic than an artistic instinct to explore grief and adversity within the creative process, he specifically commissioned ‘One More Time with Feeling’ to help him weather the record’s eventual press junket (where he’d inevitably be bombarded with loads of painful, intrusive, and maddeningly inane questions about deeply personal matters). Dominik’s resulting work premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and then played in a few hundred theaters around the world the night before the record’s release. ‘One More Time With Feeling’ is a far better film than was necessary, with exceptional form and function. What began as a promotional film is elevated into something that manages to articulate the inexplicable with great depth, compassion and insight.

Part I: Artifice

‘One More Time With Feeling’ is a 3D film photographed in high-contrast black and white. I’ve never seen 3D technology used to simply present talking heads and bodies at rest, but it really elevates the studio recording scenes that run throughout. 3D footage is shot with a depth-of-field so shallow that we see Bad Seeds band-mate Warren Ellis’ conducting hand fall out of focus just as quickly as it comes in. The camera presents life as a scattershot of stimuli vying for attention and consideration, in a context where there can be no clarity or transcendence.  The camera is disciplined enough to hold one object in focus, leaving everything else gauzy, hazy, significantly out of reach, and here Dominik creates the illusion of intimacy… making things palpable albeit extremely fleeting. And then there’s the stark black and white photography, which most effectively amplifies the weight and gravity of the content. Rich chiaroscuro lighting gives objects great depth, a nuance that conveys even the slouching weight of the fabric he wears as inky black shadows pool within the dimpled sleeves of his sport coat. With sizable floodlights studding the studio’s perimeter, the camera illuminates Cave’s grace and emotion during flares. When depicted in silhouette, it swallows him in darkness and grief.

Dominik creates no boundaries between the studio subjects and his documentary crew, and in doing so makes no efforts to cloak the artificiality that would otherwise inhibit intimacy. The film even opens with a botched take. Audio continues to roll while the cameras set-up anew, capturing Nick Cave’s close friend and collaborator Warren Ellis’ off-camera reticence to even talk about such personal affairs. Not long after, the director asks Cave to take off his shirt just so he can put it back on again within a better take. This is not a naturalistic approach to documentary filmmaking, and the director deliberately foregoes the typical fly-on-the-wall approach. In fact somewhere past the mid-point, Cave’s wife and son visit the studio and Cave calls out the irony of a cameraman watching the 3D camera, which watches he and his family as they close the circle by watching that cameraman. By assembling the film from 2 groups of cameras, one set on the musicians and the other tracking the musicians from behind crew #1, the contrivances of filmmaking become part of the film’s fabric. The camera dolly and the circular track that encircles Cave at his grand piano become as much a part of the action as the old-timey microphones and studio equipment the musicians employ to capture aural authenticity. This creates an interesting contrast between intimacy and audience, inspiration and intent.

The filmmaker also stitches together a few impossible shots to suggest continuity and context, both internal and external states. In one case, the camera spins around the piano and pulls away, swiftly pushing through a crack in the wall, plunging down the center of a circular stairwell, exiting and emerging into the blinding daylight. In another shot, possibly the filmmaker’s most literal narrative provision, the camera moves in tight on Danish soprano Else Torp’s face as she sings the song “Distant Sky”, pushing further and further through the skin and veins of her face and out the back of her head to once again thread a tiny crack in the wall. We’re back outside, pulling away from the studio and into the night. Through the aid of savvy computer editing, the town of Brighton quickly gives way to East Sussex, to England, to the UK and the Western Hemisphere, as the Earth turns. By co-opting this piece of satellite imagery, he reconciles the internal with a macro view of our place in the cosmos. Both shots suggest life beyond the grief, a context beyond Cave’s own private trauma.

Part II: Substance

Throughout the interview footage, Nick Cave considers his place in the cosmos and sees it differently. Time has become abstract for him, either all happening at once or stretching like an elastic band. He articulates best while working in metaphor: “You have this trauma and so you create a fence around the area. Everything around it is ok and you move forwards but that fence is always there and the way I was saying ‘Time is elastic’, we can go away from the event… but at some point the elastic snaps back and we always come back to it.” He points out that we have what the universe does not: consciousness, and due to that gift and curse, “the present is of a magnitude greater than the trillions of stars that came before” For that reason, there is no Earth time, there is no humility within the cosmos because “the past, the present and the future are happening now.”

Small devices aside, like those that help reconcile the verbal with the visual, Andrew Dominik tries to avoid editorializing and its within Nick Cave’s narration where the documentary broadens its appeal to those unfamiliar with his music and persona and becomes something truly profound. Nick Cave repeatedly attempts to describe the trauma but warns there are no words that can neatly summarize his grief, because extreme loss is no place for sentiment. “You can try to put words to it”, he says, “or offer some trite platitude that wraps everything up neatly, to say something like ‘he lives in my heart’ — but he doesn’t. Not really, because he doesn’t live anymore.” And here he’s not just speaking on the futility of articulation – rather he’s speaking to its utter uselessness because he can no longer event predict how he’ll respond to stimuli, events or personal interactions. “It’s too big to comprehend,” Cave says towards the end of the film, “you search to get your head around it, to create a narrative for it.” But he also recognizes that such a narrative would provide no answers and no comfort. He, his wife and Arthur’s twin brother Earl grieve together, as a family, but in parallel they also grieve alone as individuals. And he no longer understands himself as an individual. The “event” instantly made him into another person, literally someone else inside his skin. “It’s affected me in ways I don’t understand,” says Cave, still raw with grief. He recounts sobbing on the street in the arms of a friend, only to then realize that he’s leaning into the arms of a complete stranger, or he recounts how a baker asks how he is, and he gets tripped up without a clue how to answer. “It’s frightening. I don’t know what I’m fucking doing now… what am I doing sitting in a camera talking about this kinda thing? I wouldn’t have done that before.”  

Creativity fits centrally within the film, as Nick Cave concedes that a writer wants things to happen in life so you have something to write about, but suggests that trauma is very damaging to the creative process. “Imagination needs room to breathe, and when a trauma happens, there’s just no room to breathe.” He recognizes the prophetic nature of his lyrics and cites his wife Susie’s (potentially revisionist) sense of superstition around that. When she later presents the camera with a painting Arthur made when he was 5 of the Rottingdean Windmill (which happens to be located mere meters from the cliff where he fell to his death), she laments how they chose to frame the painting, way back when, in black. Their tragedy seems to define not only the present and future, but permeate the past, and it’s clearly changed her, as fundamentally as it did him. There’s an indelible moment right here as Cave’s eyes respectfully and tenderly shift to and from her, with both understanding and trepidation. He leans back in his chair to give her space, but it feels like he’s leaning forward, as if her next words could come as complete surprise. Because he assumes that she’s changed just as much as he, and maybe 6 months later they no longer know how to understand one another beyond the shared grief that’s come to define them.

Dominik applies a few devices to resolve the film in ways that feel narratively “authentic” while still serving the weight and gravity of the story. From that satellite image of the world still spinning to a montage of still portraits of each now-familiar face from the film, ‘One More Time With Feeling’ is ultimately not about the recording of an album but a family separated, and that family’s comprised of his wife and son, the band, anyone affected. Earlier we heard Cave concede a critical point that this isn’t just something that’s happened to he and his wife, because it happened to Arthur (who he reminded us, doesn’t really live in his heart because he doesn’t live at all). The film ends fittingly, with a lingering image of the cliff where Arthur fell to his death. During those end credits we hear Arthur’s own voice, for the first time, right beside his twin Earl as the now-divided brothers sing Marianne Faithfull’s “Deep Water” a few years back. It’s an impossibly fitting song that confirms as more than superstition, that there is indeed prophecy, and maybe a little bit of providence, in Nick Cave’s work and life.

‘Deep Water’ by Marianne Faithfull

I’m walking through deep water

It’s all that I can do

I’m walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

Your face is hidden from me

But your love is not

I will not reach for other things

Till I know what I have got

I’m walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

I’m walking through deep water

I have no time to lose

I’m walking through deep water

There’s nothing left to choose

This little heart of mine

Got loaded up with chains

The world just swirls around me

The water makes its claim

I’m walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

Who will calm my fears?

Who will drive my tears away?

Who will calm my fears?

Who will drive my tears away?

I’m walking through deep water

Nearer to the sea

I’m asking the deep water

Don’t take my love from me

I’ll dance with little ladies

With a hundred just like me

They hold their breath and hesitate