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ATP

521: Dance Compatible

 

00:00:00   So I might sound slightly hoarse tonight because I came from a not a very loud bar, not a big party,

00:00:08   but a elementary school children's dance.

00:00:12   Ooh!

00:00:13   Elementary school dance? Is that a thing?

00:00:16   The earliest I can recall having a dance was sixth grade.

00:00:18   Yeah.

00:00:19   Yeah, same.

00:00:20   Yeah, so that's apparently a thing here,

00:00:23   and I can say that I am exactly as comfortable here

00:00:28   as I was in sixth grade at my sixth grade dance.

00:00:32   Whatever that is in a person that makes them

00:00:38   maybe incompatible with that kind of social situation,

00:00:42   that does not change when you are 40.

00:00:44   Whatever you were when you were,

00:00:47   how old are you in sixth grade, like 11, 12?

00:00:49   Whatever age you were then, it's the same when you're 40.

00:00:54   That does not leave a person.

00:00:55   - What about your kid?

00:00:57   Did Adam inherit your dance and compatibility?

00:01:01   - Fortunately, he seems to have taken after his mother

00:01:04   in that way, which is of huge benefit.

00:01:07   It's like, I couldn't wait to get home.

00:01:10   And it's funny, it doesn't feel this way

00:01:13   'cause we're all staring at computers

00:01:14   in our offices and our houses and no one's around,

00:01:16   but in a way we are talking to 80,000 people.

00:01:20   And so it's weird to think like,

00:01:22   I'd rather talk about computers to a football stadium

00:01:27   full of strangers mostly,

00:01:29   which most people would consider a terribly scary thing,

00:01:33   but I'd rather do that than try to dance

00:01:35   in front of 40 children and their parents

00:01:37   at an elementary school.

00:01:38   - Wait a second, wait a second.

00:01:40   Why are you doing any dancing at this?

00:01:43   I thought you were just like, the vibe is awkward

00:01:45   and it felt like a place that you didn't wanna hang out.

00:01:47   But isn't it the kids supposed to be dancing?

00:01:48   Aren't you just like a chaperone?

00:01:50   Like aren't you just standing against the wall?

00:01:51   - Basically, except that there's some parents

00:01:53   who are like the fun parents,

00:01:55   and they're like dancing a little bit.

00:01:56   - No, that's not fun.

00:01:59   - Well tell me, but yeah.

00:01:59   - I'm saying it's not fun for the kids

00:02:01   who wants their parents to, ugh.

00:02:03   - Well, the good news is, this is an elementary school.

00:02:07   You know, the oldest anyone is here is fifth grade.

00:02:10   And so no one is actually old enough

00:02:13   to really be awkward about girls and boys

00:02:17   and cooties and stuff.

00:02:17   So the good thing is that there wasn't any of that really.

00:02:21   So the kids are just running around like lunatics.

00:02:24   They're just running and throwing balloons at each other.

00:02:26   - Did Adam enjoy it?

00:02:27   - Yes, yes, and that's what mattered.

00:02:29   - And did Tiff just not go?

00:02:30   - No, no, she was there too.

00:02:32   - She like it?

00:02:33   - She is dance compatible.

00:02:35   And so she has a much easier time.

00:02:39   - Right, right, right.

00:02:41   Yeah, I am not. I am also not dance compatible. That is not my thing.

00:02:46   I perhaps with the appropriate amount of social lubricant,

00:02:50   maybe a teeny bit, but no, not generally speaking, that is not for me. However,

00:02:54   I don't think being the cool parent is always bad. So, um,

00:02:59   I don't remember if I mentioned on the show,

00:03:01   but we joined a little community pool this past summer and it was really,

00:03:04   really great for our family. You know, we got to meet some new friends, you know,

00:03:08   get closer with some old friends, et cetera.

00:03:10   And early on in the summer, I decided

00:03:12   I was going to not do the normal Casey thing

00:03:15   of just sitting on the sidelines,

00:03:16   being like, "Yeah, have fun kids, I'll see you later."

00:03:18   And instead, I was going to try to be the cool pool dad

00:03:22   that will get in there and roughhouse

00:03:23   with all the kids and whatnot.

00:03:24   And even though sometimes my back looked like

00:03:28   it had been attacked by a bunch of feral kittens,

00:03:31   because that's effectively what was going on,

00:03:33   generally speaking, I thought being the fun, cool pool dad

00:03:37   was enjoyable.

00:03:38   But that doesn't require any sort of coordination at all,

00:03:42   unlike being the fun, cool dance dad,

00:03:45   which requires coordination and rhythm,

00:03:46   two things I have none of.

00:03:48   - See, that's the thing, I'm very coordinated

00:03:49   and I have really good rhythm,

00:03:51   and yet I still cannot dance to save my life,

00:03:53   'cause I think it's more of a mindset,

00:03:57   it's more mental, I think,

00:03:58   and whatever the mindset is that requires a person

00:04:01   to be able to let go of their inhibitions

00:04:04   and just dance their hearts out

00:04:07   And I don't have that necessarily,

00:04:10   or I have trouble shifting my brain to that mode.

00:04:13   And no matter how much social lubricant one has,

00:04:16   which of course at an elementary school dance is none,

00:04:19   (laughing)

00:04:20   but even if that were there,

00:04:22   in situations where that is available,

00:04:24   that doesn't help me.

00:04:24   I still cannot become a dancer for whatever reason.

00:04:28   So it's just, I can do a lot of things.

00:04:32   That's just not on the list,

00:04:34   and I've learned to live with it.

00:04:36   I've learned to cope with this lack of my personality

00:04:40   that I have here and I try to make up for it

00:04:42   in other ways as best as I can.

00:04:45   - Well, the good news is I don't think you're gonna be

00:04:46   going to too many more dances as your kid gets older.

00:04:49   - I sure hope not.

00:04:51   The good thing is I was able to use my skills

00:04:54   in a much better way.

00:04:56   Last night, my kid brought home, he had a school project.

00:05:00   They're working on, they're making public service

00:05:03   announcements as part of their unit on making

00:05:06   persuasive essays.

00:05:07   So he wrote a script basically,

00:05:10   and it had to be a 90 second recording.

00:05:13   And I'm like, oh man, dude, I got this,

00:05:17   I got your back on this.

00:05:18   So everyone else is gonna show up

00:05:20   with their voice memos thing.

00:05:21   I had him use my good mic 'cause he wanted to,

00:05:23   and I was like, of course you can.

00:05:24   And then he recorded 90 seconds max,

00:05:27   and the take, he was really happy with the take,

00:05:30   but it was like 15 seconds over.

00:05:33   And I was like, well, look, I record three,

00:05:36   two minute segments a week for this show.

00:05:39   I know what you're doing, and trust me,

00:05:41   the easiest thing to do is just rerecord it

00:05:43   and just go a little faster, maybe cut a sentence

00:05:45   out here or there if you can.

00:05:46   - Why don't you use smart speed?

00:05:47   - I thought about that.

00:05:49   But I kind of did, and so he said,

00:05:53   can't you just edit it to be shorter?

00:05:55   And I was like, well, let's try, what the heck,

00:05:58   let's try it.

00:05:59   And so we shortened the silences

00:06:02   and took out one repeated word that was in the middle there.

00:06:06   - Am I good to go 1.1 times?

00:06:08   - Yeah, I took out a couple of breaths here and there

00:06:10   that didn't necessarily need to be there to sound natural.

00:06:12   And I showed him, oh, if it cut here,

00:06:14   it doesn't sound natural, if you cut over here, it doesn't.

00:06:16   And 90 second limit, the time clock at the end said 129.996

00:06:21   and we were like, done.

00:06:24   (laughing)

00:06:25   And of course it sounds amazing,

00:06:26   'cause he's on my podcast mic, so I'm like,

00:06:29   I can't dance to save my life, but that,

00:06:32   that I can really help you out, son.

00:06:35   - I don't think it's gonna be great on audio quality though.

00:06:38   (laughing)

00:06:39   (electronic beeping)

00:06:40   - Let's do some follow up,

00:06:41   'cause we have a lot of audio quality things

00:06:43   to talk about coincidentally.

00:06:44   And we have some HomePod 2 follow up

00:06:46   and a teaser, spoiler even,

00:06:49   Marco has his HomePod 2 review coming later

00:06:51   in the episode after follow up.

00:06:52   But before we get there, we have HomePod 2 follow up.

00:06:54   - This is like when you're watching TV growing up

00:06:56   and it's like, the story you all came here for,

00:06:59   news at 11 and then eventually you get to 11 o'clock and they don't get to it

00:07:02   until like the last 10 seconds of these of the half-hour segment it's after the

00:07:07   next commercial after the next commercial you'll see when we come back

00:07:10   you'll you'll hear all about this crazy thing you wanted to hear about yeah

00:07:13   fortunately I have way more to say about it than those old news shows and we

00:07:17   won't make you wait until 11 29 hopefully not anyway alright so a home

00:07:21   pod 2 series speed tests done on video by Steven Robles who is also known as

00:07:25   bearded teacher. First of all, kudos to this unbelievably handsome gentleman for wearing a

00:07:31   gorgeous shirt during the recording of this video. I am deeply impressed with his choice of wardrobe,

00:07:37   but even with that said, the video was legitimately really good. And so Steven talks through,

00:07:44   somehow he has like 17 different Sonos setups, including the setup that I have in my living room,

00:07:53   with the exception of no rears or he didn't mention those anyway. But he tests that against the Home

00:07:58   Pod 2 stereo pair and makes some very interesting but reasonable conclusions about, you know, what

00:08:06   would you, what would he advise one to buy depending on what you're looking at. You know, if you're

00:08:11   really more of a TV person then you might want to go this route. If you're more of a music person you

00:08:16   might want to go this other route. It was a really good video. I think it was like 15-ish minutes. Yeah,

00:08:21   of 14 minutes 38 seconds and it's worth it.

00:08:23   You should definitely check it out.

00:08:24   - The reason I brought this in here

00:08:25   is because last week I complained that people,

00:08:29   all the YouTube reviews I'd watch,

00:08:30   nobody actually tested how the new system on a chip

00:08:32   affected the response speed of Siri,

00:08:34   which seems like a pretty important part of a product

00:08:36   that mostly hasn't changed,

00:08:37   but one thing that did change in it was the SOC

00:08:39   and the old one was slow, so you should test that.

00:08:43   And then that's how I got to this video.

00:08:44   I said, you know, somebody did test the speed of Siri

00:08:47   on the new home pods and you know who did it?

00:08:49   somebody wearing, as Casey was alluding to before,

00:08:52   an ATP M1 Ultra shirt, 'cause he knows what's up.

00:08:56   - Definitely knows what's up.

00:08:57   Do we want to cover this related Ask ATP

00:09:01   that we were originally gonna cover next week,

00:09:02   but I think it kinda slides nicely right in here.

00:09:05   Is that allowed, Jon, or do I need to wait

00:09:07   until next week for this?

00:09:08   - Yeah, I think I put that there.

00:09:09   - No, I did.

00:09:10   - All right, well anyway, yes,

00:09:11   that was a fine time to cover it.

00:09:12   - All right, so Justin Saussier wrote,

00:09:14   "Would a stereo pair of HomePods

00:09:16   be a better TV setup than a soundbar?

00:09:17   I know Jon will scream true surround sound

00:09:19   and Casey loves the Sonos, but purely comparing

00:09:22   between a soundbar Visio to be specific.

00:09:25   So as you expected, I cannot state enough

00:09:30   how much I adore my Sonos setup,

00:09:32   but I will be the first to tell you

00:09:32   it is heinously expensive.

00:09:34   It is incredible, but it's very expensive.

00:09:37   - Was it more than $600 for the HomePods?

00:09:40   - Oh yes.

00:09:41   - All right, I guess I haven't priced it out,

00:09:43   so I didn't realize.

00:09:44   - Sonos doesn't sell a lot of products

00:09:45   for less than $600.

00:09:47   - I don't know, you're counting it,

00:09:48   - Because you got the sub with it too, right?

00:09:50   - That's correct.

00:09:51   - And the back surrounds too, or no?

00:09:52   - That is also correct.

00:09:54   So, and you're-- - Okay, yeah,

00:09:54   that's gonna be a lot.

00:09:56   - Yes, but that's actually in some ways a perfect segue,

00:09:59   because what I was going to recommend,

00:10:00   and I'm gonna try to vamp a little bit

00:10:02   while I'm looking up the price,

00:10:03   is Sonos sells a set of the Sonos Arc,

00:10:07   which as we record is their most high-end soundbar,

00:10:12   which is what I got, and a Sonos sub,

00:10:15   and there's two different subs.

00:10:17   I got the larger of the two subs, the SubGen 3.

00:10:20   And actually, as we record, coincidentally, it is $200 off.

00:10:24   It is generally listed for $1,648.

00:10:27   It is currently on sale for $1,448.

00:10:30   Now, this sounds phenomenal.

00:10:33   And I don't personally have any experience with HomePods, so

00:10:35   I can't make any sort of claims it sounds better or

00:10:37   worse than HomePods.

00:10:39   But it sounds incredible.

00:10:41   But it's also what, like 2 and 1/2 times the cost, 2 times

00:10:43   the cost, right?

00:10:45   It's two times the cost of two HomePods, so it's not cheap.

00:10:49   I think there's something to be said for if you're doing a lot of home theater viewing,

00:10:55   you might be better off with some sort of soundbar with sub.

00:11:00   But - and I'm kind of spoiling Steven's video now - really, if you just want to get in the

00:11:05   door at a semi-cheap price and get easily 80% of the way there, even for home theater

00:11:11   stuff, even I can concede that a stereo pair of HomePod 2s might be the better answer.

00:11:17   Jon, correct me on this.

00:11:19   Yeah, so here's the thing.

00:11:20   The problem with soundbars is most of them are bar-shaped, so they're not that big.

00:11:29   The fancier ones have, what is a factor is because that means you can't have speaker

00:11:33   cones that are that big.

00:11:35   It's very difficult to get any decent bass out of a two-inch speaker cone, depending

00:11:39   how short your soundbar is, that may be a limiting factor.

00:11:44   As you get fancier and fancier soundbars, a lot of them put the big cones facing up

00:11:49   or down and they're actually fairly deep if they're not that tall.

00:11:53   The very very fancy soundbars are not small anymore.

00:11:56   Like they're just really big and so you're like "oh you can fit big drivers in there"

00:12:00   and they do and they have a whole bunch of them and they're all over the place.

00:12:03   But for television viewing, with that aside, the main thing that I feel like you would

00:12:09   want in a television viewing system has less to do with sound quality, which you can decide

00:12:15   how much money you want to spend to get whatever sound quality you want, and more to do with

00:12:18   you want all the channels represented.

00:12:20   So if I was spending my money and I was doing a television, I don't think I could ever give

00:12:25   up the center channel, which means you can't just have a stereo pair, right?

00:12:28   You have to have a left and a right and a center.

00:12:31   And then you should probably also have a subwoofer, and then you can consider whether you want

00:12:34   the back surrounds or not, right?

00:12:36   And that is something that home pods can't give you, because you just got the two of

00:12:41   them, and the two of them does not even give you a center channel, right?

00:12:45   And they have plenty of bass or whatever.

00:12:46   Now the thing is, if you have a cruddy soundbar, two home pods will probably sound better,

00:12:51   even despite the fact that the cruddy soundbar has a quote-unquote center channel.

00:12:54   Soundbars are usually about the width of your TV, so you're not going to get that much stereo

00:12:57   separation because how far can the right and left be from each other?

00:13:00   much farther than the width of the soundbar.

00:13:03   And when they do have a center channel, a very cheap soundbar will have a center channel

00:13:06   made of these tiny little speakers that are just...

00:13:09   Right?

00:13:10   And so in that case, you would say, "Oh, two home pods does sound better than this cheap

00:13:14   soundbar."

00:13:15   But the cheap soundbar probably costs less than two home pods.

00:13:17   So it's a little bit of a complicated question, but in general, what I would say is, if you

00:13:21   care about television and movies, don't get a two-channel setup.

00:13:26   Everything now has more channels than that.

00:13:27   You want center, left, and right, and preferably some kind of surround if you can manage it,

00:13:33   right?

00:13:34   And of course, as we know, anything that was shot to be 3D capable, you should also be

00:13:39   viewing on a 3D TV, because just because that capability is there, you need to have that.

00:13:44   It's always better, right?

00:13:45   3D TV is terrible, but surround sound is good.

00:13:47   Oh, really?

00:13:48   Why is that?

00:13:49   That's interesting.

00:13:50   Why is that?

00:13:51   Because it's good!

00:13:52   Because it sounds good.

00:13:53   Because it's what you have in movie theaters.

00:13:55   People like it, it sounds good, it is not annoying.

00:13:56   it makes the movies and the television shows better.

00:13:59   - And everything about a movie theater experience is better.

00:14:01   So for instance, you have to make your home smell

00:14:03   like stale step on popcorn.

00:14:05   - That's not what we're talking about.

00:14:07   Anyway, and so even just for things that you don't care about

00:14:11   like forget about the word surround,

00:14:12   like I don't wanna hear things behind me,

00:14:14   forget about that.

00:14:14   Just right in front of you sound,

00:14:16   having a center right and left

00:14:18   is better than just having right and left

00:14:20   because the shows are mixed for center right and left.

00:14:22   And they're mixed to be put out that way.

00:14:25   All the sound is coming from the front of you,

00:14:27   no weird bouncing off anything,

00:14:28   but even just in that scenario,

00:14:30   that's how the shows are mixed.

00:14:32   They're usually mixed with also backs around stuff too.

00:14:34   Anyway, so the reason I give all those caveats

00:14:38   about cruddy soundbars is it's not universal.

00:14:40   It's not like you should always get any soundbar

00:14:41   over any pair of hos, because you shouldn't,

00:14:43   because cheap soundbars do not sound good.

00:14:46   They won't have bass, and the home pods do have bass.

00:14:48   A cheap soundbar will barely have any separation,

00:14:51   because the bar is not very long,

00:14:53   And the center channel is probably really credit quality

00:14:57   'cause those usually aren't upwards or downwards facing,

00:14:59   so they're coming right at you.

00:15:00   So it's not a universal, but in general,

00:15:02   look for discrete channels.

00:15:04   Now, the obvious, if you're wanting to actually

00:15:07   spend a little bit more money,

00:15:08   KC setup is good if you don't want to spend money

00:15:11   on a receiver or if, like KC, you have an ancient receiver

00:15:13   that can't handle this, because you don't need a receiver

00:15:15   in that Sonos setup, it does all this stuff for you.

00:15:18   But kind of like when you go to sort of the top end of,

00:15:21   used to be max, but these day species,

00:15:23   a modular system where you buy a receiver

00:15:25   and then you buy speakers and then that's all modular

00:15:28   and you can mix and match.

00:15:30   I can pick a receiver based on capabilities,

00:15:31   I can pick speakers of sizes and shapes

00:15:34   and costs to fit my setup,

00:15:36   I can change those speakers over time,

00:15:37   I can swap out the receiver and keep the speakers the same.

00:15:40   A modular system is going to cost more

00:15:41   but it gives you the ultimate flexibility

00:15:43   of deciding exactly how much money you wanna spend

00:15:45   for how big a speaker, for which role,

00:15:47   and any modern receiver has more channels than,

00:15:50   it's enough channels to fill your entire room

00:15:52   depending on where you can put speakers or when you can't.

00:15:55   So that's how I feel about HomePods' TV speakers.

00:15:58   They're probably better than your cheap soundbar,

00:16:00   they're way better than what's built into your television,

00:16:03   but if it's possible for you to get discrete channels

00:16:07   for your sound, that's what I would suggest.

00:16:10   - I agree with you, but for slightly different reasons,

00:16:13   of course, the functionality of sending the audio

00:16:17   back to the Apple TV via eARC,

00:16:19   and then that wirelessly sending it to the HomePods

00:16:21   over some kind of protocol that's going to introduce,

00:16:25   obviously, a few problems.

00:16:26   Number one is going to be there's

00:16:27   going to be some latency.

00:16:28   And I have not tried this setup yet,

00:16:30   but I've heard the latency is OK.

00:16:33   But it's always going to be there.

00:16:36   It's always going to be a little bit worse than other speakers.

00:16:39   And that might be OK for movies and TV,

00:16:42   because you can adjust delays here and there.

00:16:44   It's not going to be OK for anything

00:16:45   that you need to be low latency in real time,

00:16:47   like, for instance, games.

00:16:48   Like, if you have a game system connected to your TV,

00:16:50   you're not gonna want any additional latency

00:16:52   added by the audio, and so that's gonna be a problem.

00:16:55   Number two, it's just gonna be more complicated

00:16:57   and potentially buggier.

00:17:00   This is the ability to be used as TV speakers

00:17:03   is not the main role and selling point

00:17:06   and focus of the HomePod as a product.

00:17:09   And so maybe you can do it,

00:17:10   but if that's really what you're shopping for,

00:17:14   you should probably go a different direction

00:17:16   to something that's actually made more for that purpose,

00:17:18   'cause your life will probably be simpler and better

00:17:21   and more reliable in the long run.

00:17:22   Like for instance, if you wanted to buy a computer

00:17:25   to primarily play video games on, that can be a Mac.

00:17:29   You can buy a Mac and Macs can run games.

00:17:32   That's a thing that can happen,

00:17:33   but you're better off buying a gaming PC.

00:17:36   So, John, so you can do it with the Mac,

00:17:40   but that's not really what it's made for.

00:17:42   The HomePod is never, that's never gonna be

00:17:45   a main priority for them.

00:17:47   that's never gonna get all the testing in the world,

00:17:50   it's never gonna have all the capability in the world.

00:17:52   Down the road, a software update might break it

00:17:54   in weird ways and maybe your TV speakers

00:17:55   will be broken for a month while they fixed it.

00:17:58   You don't wanna be in that world.

00:18:00   If you're buying specifically to be used as TV speakers,

00:18:04   get regular TV speakers.

00:18:05   Now, whether that's a soundbar,

00:18:08   which I still hate that entire product category

00:18:11   and term and everything.

00:18:13   See, soundbars,

00:18:16   The same way that when Steve Jobs was first talking about

00:18:21   apps in the app store, and he kind of talked about them

00:18:23   almost like diminutively, like, oh they're just apps,

00:18:27   oh just snack on these apps.

00:18:29   It was like, the way he was speaking about them

00:18:32   didn't show a lot of respect for them,

00:18:35   or reverence to them, it was more just like,

00:18:38   here's these little things that kind of don't matter,

00:18:39   here, snack on them, good luck with that.

00:18:41   That's what soundbars are to the entire

00:18:44   world of home theater audio.

00:18:45   It's like, oh, we just gave you a little soundbar.

00:18:47   Yeah, here, have a soundbar.

00:18:49   - There are high-end soundbars now, believe it or not.

00:18:52   - Yes. - They are very expensive,

00:18:53   and they are actually pretty good.

00:18:55   Like I said, they are actually pretty good

00:18:57   because they're really, really wide,

00:18:58   so you actually get stereo separation, and they're big,

00:19:01   so they have large speaker drivers in them.

00:19:03   So what they are essentially is speakers,

00:19:06   enough of the guts of a receiver to make them work,

00:19:08   all shoved in one thing.

00:19:10   So it's not, most of them, I agree,

00:19:12   most of them are not great, but there are actual ones,

00:19:14   if you spend a ton of money and you have limited space that

00:19:18   are fairly impressive.

00:19:20   Sound bars are the point-and-shoot camera

00:19:23   of the home theater audio world.

00:19:25   So you have the built-in speakers on the TV

00:19:28   that you get for free with no space.

00:19:30   And they do kind of remarkable things

00:19:32   considering the limited space and front-facing grills

00:19:36   and stuff that they tend to be lacking.

00:19:38   So you have the built-in speakers on the TV.

00:19:40   Then you have this huge quality gap.

00:19:42   And then you have a nice speaker system,

00:19:45   whether it's two channel, three channel,

00:19:46   five channel, 19 channel, whatever it is,

00:19:49   you have like, there's that big gap in size, complexity,

00:19:52   cost between TV speakers and then a full blown

00:19:56   separated speaker system with a receiver.

00:19:58   Soundbars try to be in the middle of that,

00:20:00   but they have a very hard time,

00:20:02   most soundbars are not that much better

00:20:06   than the built-in speakers of your TV

00:20:08   and also are way, way worse than a big system.

00:20:13   And so if you can do the big system,

00:20:16   and it doesn't have to be a high-end big system,

00:20:19   it just gets bigger.

00:20:20   You have to have generally some kind of receiver or amp,

00:20:22   and then you have to have,

00:20:24   you have to buy separate speakers, you know?

00:20:25   And even though I'm a two channel or 2.1 person,

00:20:30   I love having a subwoofer and the two speakers,

00:20:33   that's a great system for me.

00:20:34   I know Jon espouses at least having a center channel,

00:20:37   and I can see the reasons for that.

00:20:38   That's kind of, it's kind of a preference thing.

00:20:40   And so I see that both ways.

00:20:42   And again, John was right, you know, with HomePods,

00:20:45   like you can't expand that system,

00:20:47   whereas with anything else you can.

00:20:49   But what everybody will tell you,

00:20:51   all the people who are soundbar apologists,

00:20:53   they'll tell you, oh yeah, get the soundbar, it's okay.

00:20:55   But if you really want the best setup,

00:20:58   also get front, left, and right separate speakers

00:21:01   and rears and a subwoofer.

00:21:03   Well, if you're doing that, then all the soundbar is

00:21:06   is an extraordinarily expensive, crappy center channel with an amp in it.

00:21:10   And you're better off separating out those rules.

00:21:13   I don't think they'll tell you to get bright and left with a soundbar.

00:21:16   Yeah, no, I think you've jumped off the ship at this point.

00:21:20   I mean, I understand the point you're making, but--

00:21:22   and I agree wholeheartedly, by the way, that your average soundbar,

00:21:26   from everything I've experienced, sounds like garbage.

00:21:28   I completely agree.

00:21:29   Although I still think it sounds way better than most TV speakers.

00:21:31   Like, there is a jump between--

00:21:32   It's a pretty low par.

00:21:33   --TV speakers and even the worst soundbar.

00:21:35   That's true.

00:21:36   but that's a very, very low bar.

00:21:37   - Honestly, not for many people.

00:21:39   Like, it turns out, like, I mean, look, obviously,

00:21:42   you know, everyone is picky about different things,

00:21:44   but like, for most people's needs,

00:21:47   a sound bar isn't that much better

00:21:49   than the built-in speakers on most decent TVs.

00:21:52   Now, that's a lot of mosts,

00:21:53   there's a lot of qualifying words there, I know that,

00:21:56   but for the most part, sound bars usually do not pull off

00:22:00   what they purport to pull off.

00:22:02   What they purport is, this is going to be

00:22:04   a relatively smallish, relatively simpleish thing

00:22:08   that's gonna be way better.

00:22:09   And of course they play all the same tricks as HomePods.

00:22:13   Like, oh, you can just have this one thing in the middle

00:22:15   and we'll bounce sound off the walls.

00:22:16   And none of that really works very well.

00:22:18   You can always tell, oh, this is all coming from the middle.

00:22:21   It's not fooling anybody, you can't beat physics.

00:22:23   But what people think they are good at,

00:22:28   they're not that good at.

00:22:29   - I don't know, I think it's one of those things

00:22:32   where if you are willing to spend the money for a,

00:22:35   like Jon has been saying, a properly good soundbar,

00:22:39   then it can be done well.

00:22:41   Although I will say even the ARC,

00:22:43   which is the most fancy soundbar that Sonos makes,

00:22:46   it is pretty tinny without an attachment.

00:22:48   - And it is not, that is not an example

00:22:50   of a high-end soundbar, by the way.

00:22:52   - Okay, well then what would you?

00:22:53   - Like the fancy ones are substantially more expensive

00:22:56   than the Sonos ARC and substantially larger

00:22:59   and usually do come with a subwoofer.

00:23:01   They're not cheating, they just have tons of speaker drivers

00:23:05   widely separated with high quality and the built in guts

00:23:08   to amplify them and make them sound good.

00:23:10   And they have some smarts to make the,

00:23:13   aiming them around the room.

00:23:14   Like the bouncing is never gonna make it sound like

00:23:15   it's coming from behind you, behind you.

00:23:17   But the very best ones sound like they're on the side of you

00:23:20   which is much better than only being in the front.

00:23:22   (upbeat music)

00:23:23   - We are brought to you this week by Drafts.

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00:25:27   - Vortech writes with a recommendation

00:25:34   for what happens when you accidentally tap a HomePod

00:25:36   and you're an outlet.

00:25:37   Well, it turns out accessibility is for everyone,

00:25:40   as we know but often forget.

00:25:42   You can go into Touch Accommodations

00:25:45   and then have a Hold Duration.

00:25:47   I presume this is specific to the HomePod.

00:25:49   I don't have a HomePod, so I can't try this out myself.

00:25:51   But anyways, you can set a Hold Duration

00:25:54   for a very small amount of time.

00:25:55   In this screenshot, Vortec had set it for 0.2 seconds,

00:26:00   and that will presumably stop an accidental touch,

00:26:03   and you can always make it longer if need be.

00:26:05   - Yeah, I mean, this is better than nothing,

00:26:09   but if only there was some way,

00:26:12   if we had designed some kind of input device--

00:26:15   - No, it's impossible, can't be done.

00:26:16   - Where you could maybe brush against it or dust it

00:26:20   without actuating an action,

00:26:23   but if you wanted to create the action,

00:26:26   there wouldn't be any kind of weird gesture or delay,

00:26:28   you could just maybe like push it.

00:26:30   I don't know if there's--

00:26:30   - How about we add a camera to look at your eyeballs

00:26:32   to tell if you're looking at the button

00:26:34   and then only if you have like your eye

00:26:36   if it's focused on the button,

00:26:37   then it will activate the button

00:26:38   'cause that's the only thing I can think of.

00:26:40   Same with car interior design,

00:26:42   is we need to have buttons on the steering wheel.

00:26:44   It's not like people's hands are gonna be

00:26:45   near that area frequently, right?

00:26:47   So we can just make those touch buttons,

00:26:48   I'm sure that'll be fine.

00:26:49   (laughing)

00:26:50   - Yeah, I just like, you know, this makes the HomePod

00:26:53   a little bit less annoying to use,

00:26:54   but the fact is like, I actually do use the top tap input

00:26:59   as a quick gesture to play pause or to go next track,

00:27:01   you know, double tap, like, I actually do that

00:27:03   on a regular basis, so I don't want to make the interaction

00:27:06   with it worse or slower or more annoying.

00:27:09   I just want it to ignore accidental input and--

00:27:12   - They'll add force touch sensors to it.

00:27:14   Still not a real button, but it has force touch,

00:27:16   you have to press real hard.

00:27:17   - Yeah, it's like, they're putting all this effort

00:27:19   things like, you know, this would be so much better if it was just a button. You're just making a button,

00:27:24   an actual button that moves up and down. It's even cheaper, like, I don't, it's just,

00:27:28   it's like, it's, what they have now is worse in every way. And it's not, it's not like it's

00:27:33   gonna wear, it's not like it's gonna wear out, like, a mouse button from hundreds of thousands

00:27:37   of clicks either. It's not like you're sitting there hammering the top of the home pod all day

00:27:40   long. It's like, it doesn't even have to be a good button, just put a button on it, geez.

00:27:46   You know, my Sonos speakers, they have buttons that you can press.

00:27:50   I know!

00:27:52   Just saying.

00:27:52   All the touch sensors on the top of the Apple devices, you gotta go for this variation of the frequent internet meme.

00:28:00   Did a cat design this?

00:28:03   Alright, moving along, Sevrere Bjorkvinson—I'm sorry if that's wrong, I'm doing my best here—

00:28:10   points out and reminds us that the Foo Fighters did perform at an Apple event.

00:28:15   It was the iPhone 5 launch event and even provided a YouTube link that we will put in

00:28:20   the show notes.

00:28:21   Good, I'm glad we're all excited about that.

00:28:23   Hey, so Twitter is still a mess, as it turns out.

00:28:27   So on February 2nd, Twitter Dev, which is the Twitter account that represents, I guess,

00:28:34   the developer relations, in so much as such a thing exists.

00:28:38   Anyways, they tweeted on February 2nd, "Starting February 9th, we will no longer support free

00:28:44   access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead.

00:28:49   Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have sent over a trillion tweets with billions

00:28:53   more every week. Twitter data are among the world's most powerful datasets. We're committed

00:28:56   to enabling fast and comprehensive access so you can continue to build with us. We'll

00:29:00   be back with more details on what you can expect next week." Well, those details still

00:29:04   haven't arrived, as we record, which is super fun. However, two days later, the chief idiot

00:29:11   in chief wrote, "Responding to feedback, Twitter will enable a light write-only API

00:29:16   for bots providing good content that is free." Well, thank you. That really clarifies things.

00:29:21   Good content. Dare I ask, what is good content, King? I don't, I can't.

00:29:28   I feel like this is one of those things where people focus a lot on his individual words

00:29:34   or the individual details of the policy, but what you need to do is take a step back here

00:29:38   and look at the big picture.

00:29:40   This is an unreliable platform

00:29:42   run by unreliable, erratic leaders.

00:29:46   And so this is not a place to build anything.

00:29:49   And if you already built something there,

00:29:52   this is like one of many recent warning signs

00:29:57   that you should probably look to move

00:29:59   whatever it is you need that for

00:30:01   to move that role somewhere else.

00:30:03   Because this is just a, it's an unreliable platform.

00:30:05   You cannot build on this platform anymore

00:30:07   and if you've already built there,

00:30:10   it's just a matter of time before anything you built there

00:30:12   or invested in there is arbitrarily

00:30:15   and capriciously set on fire.

00:30:17   - Yeah, and it's not like charging for API access

00:30:19   is a bad idea, it's a perfectly good idea.

00:30:20   It's all about the way it's been done

00:30:22   and the sort of lack of understanding

00:30:24   of the sort of value ecosystem

00:30:25   that the API has provided for Twitter.

00:30:27   It's existed for so long, a lot of the value on Twitter

00:30:30   is done by people having fun bots

00:30:33   that make little accounts that you can follow

00:30:35   or post the weather or show pictures of cats,

00:30:37   or I follow one that does a calendar accurate

00:30:42   retelling of snippets of Lord of the Rings.

00:30:44   So like when October happens in the book,

00:30:46   there'll be a tweet on that day in October saying

00:30:49   where the characters are in the story or whatever.

00:30:51   That's all like extremely low volume, silly,

00:30:54   frivolous stuff that's getting by on the free API, right?

00:30:58   And then of course there are bots that abuse it

00:31:01   and do bad things, and then there are things

00:31:03   that are actually using the API thoroughly.

00:31:06   And it's like, this is not the first site to have an API.

00:31:09   Like this is a known thing that's been around for ages

00:31:12   and Twitter has history behind it.

00:31:13   You wanna monetize the API,

00:31:15   you monetize the big ones that you know can pay,

00:31:18   you allow the Lord of the Rings bot to continue to exist

00:31:21   and you have a free tier with low limits

00:31:24   for everybody else to do.

00:31:25   And you come out with that plan, with ample warning,

00:31:29   with a clear explanation of what it's gonna be

00:31:31   and the pricing structure and everything like that,

00:31:33   and of course they didn't do any of that.

00:31:35   And so it's not the fact that they're charging for an API.

00:31:37   It's not the fact that they're killing the whole free API.

00:31:40   It's the fact that they just have no idea

00:31:42   what they're doing, they're just blundering through

00:31:44   like a bull in a china shop.

00:31:45   Just unknowingly destroying value, scaring people away,

00:31:49   frightening developers into saying,

00:31:51   well I don't even wanna deal with that,

00:31:52   so I'm just taking Twitter support out of my app.

00:31:54   All the people who had bots are like,

00:31:56   well, you know, I was already kind of sketchy on this place,

00:31:58   but now it's just like, whatever, I'm just gonna give up,

00:32:00   And if I want to have my fun thing, I'll go somewhere else.

00:32:03   It's just, you know, typical Elon Musk's quitter behavior,

00:32:07   which is even if you are kind of sort of on the right track

00:32:11   for something that might possibly be a good idea,

00:32:13   do it in the worst way possible

00:32:14   to get any benefit you might have.

00:32:16   And by the way, this still does not solve

00:32:19   the giant money problem they have

00:32:21   because charging for the API,

00:32:23   no matter how much they charge,

00:32:24   there's just not enough money at this point

00:32:25   to ring out of Twitter in the next year

00:32:27   to be able to service their debt or whatever.

00:32:29   So, typical comedy of errors going on over there.

00:32:32   - He's a incredible businessman though, let's not forget.

00:32:37   Move to Dawn was killed for unspecified rule violations,

00:32:40   surprise, surprise.

00:32:41   Tibor Martini writes, and this is the creator,

00:32:44   "According to Twitter, the app has violated

00:32:46   "Twitter rules and policies.

00:32:47   "I can't tell much more at the moment

00:32:49   "since the email they mentioned never arrived in my inbox.

00:32:51   "I try to get more information from Twitter,

00:32:53   "but they already mentioned that it may take

00:32:54   "a few days to get back to me."

00:32:55   - It'll take a few days to get back to them.

00:32:58   By the time they get back to them,

00:32:59   the free API will be turned off anyway.

00:33:02   It's like, your app is dead no matter what.

00:33:04   Because that's what people were saying.

00:33:05   Movetodon is that thing that lets you find your followers.

00:33:08   Find people you follow on Twitter,

00:33:09   if they put a Macedon address in their bio

00:33:12   or in their name somewhere, it will find it.

00:33:14   And then it will let you follow them

00:33:16   using your Macedon account.

00:33:17   There's a bunch of tools that are like that.

00:33:18   This was one of the better ones we talked about

00:33:20   on the past in the show.

00:33:21   I think at some point where these things,

00:33:23   they weren't banned.

00:33:24   No, they were doing the thing where they weren't letting you

00:33:26   put Macedon addresses in your address.

00:33:27   It's hard to keep track of all their weird rules.

00:33:29   But anyway, one of the people like,

00:33:33   oh, they killed the API so they could kill

00:33:34   these migration services.

00:33:36   I'm sure they enjoy the fact that these migration services

00:33:38   won't be able to exist on the free API anymore,

00:33:40   but these people could, in theory,

00:33:41   just pay for the API if they wanted to continue this.

00:33:44   It's ascribing to them some master plan.

00:33:48   They're there going, haha, we're gonna do this thing.

00:33:50   Same thing with the bots.

00:33:50   This is to get rid of the bots.

00:33:51   Like, are you kidding?

00:33:52   If there's anything in the world that is going to

00:33:55   do HTML scraping of your website

00:33:57   to get around API limits is spammers, right?

00:33:59   Like, don't worry, they'll be, spammers will be fine.

00:34:02   They don't need your API.

00:34:04   And they'll just find a way to pay for your API

00:34:05   with stolen credit cards anyway.

00:34:07   You'll have fun chasing them around, yeah.

00:34:08   Solving spam is easy.

00:34:09   Just, you know, end the free API.

00:34:11   You'll never have spam again.

00:34:13   I'm sure that'll work great.

00:34:14   But yeah, this thing got suspended, who knows why.

00:34:17   You're not, like Margaret was saying,

00:34:19   you're not dealing with, you know,

00:34:22   I know it's not an individual,

00:34:23   but if you were to personify Twitter,

00:34:25   you're not dealing with an adult here.

00:34:26   You're not dealing with a professional adult.

00:34:28   Things are gonna happen,

00:34:29   and there's not gonna be any explanation,

00:34:31   and there's nothing you can do about it.

00:34:33   It's just like a completely unreliable, flaky other party

00:34:38   that is gonna ban you and not tell you why

00:34:40   and tell you they're gonna tell you

00:34:41   and not ever send you that email.

00:34:43   They're just gonna flake out on you.

00:34:44   Like, the whole company is like that.

00:34:45   So it doesn't take much of interaction like that

00:34:48   to make people think, yeah, screw this.

00:34:51   I'm like, I don't need to deal with this.

00:34:52   I'm just trying to make,

00:34:54   I was trying to make a fun Twitter account

00:34:55   that post pictures of kittens every day,

00:34:56   and I don't need to deal with my thing getting banned

00:34:59   and them telling me they're gonna tell me what I did,

00:35:00   but they never tell me and I try to get back to them,

00:35:02   but they don't have a communications department

00:35:04   and it's just, whatever.

00:35:06   It just makes people not wanna deal with it.

00:35:09   - For what it's worth, Mastodon Flock,

00:35:12   which is similar to Move to Dawn, is still working.

00:35:14   Also, breaking news via Smythe in the chat,

00:35:17   Paul Haddad of Tapbots just tweeted that,

00:35:21   sometime in the last couple hours,

00:35:23   Twitter dev finally announced some more details.

00:35:25   This is breaking news.

00:35:27   Delay the new rules for four days.

00:35:29   Free bot level of up to 1,500 tweets a month for a single

00:35:33   authenticated user.

00:35:34   And Paul surmises that probably means no read access.

00:35:37   You can only post.

00:35:39   $100 a month for low level of API usage tier.

00:35:42   So $100 a month if you want to post is what we're assuming.

00:35:46   That's not factual, but that's what we're assuming.

00:35:48   And then the premium API, which is the expensive one that

00:35:51   had prices listed goes away in favor of the Enterprise API,

00:35:55   which is the even more expensive one that didn't even

00:35:57   have prices listed.

00:35:58   And Paul continues, before anyone asks,

00:36:00   this does not mean third party clients are coming back.

00:36:02   If anything, it is the exact opposite.

00:36:04   Having no read access kind of kills the-- well,

00:36:07   it doesn't entirely kill the-- I don't know.

00:36:10   The move to Don type scraping things kind of

00:36:13   need read access in addition to-- well,

00:36:14   I guess they don't need write access.

00:36:15   But the write only ones is like, oh, you

00:36:17   can contribute content to this black hole,

00:36:18   but you can't actually read from it.

00:36:20   But like for example, our Ask ATP--

00:36:21   - Birdhouse would be okay.

00:36:22   - Our Ask ATP scraper that was looking for the Ask ATP

00:36:26   hashtag and putting it into a Google Sheet,

00:36:28   that just uses read, it doesn't use write at all,

00:36:30   and that thing would still be screwed,

00:36:31   not that we would ever pay for access to that anyway, but.

00:36:34   Yeah, whatever, and this set of rules or whatever,

00:36:37   imagine if you had like an adult come up with a plan

00:36:39   for the API before you started announcing things,

00:36:42   before you started canceling the API

00:36:44   and had like an actual plan and put it together

00:36:46   and rolled it out smoothly with warning ahead of time

00:36:49   and a PR push and marketing, you know,

00:36:51   like a real grown up company,

00:36:53   but that's not the way any of this works.

00:36:54   - Imagine.

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00:39:07   - Marco, you've bought one to seven HomePod 2s.

00:39:14   Please tell me-- - I bought two HomePod 2s.

00:39:17   - Please tell me, are they worth the money?

00:39:19   Are they good, are they bad?

00:39:20   Are they better than the ones?

00:39:21   Have they solved all your problems?

00:39:23   What's the situation?

00:39:24   - Actually, before Marco starts,

00:39:25   I have a comment on the picture

00:39:27   that I'm assuming he will make the chapter art

00:39:29   for this little section here.

00:39:31   He posted a bunch of pictures

00:39:32   of your little HomePod testing area

00:39:34   that slowly gained more and more pods.

00:39:38   - That kept multiplying. - Yes.

00:39:39   - See the little baby ones after next to the two parents?

00:39:41   - Yes.

00:39:42   Now obviously this is not,

00:39:43   He doesn't have an anechoic chamber in his house.

00:39:46   This is not super scientific testing, blah, blah, blah.

00:39:49   Even down to the point of like some people saying,

00:39:50   well, you know, audio devices take a while to break in

00:39:53   and if you just got them today,

00:39:54   like you need a week to break in and it's like, whatever.

00:39:56   But this is not, we're not going super scientific here.

00:39:59   But I will say that even from the very first picture,

00:40:02   when I saw that you had arranged the right and left

00:40:05   old and new home pods and little stereo pairs

00:40:08   next to each other, I mean, I guess you can tell me,

00:40:12   But they're pretty close to each other.

00:40:15   And my recollection is the HomePod 1s at least

00:40:18   did something where they sprayed out sound

00:40:20   and then saw how it bounced back to figure out

00:40:23   how they're supposed to adjust to their environment.

00:40:27   But the environment is weird when you've got HomePod,

00:40:31   the two right ones right next to each other

00:40:34   and the two left ones right next to each other

00:40:35   because it's not an apples to apples comparison

00:40:39   because the environment for both of them is different.

00:40:42   one of the right ones has something to its left

00:40:44   and one of the right ones has something to its right.

00:40:46   - Yes, the reason I arranged them this way,

00:40:47   and you're right on a bunch of things that I'll get to,

00:40:49   but the reason I arranged them this way

00:40:51   is so that each pair would have the same amount

00:40:53   of space between it, because otherwise I figured,

00:40:57   if I had the new ones on the inside

00:40:59   and the old ones on the outside, then it would be unfair.

00:41:01   - No, no, I get it.

00:41:02   You want the stereo distance to be the same.

00:41:04   - Yes.

00:41:05   - But the distance to its neighbor,

00:41:07   and here's the problem.

00:41:08   You can't just, well, why don't you just have two of them

00:41:10   and then swap them out?

00:41:11   You want to be able to do like A/B testing like immediately.

00:41:13   You're not like, oh, let me just lug a bunch of bricks, right?

00:41:15   So it's not ideal.

00:41:17   The second thing is that-- and this is an accurate test

00:41:20   for Marco's environment for sure,

00:41:22   but I always think about this when I see HomePod set up.

00:41:24   You've got him on a counter with like a backsplash, right?

00:41:27   That's not an ideal audio environment, a speaker that

00:41:30   is like inches away from--

00:41:31   Not at all.

00:41:32   --a stone backsplash or whatever.

00:41:35   But that's how they're going to be used in a lot of places.

00:41:37   So it is a representative test for Marco's environment,

00:41:41   but again, it is not an anechoic chamber

00:41:44   where you have this beautiful isolated speaker.

00:41:47   So let's say this is a challenging scenario

00:41:50   for all the little felt covered orbs involved.

00:41:53   And I think also a challenging listening scenario

00:41:55   because you can never know how much of what you're hearing

00:41:57   is a result of the devices

00:41:59   versus a result of the devices

00:42:01   either not adjusting for their environment

00:42:03   or badly adjusting for their environment.

00:42:05   And finally, how much of what you're hearing

00:42:06   is just a result of like, look, the sound,

00:42:08   it's gonna be bouncing off marble

00:42:09   that's two inches behind it.

00:42:10   - Right, and it's not a marble, it's quartz.

00:42:12   We have a marble table, like the little circular marble,

00:42:15   and it's like the biggest pain in the butt.

00:42:18   Oh my God, never get marble anything.

00:42:20   Quartz is so much better.

00:42:22   Anyway, so, and you're right.

00:42:23   So, and I think a huge disclaimer here that all of these,

00:42:28   I think except the HomePod Minis, but all the,

00:42:30   so I have in this test two old HomePods,

00:42:34   two new HomePods, two HomePod minis,

00:42:37   and a fourth gen Amazon Echo.

00:42:40   I only have one 'cause the second one died

00:42:42   after like two seconds 'cause they're garbage.

00:42:45   They're the worst built Amazon thing I've ever had.

00:42:47   Anyway, and I tested them in stereo pairs

00:42:51   and in single configurations,

00:42:54   except for the Echo where I only have one,

00:42:55   so I couldn't test stereo pair of that.

00:42:57   A huge disclaimer here that, again,

00:42:58   besides the HomePod mini, which I think doesn't do this,

00:43:01   all of the other ones, maybe the Echo,

00:43:03   do some kind of sound processing

00:43:06   based on whatever surroundings they sense.

00:43:08   Or like the HomePod for instance has a microphone

00:43:11   inside of it that tweaks the bass response I think.

00:43:14   And it also, it does like you know,

00:43:16   measure reflections and everything.

00:43:18   If you like shake a HomePod while it's playing,

00:43:22   it has accelerometers to detect that it's been moved

00:43:24   and it will kind of like reset itself

00:43:25   and like readapt the sound briefly.

00:43:27   It sounds really weird, try it.

00:43:29   Anyway, with all that said, these are all speakers

00:43:31   that use a lot of software processing.

00:43:34   What I try to do when I'm judging,

00:43:35   like does this sound better than that or whatever,

00:43:38   and how does it sound better,

00:43:40   I also have to consider the fact that

00:43:41   not only are people's environments different,

00:43:43   but the state of the software is going to vary over time.

00:43:47   And so it might be adjusting for something in my room

00:43:49   that somebody else wouldn't have,

00:43:51   and it even might be like that maybe in a software update

00:43:55   they'll tweak the mix slightly over time as well.

00:43:57   So that's a huge disclaimer.

00:43:59   So what I'm really judging here is

00:44:01   to some degree how they sound now,

00:44:03   but also you can tell when you're judging a speaker

00:44:06   or a headphone, you can tell, or a microphone even,

00:44:09   you can tell what you can fix in EQ versus what you can't.

00:44:14   If you look at a frequency response graph,

00:44:17   you'll see these in reviews sometimes

00:44:19   where it'll have like 30 hertz on one side

00:44:22   and like 16,000 or 20,000 hertz on the other side,

00:44:24   it'll show a logarithmic graph,

00:44:25   you'll see a little wavy line,

00:44:27   it's usually, it's supposed to be somewhat flat

00:44:31   In practice, usually you see like a slow hump up

00:44:34   on the base side and left side,

00:44:36   and then all the way on the right

00:44:37   when the high treble frequencies,

00:44:38   he goes zigzag, zigzag, zigzag,

00:44:39   and kind of fall off at the end.

00:44:42   A frequency response graph is the kind of thing

00:44:44   where you can use EQ to tweak things about that

00:44:48   that you don't like a little bit to some extent.

00:44:50   But where EQ doesn't help you

00:44:53   and processing doesn't help you

00:44:54   is in other areas of sound design,

00:44:57   and you'll have to forgive me,

00:44:58   I'm not a speaker or headphone designer,

00:45:00   So I know a little bit about this stuff,

00:45:02   'cause this is like a world that I'm a big enthusiast about,

00:45:05   but a lot of the science I don't know.

00:45:07   So with that disclaimer in mind,

00:45:09   and I'm sure we'll hear from people

00:45:10   who design speakers in our audience.

00:45:12   So with that being said, so other factors, for instance,

00:45:16   are things like distortion characteristics,

00:45:18   or like weird phase interference issues you can get

00:45:22   with certain designs of, like certain physical designs

00:45:25   of the enclosure the speakers are in,

00:45:27   the drivers, how they're arranged.

00:45:29   There's all these different other factors,

00:45:31   and a lot of those can't be corrected in EQ.

00:45:33   So what I'm judging here, this is a huge preamble I know,

00:45:36   this is almost John level of preamble,

00:45:37   what I'm judging here, I'm trying to listen to like,

00:45:40   what is the speaker capable of,

00:45:42   and then what is it doing now,

00:45:43   as like kind of two separate things.

00:45:45   Because what it's doing now could be adjusted

00:45:47   with software over time,

00:45:48   what it's capable of, for the most part, can't.

00:45:50   - And speaking of these frequency response curves

00:45:52   and phase stuff or whatever,

00:45:54   one of the things that that Dirac Live software

00:45:56   that I've talked about in the past,

00:45:57   like an app that you run on your Mac or PC,

00:45:59   that talks to your receiver, that measures your speakers with stereo, with the microphone

00:46:04   that you put where your head would be, it takes these frequency response curves and

00:46:08   it will level them out with very detailed EQ and everything, and it will also tell you

00:46:13   these speakers are out of phase, there's destructive interference over here, like that's what those

00:46:19   applications do, because you can't really do it by ear, you need sort of equipment to

00:46:22   do it, and if you have your speakers wired the wrong way, if you have your subwoofer

00:46:29   phase switch the wrong way, if your crossover is in the wrong spot, this software will tell

00:46:33   you because you might not know what you're supposed to, I certainly don't, what I'm supposed

00:46:36   to be listening for or I hear this, I know this wrong, but the software will literally

00:46:40   tell you until you get your thing sounding as good as it possibly can with your equipment,

00:46:45   which is actually fairly challenging.

00:46:47   Presumably, HomePods are doing something similar internally, but all they can do is change

00:46:52   the sound that comes out of them.

00:46:54   I don't think they ever demand that you move them.

00:46:56   Like hey, nobody puts HomePod in a corner.

00:46:58   What am I doing?

00:46:59   and a picture frame is blocking me,

00:47:01   but my HomePod is, by the way,

00:47:02   behind a bunch of fractured pictures of my dog,

00:47:04   'cause I don't care what it sounds like.

00:47:05   And I bet it hates that,

00:47:06   because it's like the worst environment.

00:47:08   Like it's in a corner, it's got glass pictures in front of it.

00:47:12   - Blocked by glass, oh God.

00:47:14   - I'm listening to podcasts on you, HomePod,

00:47:16   and most of the time you do nothing,

00:47:17   and usually you can't even turn off my lights,

00:47:19   so shut up and take it.

00:47:20   But anyway, the D-Rack software does help

00:47:24   with stuff like that, and it is fun to kind of tweak manually

00:47:27   But the HomePod is like, I'll do that all for you.

00:47:29   And presumably it does a passable job.

00:47:31   - And one other quick thing, you know,

00:47:33   John just mentioned like the alleged phenomenon

00:47:36   of break-in periods for headphones or speakers.

00:47:40   This has been pretty widely discredited

00:47:43   as a thing that's real.

00:47:44   What is real is that your perception of the sound adjusts.

00:47:49   Like, so it's not that the speakers are being broken in,

00:47:54   it's that your ears are being broken in,

00:47:55   Like your brain's being broken in.

00:47:57   That's what's actually happening.

00:47:58   And so if there is something about a particular transducer

00:48:02   that is different from what you are used to before that,

00:48:06   over time you get used to that.

00:48:07   You stop hearing it as like,

00:48:09   oh that's weirdly harsh or different.

00:48:11   That just becomes what you think of as normal.

00:48:12   It's almost like the way your eyes

00:48:14   perform automatic white balancing.

00:48:16   You know, it's the same thing for sound.

00:48:17   Your brain's being broken in.

00:48:18   And then finally, how I was A/B testing them.

00:48:22   What you wanna do if you're comparing speakers,

00:48:25   like this, you want to be able to play the same thing

00:48:28   on all of them and to be able to switch between them

00:48:30   as quickly as possible.

00:48:32   If you have to unplug stuff, start something,

00:48:34   or start something, it becomes much harder.

00:48:37   If the difference between them is more than a couple

00:48:39   of seconds, it becomes much harder to remember

00:48:42   how that sounded and try to compare.

00:48:44   You can't rely on memory for much here.

00:48:47   You have to be, it has to be quick,

00:48:49   being able to transition between them quickly.

00:48:51   That's how you can really tell the differences.

00:48:52   And when you can do that, the differences become

00:48:55   very apparent.

00:48:56   So the way I do this, I use AirPlay,

00:48:58   and I play to all of them at the same time,

00:49:01   and as a group in the AirPlay selector,

00:49:04   and then you drop down the AirPlay selector

00:49:06   so you get individual volume sliders for each speaker,

00:49:08   and I just would drag to zero the ones I wasn't listening to

00:49:11   and drag up the one that I was testing,

00:49:13   and then quickly swap that, drag that one down,

00:49:15   drag this one up.

00:49:16   - Did you do the thing where you drag all the sliders down

00:49:19   except for one pair and then shake that pair

00:49:22   and then drag all the sliders down except for another pair

00:49:24   and then shake that pair, because what you want them to do

00:49:26   is to adjust to their acoustic environment

00:49:28   when other speakers aren't playing in their face,

00:49:31   you know what I mean?

00:49:32   - I did not do that, I probably should have done that,

00:49:33   but I didn't.

00:49:35   But again, I think, again, I want to not lean too heavily

00:49:39   on the specifics of whatever the adaptive EQ processing

00:49:43   is doing at that moment.

00:49:45   Because again, that can change,

00:49:46   that changes a lot with environment.

00:49:48   - But that's gonna change the sound of the speakers, too.

00:49:50   - Trust me, it doesn't change sound like this.

00:49:52   - All right, well then.

00:49:54   So my opening, so first let me cover the, you know,

00:49:57   the non-sound aspects first.

00:49:59   Aesthetics, physical design, the new HomePod compared

00:50:02   to the old one is very similar overall looking.

00:50:05   You would only notice the differences if you saw them

00:50:07   side by side for the most part because it still looks like

00:50:10   approximately the same size cylinder, it has the same

00:50:14   material on the outside, at least the white ones,

00:50:16   I don't have the black ones to compare.

00:50:17   - Is it skinny or is that just an optical illusion

00:50:19   because the top disk is bigger?

00:50:21   - I think it just, if you look at the measurements,

00:50:23   they're very similar, like it's slightly shorter,

00:50:25   it might be a little bit fatter,

00:50:26   but it just, it looks like the same kind of object.

00:50:29   You could change them out and the less observant

00:50:32   or less caring members of your household wouldn't notice,

00:50:34   until you touch the top.

00:50:36   The biggest difference you'll notice is that the top screen,

00:50:39   the quote screen, the top LED color visualizer thing,

00:50:43   now goes all the way to the edge and is bigger.

00:50:46   It is also kind of, it's inset instead of being convex,

00:50:48   but that honestly doesn't matter in practice.

00:50:51   maybe it'll collect dust a little bit differently,

00:50:53   but otherwise, as you tap it to dust it off,

00:50:56   you'll blast your Foo Fighters at night again.

00:50:57   But anyway, with the previous one,

00:50:59   when it was totally not playing anything,

00:51:02   like just sitting there idle or off,

00:51:04   you wouldn't see the plus and minus

00:51:06   that indicated the volume buttons.

00:51:07   They were themselves individually lit

00:51:10   little white LED things that would turn off,

00:51:12   so it would just look like a flat white surface.

00:51:15   The new one, the plus and minus

00:51:16   are permanently etched in there,

00:51:18   so they're just like, they're drawn on the top,

00:51:20   so you can always see the plus and minus.

00:51:21   Some people saw this as a downgrade,

00:51:23   I see this as a positive thing

00:51:24   because if you nudge your HomePod on the counter

00:51:27   as you're working on your kitchen counter accidentally

00:51:29   and you wanna reset it and make sure it's aligned correctly,

00:51:32   you can just look at the plus and minus, it's always there,

00:51:34   and you can say, oh, now it's straight, okay.

00:51:37   So that to me is an improvement.

00:51:39   The wider color panel of the LEDs on top,

00:51:43   I don't think it's an improvement.

00:51:44   When it's just playing,

00:51:46   it does the same thing as a HomePod Mini.

00:51:48   If you have a HomePod Mini, it's that same pattern.

00:51:50   So when it's just playing, it's showing this kind of like

00:51:53   soft white glow from the middle, and that's fine.

00:51:56   When Siri is processing, it's attempting to do that kind of

00:52:00   Siri like multicolor pulsing logo thing,

00:52:03   and it does it across the whole service,

00:52:05   and this is now a pretty big service,

00:52:07   and so it kind of looks garish,

00:52:10   and I don't think this panel needed to,

00:52:11   I don't think the LEDs needed to go all the way to the edge

00:52:13   the way they do now, and if they were looking to cut cost

00:52:16   somewhere, I don't know why they didn't cut cost there,

00:52:18   because that seems to serve no real purpose,

00:52:23   except looking garish during serial requests

00:52:25   and showing this weird rainbow light show

00:52:27   at a scale that I don't think it was designed for.

00:52:31   It looks better on the smaller ones,

00:52:32   but it doesn't look good on the big size.

00:52:34   - It's interesting that this is like a thing

00:52:36   that Apple hasn't done in ages

00:52:39   and didn't really do that much before,

00:52:41   which is have lights on their devices

00:52:44   try to imbue some kind of personality.

00:52:47   We've talked about the breathing sleep light way back when on the laptops or the glowing Apple logo on the the back of the old laptop

00:52:53   screens

00:52:54   In general if Apple wants to do something to him to imbue a device with dynamic personality

00:53:00   They use a screen and still on all the home pods

00:53:03   No screens and I can't recall the last time I saw them say, okay

00:53:06   We're not gonna have a screen

00:53:08   But what we want to do what they want to do is like when if you hold down like the power button on your phone

00:53:12   You see that Siri colored blob thing

00:53:14   This is like well if we could we'd show the Siri colored blob things

00:53:18   That's our branding for Siri when you're interacting with it, whatever that colored blob thing that waves around a cool little animation

00:53:23   Why don't we show that well, we can't we don't have a screen

00:53:25   Well, can we show like a really blurry version of that with just a bunch of RGB LEDs under like a translucent frosted surface

00:53:32   It's like we could but it's but I feel like that doesn't accomplish

00:53:36   The branding because it's like it's it reminds you of the branding

00:53:41   But it's like the branding is trapped underneath cloudy glass and you can't really see it and the second thing is

00:53:46   Like what value does that add does it look does it look good does it put on a laser light show does it does it?

00:53:53   Indicate something to you from a distance any more than like just a single LED would or something like that

00:53:57   It's a strange gesture to spend that much time and space on a thing that isn't a screen

00:54:03   And I'm not particularly against it like I mean I don't mind it on mine or whatever

00:54:08   It just reminds me of an older Apple that wanted to put

00:54:13   these type of sort of, I don't know,

00:54:15   like a appearance personality, dynamic appearance

00:54:18   personality into their hardware that is not a screen.

00:54:22   And we keep waiting for a HomePod-like device

00:54:25   with a screen on it, but it's not this one.

00:54:26   - To some extent, I actually don't mind it not being

00:54:29   a screen just because in most contexts where you'd put

00:54:32   these things, you don't really have a lot of visibility

00:54:34   onto that top surface anyway.

00:54:36   Like it's not like, you can't see it from across the room.

00:54:38   Having the screen face, the ceiling is not great, yeah.

00:54:41   - Right, so anyway, so that's the physical stuff aside,

00:54:44   I did replace the power cords with nice shorter ones now,

00:54:47   they came in today and I'm super happy about that,

00:54:49   that's nice, but anyway, so onto the sound,

00:54:52   this is what everybody wants to know, does it sound,

00:54:54   but frankly, all the reviews are like,

00:54:59   yeah, it sounds pretty much the same.

00:55:01   It doesn't, it does not sound pretty much the same,

00:55:03   it sounds surprisingly different,

00:55:05   much more different than I thought it would.

00:55:07   I'm gonna start easily the bass.

00:55:09   It is lighter, the bass is lighter.

00:55:12   However, there are asterisks on this.

00:55:15   In general, the new ones have less bass

00:55:18   at medium to high volume,

00:55:19   and they have actually a lower maximum volume.

00:55:24   The old ones go louder.

00:55:26   Now this is all relative.

00:55:28   These are still really impressive for their size,

00:55:31   and anything else that's anywhere near their size,

00:55:34   You know, when you compare them to other multi hundred dollar premium, you know,

00:55:39   smart speakers or self powered speakers,

00:55:41   usually what people compare these to are much larger than them because things,

00:55:45   the things that cost $300 are usually much larger than them.

00:55:48   But in this size class, they do shockingly well at base and volume.

00:55:53   If you have a large room, again, going back to the home theater thing,

00:55:57   it might not be enough. That being said, for their size, still great,

00:56:01   Still plenty of bass, but it is definitely a reduction

00:56:04   in bass strength from before.

00:56:06   That's at medium to high volumes.

00:56:08   Now, at lower volumes, it seems like there's

00:56:11   plenty of bass there.

00:56:12   And what I think they are doing-- a lot of people

00:56:14   don't realize this, but in any kind of speaker that

00:56:16   has some kind of processing going on that isn't just

00:56:20   like an amp connected to some wired speakers

00:56:22   that you turn the knob and it gets louder,

00:56:24   in most other modern powered speakers that

00:56:27   have their own kind of DSP stuff built in,

00:56:30   many of them will actually dynamically ramp the bass down

00:56:34   as the volume goes up.

00:56:35   And there are multiple reasons for this,

00:56:37   but the two key ones are, number one,

00:56:41   it sounds really nice to have relatively strong bass

00:56:45   when it's turned down lower.

00:56:47   It sounds like a more premium, nice, rich experience.

00:56:51   But if you take that exact same amount of bass

00:56:54   that's down low, and you'll see this in Bose products,

00:56:56   like this is a common thing,

00:56:57   or like any of the fancy power speaker brands,

00:57:01   B&O, B&W, some of us might even do this

00:57:04   in some of their power stuff.

00:57:05   I'm not positive on that,

00:57:06   but anything that does processing on the sound,

00:57:09   at low volumes, the bass will be proportionally

00:57:12   much more strong than if you turn it up a lot,

00:57:16   it would sound ridiculous if the bass was that strong

00:57:18   at the high volume, so they actually ramp it down.

00:57:21   Part of that is because again, it sounds better that way,

00:57:23   makes it sound better at lower volumes

00:57:25   without having the negatives of very loud bass,

00:57:28   of like, when you turn it up, you wouldn't want it to like,

00:57:30   you know, be really boomy and like vibrate things

00:57:32   in your house or, you know, anger at your neighbors

00:57:35   or whatever else.

00:57:36   I think it's doing that to a pretty strong degree.

00:57:39   I haven't measured that, I didn't have time

00:57:40   or equipment, frankly, to measure that,

00:57:43   but it sounds like it's doing dynamic bass roll off

00:57:45   as the volume goes up.

00:57:46   And I think for a product of this category,

00:57:48   that's the right choice.

00:57:49   The other reason somebody might not wanna have bass

00:57:52   that strong at high volumes is,

00:57:54   it takes a very powerful amp to deliver high volume bass.

00:57:58   I think in a lot of these products,

00:58:00   the amp just is not spec'd for that much power.

00:58:02   The old HomePod had a custom designed main woofer amp.

00:58:07   I tried to look at the specs for it,

00:58:09   nobody really has them

00:58:10   'cause it's a custom designed chip from this company.

00:58:12   As far as I can tell, no one has figured out yet

00:58:15   what the chip is in the new HomePod,

00:58:17   so I couldn't find any information to compare,

00:58:19   like does the bass amp actually have less wattage

00:58:23   or less power potential in the new one.

00:58:26   I would speculate that it probably does.

00:58:28   - And by the way, this is why if you have

00:58:29   a individual component set up and you have a receiver

00:58:32   that puts out however many watts per channel,

00:58:34   the subwoofer that you buy will plug into the wall

00:58:37   because it has its own amplifier.

00:58:39   - Yes, powered subwoofers are the way to go.

00:58:42   - Right, 'cause it doesn't like,

00:58:44   two things in receivers, one, no matter how much power

00:58:46   per channel they say in the receiver,

00:58:48   it's like whatever, 150 watts per channel,

00:58:50   still it's a hangover of historical things.

00:58:53   That number you see, like 150 watts,

00:58:55   that's for two channels.

00:58:57   They don't, if you put seven speakers,

00:58:59   you don't get 150 watts on all seven of the speakers.

00:59:03   The math doesn't add up real fast,

00:59:04   but for historical reasons,

00:59:06   because stereo receivers used to just be like that,

00:59:08   that is still the standard.

00:59:10   And not only that,

00:59:11   but the manufacturer won't even tell you

00:59:13   how many watts you get if you hook up seven speakers.

00:59:15   And then yes, the point one for the subwoofer,

00:59:18   that's a powered subwoofer.

00:59:19   That plugs into a different outlet in a wall.

00:59:21   It's got its own amplifier.

00:59:22   The other thing to consider, by saying it has less bass,

00:59:26   that even could be, again, this could be software.

00:59:29   It has an internal microphone to measure the bass response

00:59:32   and any kind of resonances and stuff.

00:59:34   It might just be throttling its own bass

00:59:37   to prevent vibration and stuff.

00:59:38   So there's all sorts of things that go into this.

00:59:40   So in short, it sounds, compared to the old one,

00:59:43   it sounds like there's less bass at high volume,

00:59:46   but at low volume it sounds about the same

00:59:48   and might even have more.

00:59:49   It sounds very pleasant on the bass

00:59:52   at moderate to low volumes, I'll tell you that for sure.

00:59:55   So anyway, that's the bass.

00:59:57   The mid-range and the treble.

01:00:00   This is now, we're moving into the tweeters.

01:00:02   And by the way, this is one of the biggest reasons

01:00:04   why the HomePod Mini, which only has one speaker cone

01:00:08   in there, it uses a quote passive radiator design

01:00:11   for the bass, I'm not entirely sure what those do,

01:00:15   but the Mini effectively is one speaker cone in there,

01:00:18   like one driver.

01:00:20   And the HomePod, as we know, has the one big

01:00:23   four inch woofer that faces, I think, up from the middle,

01:00:26   and then it has formerly seven, now five,

01:00:29   tweeters around the bottom.

01:00:31   And the whole reason for this is to separate these out,

01:00:35   if you want something to be able to produce bass,

01:00:38   you need a pretty large speaker cone

01:00:41   that moves in big waves forward and back.

01:00:44   That's how you make good bass.

01:00:46   but a very large speaker cone has a lot of mass to move,

01:00:50   and if you want to make something that produces

01:00:52   very good high frequency sounds, like in the treble range,

01:00:55   you actually want as little mass moving as possible,

01:00:58   because you want it to be vibrating really small,

01:01:00   really fast, and so it's kind of impossible

01:01:03   to physically design the same speaker cone,

01:01:05   like one speaker cone, that does really good bass

01:01:07   and really good treble.

01:01:09   That's why when you have nicer speakers,

01:01:11   they tend to have more drivers,

01:01:13   and they cover different size classes basically.

01:01:16   You might have a few woofers or one big woofer

01:01:18   and usually you have like maybe a mid-range driver,

01:01:21   maybe a little tiny tweeter,

01:01:22   or you'll have just a woofer and a tweeter,

01:01:24   but that's why there's a separator.

01:01:25   And so you might think that when you go from

01:01:28   the old HomePod with the seven tweeters

01:01:30   to the new HomePod with five,

01:01:31   you might think this would hurt its treble performance

01:01:34   in some meaningful way.

01:01:36   And I can tell you that the treble and the mid-range

01:01:40   sound way better on the new one.

01:01:44   It is the opposite of what you think it would be.

01:01:47   The new one, treble and mid-range sound awesome.

01:01:51   I am a huge snob for these things.

01:01:55   I don't care that much about bass.

01:01:57   I care a lot about mid-range and a little bit about treble.

01:02:00   I care about vocals sounding smooth,

01:02:03   guitars sounding smooth, and having them be present,

01:02:07   having them be right there hitting you in the face

01:02:09   in the middle of the mix.

01:02:10   Oftentimes what cheap, crappy speakers and headphones

01:02:12   will do is they'll have kind of a weak response

01:02:15   in that kind of mid-range vocals and guitars

01:02:17   and pianos kind of area.

01:02:19   It almost gets pushed back in the mix

01:02:21   so you don't hear it too much.

01:02:22   You know, they'll like crank up the response

01:02:24   for the bass and treble so that it kind of,

01:02:26   you know, kind of masks the crappy, distorted,

01:02:30   you know, harsh mid-range they have in the middle there.

01:02:33   And I don't like that.

01:02:34   I wanna hear really clear, crisp vocals

01:02:37   and really strong, smooth guitars.

01:02:40   That's what I want in my music.

01:02:41   That's my favorite part of the music.

01:02:43   Very, very few speakers or headphones

01:02:46   are able to deliver that very well.

01:02:48   The whole reason I love my KEF or KEF,

01:02:51   I don't know what it is,

01:02:52   that series of the Q150, the Q350,

01:02:55   they have the best mid-range I've ever heard in a speaker.

01:02:58   The whole reason I love my ridiculously old,

01:03:02   super high-needs, HiFiMan HE6 headphones

01:03:06   is because they have the best mid-range

01:03:08   I've ever heard in headphones.

01:03:09   These new full-size home pods have really great mid-range.

01:03:14   Smoothness, detail, lack of harshness,

01:03:18   lack of distortion in the mid-range.

01:03:20   It's amazing in these new home pods.

01:03:23   And so this makes vocals sound better.

01:03:25   Pianos, guitars, like the kind of, you know,

01:03:28   the main like middle of the frequency range.

01:03:30   Those all sound really great.

01:03:33   What I'm trying to get away from,

01:03:34   Like when I talk about mid-range distortion,

01:03:36   what this kind of sounds like is,

01:03:38   you know those bands came out like in the early 2000s

01:03:41   where it sounds kind of like they're talking through a phone

01:03:44   as they're singing like, rar, I can't even do it.

01:03:48   It's like, is it The Strokes, The Killers, whatever?

01:03:51   Those kind of bands, and they did it intentionally,

01:03:54   you know, that that was part of their style,

01:03:55   but it sounds like kind of a crunchy filter on the vocals

01:04:00   or it's kind of like you're talking through an old telephone.

01:04:03   that kind of sound effect.

01:04:05   Crappy mid-range on speakers and headphones

01:04:08   makes all vocals sound a little bit like that.

01:04:11   It's like a little bit of distortion in the mid-range

01:04:13   that does not sound good.

01:04:15   And the opposite of that is when things sound clear.

01:04:18   It just sounds like someone's there

01:04:19   singing in the room with you.

01:04:21   In audio terms, people talk about,

01:04:22   they use the word transparency.

01:04:24   And what you want, and unfortunately,

01:04:26   this is kind of a, it's a tricky term

01:04:29   'cause everyone's definition of transparent

01:04:31   is different in audio, but the idea of transparency is

01:04:35   you don't notice the speaker, you don't notice the headphone,

01:04:38   it just sounds like the music is there in the room.

01:04:40   It isn't imparting a bunch of, you know,

01:04:42   filters or effects or noticeable artifacts on the music,

01:04:46   it is just, it sounds natural.

01:04:49   That's how these sound in the mid-range and the treble

01:04:52   way more than the old ones.

01:04:54   And the old ones sounded great overall,

01:04:56   but when you do a side-by-side comparison,

01:04:57   it's no contest, mid-range and treble are way,

01:05:01   way nicer and clearer and better on the new ones.

01:05:04   Frankly, I'm blown away.

01:05:06   I'm so happy with how good these are in that area.

01:05:09   Again, if you compare these,

01:05:11   put on whatever track you like,

01:05:12   but if you really wanna hear the kind of differences,

01:05:14   put on a track that has like a singer with a piano

01:05:17   or something, or like a singer with a guitar,

01:05:18   like one of those, you know, there's not a ton going on,

01:05:21   you can just hear that, and you will hear,

01:05:23   there's a pretty substantial difference between the two.

01:05:26   And so whatever they did to reduce from seven tweeters

01:05:29   to five, I can tell you not only is not a downgrade,

01:05:32   it's a massive upgrade.

01:05:34   Just overall, the new HomePod in those ranges,

01:05:38   and even frankly in the base,

01:05:39   it just sounds way better overall.

01:05:42   - What they might have done is bought five

01:05:44   slightly more expensive tweeters instead of seven

01:05:46   slightly less expensive tweeters.

01:05:47   You know what I mean?

01:05:48   Spend a similar amount of money,

01:05:49   but get a higher quality thing.

01:05:52   And speaking of the way you're describing about

01:05:54   sort of the transparency of the mid-range stuff.

01:05:56   I watched a review recently.

01:05:57   They were reviewing receivers, believe it or not.

01:06:01   Like, you know, they had a set of speakers

01:06:03   that was the same through all the tests,

01:06:04   but they were saying, with a given set of speakers

01:06:07   that we think are these fancy high-end speakers, whatever,

01:06:09   that the receivers were imparting a,

01:06:12   some receivers would impart a personality

01:06:15   on things like vocals in the mid-range or whatever,

01:06:17   and they described it by brand,

01:06:18   that these, some particular brands,

01:06:20   like I think it was like, Marantz,

01:06:22   some other fancy expensive one had a more rounded sound

01:06:26   and they said like NAD was 100% neutral right in the middle

01:06:29   and didn't impart any personality on the sound whatsoever

01:06:32   and then they had the other one was like,

01:06:34   like Sony or Yamaha that was more of a,

01:06:37   more of a sharp or sparkly sound.

01:06:40   If you had to, I know these words are so bad

01:06:41   'cause if you watch a lot of--

01:06:43   - I would caution that there is a lot of placebo effect

01:06:46   in a lot of those kind of judgments.

01:06:47   - Well, but I know what they're talking about.

01:06:49   As someone who's not an audiophile,

01:06:51   You like ever I think is everyone has heard something where the what you talked about even with podcasting of a sibilance

01:06:58   But with the treble is too sharp, right?

01:07:00   The the that is just too kind of spiky in your ears and then the more rounded one like Casey would like on vinyl where?

01:07:07   All the edges are cut off of everything that sounds like someone singing through a sock, but people

01:07:11   Sharp edges, right

01:07:17   It smooths off all the sharp edges.

01:07:18   And then neutral.

01:07:20   Lots of people have bad things to say about audio devices

01:07:23   that are like, if you use something to measure it,

01:07:27   like I'm gonna objectively measure the frequency response.

01:07:29   Wow, look at this frequency response.

01:07:30   It's just, it's exactly, almost exactly level.

01:07:33   It's extremely neutral.

01:07:34   It doesn't impart anything.

01:07:35   It's just perfectly clean,

01:07:37   and you hear things through that, and people go,

01:07:39   "Yeah, I don't like how much that sounds."

01:07:41   It sounds better on one of the ones that is less neutral,

01:07:43   that does more to the sound

01:07:45   instead of just having like a completely flat frequency response but instead accentuates

01:07:50   whatever part of the sound that they like.

01:07:52   In your case you like the mids and the highs, some people might like it accentuated in the

01:07:56   bass.

01:07:57   That's not a neutral profile, whether it's done with EQ or done with processing or done

01:08:02   as part of the nature of the set of drivers they have.

01:08:06   The difficulty with audio equipment is that it's not something that you can measure scientifically

01:08:12   and say this one has the flattest frequent response,

01:08:14   therefore it's the best, or it has least distortion,

01:08:17   flattest frequency response,

01:08:18   like it's all scientifically accurate,

01:08:19   and then you'll put it next to something

01:08:21   that just has way more bass than is in the original recording

01:08:24   and people will like that better if they like bass.

01:08:26   And in your case, I feel like if you get the mids

01:08:29   and the treble accentuated more than some people might like it,

01:08:33   that's exactly what you want out of it.

01:08:35   So that's why audio reviews are so difficult,

01:08:37   and that's why they come up with all these different words for it.

01:08:40   And even in the receiver view, they weren't saying

01:08:41   that one of those that spectrum was worse or better,

01:08:44   they're saying it depends on what you want.

01:08:46   And the example they gave was the NAD one,

01:08:48   which is super expensive, extremely neutral thing

01:08:50   or whatever, is that some people hate that.

01:08:52   Some people think it sounds quote unquote dead

01:08:54   and they'd rather have one of the other brands

01:08:56   that imparts more quote unquote personality on the sound,

01:09:00   depending on what personality they want in the sound,

01:09:03   depending on what part of the sound

01:09:04   is important for them to hear.

01:09:06   And honestly, for people our age and older,

01:09:08   depending on what frequencies they can still hear.

01:09:10   - Right.

01:09:11   - Yeah.

01:09:12   - And they're decrepit old age.

01:09:13   That's why very often young children

01:09:15   have very different ideas about what sounds good

01:09:17   and what doesn't when it comes to music.

01:09:19   - Setting aside whether amps really make that big

01:09:22   of a noticeable difference on the sound quality,

01:09:24   which I question honestly,

01:09:26   in my experience they really don't, but--

01:09:29   - The receivers aren't acting as amplifiers here,

01:09:31   that's because the receivers are doing processing.

01:09:33   - Oh, okay, right.

01:09:34   - Everything is doing processing now,

01:09:35   so that's what they're saying,

01:09:37   that the processing that these things are putting,

01:09:39   It's not just straight up, it's not like an analog amplifier

01:09:41   where they're measuring it that way.

01:09:42   - Right, right.

01:09:43   But like, and it's funny, there's a long time ago,

01:09:45   decades ago, I think, the Harman Audio Company

01:09:48   developed this thing called the Harman Curve,

01:09:49   and this is through some kind of scientific

01:09:52   or survey-based method, whatever it was,

01:09:55   they'd advise like, what people actually want

01:09:58   out of an ideal frequency response is not flat.

01:10:01   It's not like perfectly even reproducing of all frequencies.

01:10:03   It's a certain curve that people find most desirable,

01:10:06   and they publish this as the Harman Curve,

01:10:09   and over the last many decades,

01:10:12   the manufacturers of audio gear

01:10:14   have been slowly trying to make their stuff

01:10:16   more closely match the Harmon Curve.

01:10:18   And this kills me because I don't like the Harmon Curve.

01:10:23   I find it sounds really boring.

01:10:25   - And it's not that the Harmon Curve is arbitrary,

01:10:28   but it is subjective, right?

01:10:30   It's not completely arbitrary,

01:10:31   'cause I'm sure they did ask people

01:10:33   what they thought sounded better.

01:10:34   But people are different.

01:10:35   First of all, people's physical hearing is different,

01:10:37   but second of all, people's taste is different.

01:10:38   So targeting a matching of any particular curve exactly is,

01:10:43   unless you know what your curve is

01:10:46   and your name is Mr. Harmon or Mrs. Harmon,

01:10:48   you don't know, that's why you have to sort of

01:10:52   adjust the thing to your liking

01:10:54   and listen to things against each other

01:10:56   to decide which one actually sounds better to you.

01:10:58   But there is some scientific basis,

01:11:00   like the things you mentioned, distortion or like that,

01:11:03   for example, if you look at a curve and it just drops off

01:11:05   before you even get close to the low frequencies,

01:11:07   you know that's not gonna have any bass,

01:11:08   or if it goes off a cliff before it gets to the highs,

01:11:10   that's gonna suck too.

01:11:12   So there is a room for a scientific assessment

01:11:15   of the sounds that can and can't be reproduced

01:11:18   by a sound system, or sounds that can and can't be

01:11:20   reproduced by a sound system without massive distortion

01:11:23   that destroys it.

01:11:24   But once you start getting into the details,

01:11:26   okay, now I'm making a decision.

01:11:29   Do I want the Harman curve?

01:11:30   Do I want something different than the Harman curve?

01:11:32   What you want is whatever frequency response

01:11:35   is desirable for you, you want to be able to hear that

01:11:38   without distortion of the volumes you wanna listen.

01:11:40   - Yeah, exactly.

01:11:41   And frankly, I have looked at so many

01:11:44   frequency response graphs trying to figure out,

01:11:46   like before I wanna buy a pair of headphones,

01:11:48   trying to figure out like, is this what I want?

01:11:49   Is this gonna sound good to me?

01:11:51   And it's so rare that my expectations

01:11:55   from the frequency response graph have matched

01:11:57   how happy I am with the actual thing when I get it.

01:12:00   All these other factors are at play,

01:12:01   so you really need to like kinda try this stuff out yourself.

01:12:04   it's really hard to get much out of a frequency response

01:12:06   graph that could tell you, am I going to like this or not,

01:12:09   or is this good or not?

01:12:10   - Do you look at the frequency response graph

01:12:12   from the Dave2D YouTube video,

01:12:14   which we'll put in the show notes?

01:12:16   - I do.

01:12:17   - It's hard to see in that when we put it in the show notes,

01:12:18   but if you look at the actual video,

01:12:19   and you just look at HomePod one versus two?

01:12:22   - Yes, and I see that, and it's funny,

01:12:25   so his conclusion, I like Dave2D, he's good,

01:12:28   but his conclusion here was kinda like,

01:12:30   oh yeah, they sound about the same,

01:12:31   but if you look at this frequency response graph,

01:12:33   there are gaps of like five, eight decibels

01:12:37   like between some of the, like those are big gaps.

01:12:40   - Like look right in the middle,

01:12:41   look right in the mid range, the HomePod is an orange

01:12:44   and there's a huge dip in the mid range there

01:12:47   and then a little bit past the mid range,

01:12:48   past one kilohertz, there's a huge spike on the new HomePod,

01:12:51   that to me is a big difference

01:12:53   because that's kind of the area you're talking about,

01:12:54   isn't it, kind of the mid range, the middle of that graph

01:12:57   and the HomePod one has a big divot cut out of it

01:13:00   and the HomePod two is level and then has a big spike

01:13:03   at the higher frequencies,

01:13:04   and that is obviously the Marco spike.

01:13:06   That's the part that you like.

01:13:08   - And then as you get into the treble range,

01:13:09   above the 10K, you start seeing,

01:13:12   there's like a 10 decibel gap in frequency ranges

01:13:15   that are still audible.

01:13:16   So you can see what I'm talking about in this graph.

01:13:19   It's not gonna tell you exactly how the thing sounds.

01:13:22   You gotta hear it for yourself.

01:13:23   But Apple, in recent years,

01:13:25   especially with the AirPods, and in my case,

01:13:28   I don't have any real experience with the regular AirPods

01:13:31   'cause they wouldn't really fit me,

01:13:32   but the AirPod Pros in particular.

01:13:34   And also even the AirPod Max,

01:13:36   which I wish those were comfortable on me

01:13:38   'cause they sound really good.

01:13:39   But Apple has really mastered a certain frequency mix

01:13:44   that sounds really, really good,

01:13:47   but yet not offensive to pretty much anybody.

01:13:50   It's a great kind of all-arounder.

01:13:53   It's not the Harman curve,

01:13:55   but it probably isn't too far from it, if I had to guess.

01:13:58   I don't have it in front of me,

01:13:59   but because what Apple, like Apple's recent

01:14:03   high end speaker designs, again, AirPods Pro,

01:14:05   AirPods Max, HomePod, they all, they sound really good.

01:14:10   Even like their built in speakers

01:14:11   on a lot of their computers now,

01:14:12   like you know, the built in speakers on the studio display

01:14:15   or on like some of the laptops,

01:14:16   like you know, obviously within the realm

01:14:18   of what you can do in those size, you know,

01:14:20   classifications and you know, the space you have

01:14:22   in the enclosures and stuff and the budget,

01:14:24   they do surprisingly well.

01:14:25   Like Apple's really good at making stuff

01:14:27   that sounds pretty good to pretty much everybody.

01:14:30   And this is not Beats.

01:14:34   Beats had a much more personality in their sound,

01:14:38   that was much more bass heavy.

01:14:39   They would frequently withdraw the mid-rings,

01:14:42   you'd hear boom, boom.

01:14:44   And sometimes I wish they would add EQs

01:14:47   to some of their products, but in this case,

01:14:50   with the exception of how much bass you want,

01:14:52   and there is a setting that you can say reduce bass,

01:14:54   which as far as I can tell, I tried it out,

01:14:56   As far as I can tell, it seems to just be like

01:14:59   a high pass filter, but like it just lets

01:15:00   the running frequency above maybe like 100 hertz

01:15:02   or something like that, like it cuts out

01:15:04   all of the bass below that, so you really don't want that

01:15:07   unless you're in like a situation like maybe

01:15:09   if you're in an apartment with thin walls

01:15:10   or if you know, the sound travels through the floor

01:15:12   and you wanna be able to watch movies with it,

01:15:14   you know that's a different story,

01:15:15   but for most listening, I wouldn't recommend

01:15:17   using that setting if you can help it.

01:15:19   But that's the only setting they have

01:15:21   to control the audio of this product.

01:15:22   And I wish there was maybe a little more control

01:15:25   over the bass, because I would ask for a little bit more

01:15:27   out of it sometimes.

01:15:29   Some people would ask for a little bit less,

01:15:30   and that seems to be the main holdup.

01:15:32   But again, for the most part, they've made a product here

01:15:34   that sounds really great, and really great

01:15:38   to pretty much everybody, I think.

01:15:39   Now, a few more details on the sound before I move on.

01:15:41   What I would describe it most is transparent.

01:15:44   You really don't notice the speaker.

01:15:47   Music just sounds good.

01:15:48   You do get, in a stereo pair,

01:15:51   you do get the larger sound stage,

01:15:53   And what that, that's a term of art in the audio world.

01:15:56   Basically means like, how big does the sound source

01:16:00   sound like it is?

01:16:01   Like, does it sound like you're hearing music

01:16:03   from a huge wide area?

01:16:05   Or is it something that's all coming out

01:16:06   of like one little point, you know?

01:16:08   And when you have a stereo pair,

01:16:11   physics are helping you a lot.

01:16:12   This is why sound bars suck.

01:16:14   This is why individual speakers

01:16:15   are not as good as stereo pairs.

01:16:16   What the hell, Siri?

01:16:19   My watch keys, I don't know.

01:16:22   Why is my watch?

01:16:23   Oh, 'cause I'm moving my hand while talking,

01:16:24   'cause I'm Italian.

01:16:25   All right. (laughs)

01:16:27   Anyway, the soundstage on these,

01:16:29   like how big the sound space sounds,

01:16:33   even on just one, even when comparing single speakers,

01:16:37   the new HomePod soundstage is much wider,

01:16:41   much larger than the old one.

01:16:43   And when you hear the stereo pair,

01:16:45   again, it's not as big of a difference

01:16:47   as when comparing individuals,

01:16:48   'cause stereo, again, it's helping with physics there,

01:16:50   but you get a larger soundstage.

01:16:53   It sounds airier, it sounds like there's,

01:16:55   it's coming from a larger space.

01:16:57   That's a very good thing.

01:16:59   I did one comparison, 'cause people have often asked,

01:17:01   like if they already have a HomePod Mini,

01:17:03   or if they have two HomePod Minis,

01:17:05   'cause they're, I mean, they're so inexpensive.

01:17:07   And then people have often asked, like, what's better,

01:17:10   a single large HomePod, or a stereo pair of HomePod Minis?

01:17:15   I did that test.

01:17:16   The single large HomePod I would still prefer in most cases,

01:17:19   just because the soundstage is actually

01:17:22   not that much worse than two HomePod Minis and the rest of the audio just sounds so much

01:17:28   better.

01:17:29   The vocals, the mid rings, it just sounds so much better on the big one.

01:17:33   So I would say compared to two Minis a single large HomePod is better for most people's

01:17:39   uses.

01:17:40   When compared to the HomePod Mini in a stereo pair, stereo pair versus stereo pair, again

01:17:46   the HomePod Mini is a very small speaker.

01:17:48   It's very, very small.

01:17:50   And again, there's only one driver in there.

01:17:51   And it's a third the price, you know, about a third to a quarter the size.

01:17:56   So it's this is not a fair comparison and it shows the HomePod mini is a great product

01:18:01   for its price and size.

01:18:04   But the large HomePod totally destroys it in audio quality.

01:18:08   And that's again, that's just the nature of this difference here.

01:18:11   Like that's that's a big difference in physicality there.

01:18:13   The big HomePods have much larger soundstage, much better treble response, much better bass

01:18:19   response, much smoother and better mid-range.

01:18:23   The HomePod Mini has the problem I was talking about before where the vocals and guitars

01:18:27   are kind of withdrawn, they're kind of pushed back in the mix.

01:18:31   It just isn't doing a good job of reproducing those.

01:18:33   So the full-size HomePods are a large step above the Minis.

01:18:38   People often ask about how the HomePods compare

01:18:41   to just speakers, regular bookshelf-sized speakers

01:18:45   or countertop or desktop monitors,

01:18:48   whatever size speakers you think are similar to HomePods,

01:18:51   which by the way, their HomePods are way smaller

01:18:53   than most bookshelf speakers,

01:18:54   but anyway, that's beside the point.

01:18:56   How they compare to bookshelf speakers,

01:18:57   and I would say I have heard better bookshelf speakers

01:19:01   than the HomePods.

01:19:02   I just said my KEF Q150s are better sounding in most ways.

01:19:08   They also have way less bass.

01:19:10   I need a subwoofer with them.

01:19:11   I don't need a subwoofer with the HomePods

01:19:12   for the most part.

01:19:13   And they're way bigger, like way bigger.

01:19:16   Comparing it to bookshelf speakers is not super useful

01:19:20   'cause they're just so much smaller

01:19:22   and don't need to be amplified and everything else.

01:19:23   But then also, where the HomePods really shine

01:19:27   is a situation like where I have them

01:19:28   where they're on my kitchen counter.

01:19:30   Well, I'm oftentimes not working in front of them.

01:19:34   I'm often working next to them, off to the side.

01:19:37   The HomePod Minis do an okay job of kind of off-axis

01:19:41   listening when you're not right in front of them

01:19:42   when you're off to one side,

01:19:44   but the full-size HomePods do a really great job of it.

01:19:46   They sound really good even when you aren't

01:19:49   directly in front of them.

01:19:50   So if you're in a situation like this

01:19:51   where you have them somewhere where you will often

01:19:53   not be right in front of them,

01:19:54   if you'll be off to one side,

01:19:56   the HomePods, the full-size ones,

01:19:58   are I think possibly the best products

01:20:01   I've ever heard in this category.

01:20:02   They are amazing for that,

01:20:05   and they destroy almost all of the competition

01:20:07   people usually would compare them to,

01:20:09   they destroy them in off-axis listening.

01:20:11   They're so much better for that.

01:20:13   It doesn't sound like you're listening to a crappy,

01:20:16   treble-reduced side version of the sound,

01:20:18   you just hear the music, and it's not as good

01:20:20   as standing in front of them, but it's still really good.

01:20:23   - They're radially symmetrical, that's why.

01:20:25   Like, they are not directional.

01:20:27   Like, regular speakers have their speaker cones

01:20:29   facing a single direction.

01:20:31   That's not true of the HomePods.

01:20:33   There is no front or back, like the base one is pointing either directly up or down, I

01:20:44   forget which, and then the five that are surrounded, they're equally spaced in a circle.

01:20:49   That's the whole point of this device, that's why the HomePod is round.

01:20:54   There is no wrong place to put it, and so it should be exactly the same no matter where

01:20:59   you are, plus or minus the fact that you have it up against the backsplash or there's a

01:21:03   mixer in the way or you know what, obviously physical obstructions are going to cause it,

01:21:07   but that's why these speakers are like, "Look, just put it wherever you're in your house."

01:21:10   And that whole thing of like it's saying, "Oh, I'm going to play sound and figure out

01:21:13   how to adjust myself," half of that is figuring out which one of my tweeters is blocked by

01:21:18   a wall and I should maybe not send super amount of sound into that one tweeter because it's

01:21:22   pointless because it's going to be bouncing all over the place.

01:21:24   So, you know, when you compare HomePods to,

01:21:28   you know, again, anything else, say the Sonos One,

01:21:31   which is a common comparison,

01:21:33   which I find massively overrated,

01:21:35   the Sonos One is a totally fine, small, cheap speaker.

01:21:39   It sounds closer to the HomePod Mini

01:21:41   than the full-size HomePod.

01:21:43   Price-wise, it's kind of right in the middle,

01:21:45   and so I respect that.

01:21:46   It isn't $300, it's about $200, so, you know, that's fine,

01:21:51   but it's also as big as a HomePod.

01:21:53   And I think if you're gonna have that amount,

01:21:55   that size on a countertop with the Sonos One,

01:22:00   I think unless you want the Sonos ecosystem

01:22:02   for other reasons, I think the full size HomePod

01:22:04   for 100 bucks more, you get a lot more than $100 worth

01:22:07   of additional sound quality.

01:22:08   And again, the Sonos One is highly directional.

01:22:12   The HomePod Mini is mostly directional.

01:22:15   It's kind of, the HomePod Mini is kind of a,

01:22:18   kind of mushes the sound.

01:22:20   It's not, there's not a lot of definition there.

01:22:22   What tends to be very directional is the higher frequencies,

01:22:27   the treble frequencies, and the HomePod Mini

01:22:29   has such poor treble response that you don't really

01:22:32   notice as much, so it's less important.

01:22:35   - Isn't the HomePod Mini also radially symmetrical

01:22:37   internally?

01:22:38   - No, it's just one driver, it's one speaker.

01:22:40   - Right, but isn't it pointing straight down?

01:22:42   - Oh, I think you might be right.

01:22:44   I forget, I think you're right.

01:22:46   I forgot about that.

01:22:46   - I mean, obviously that's not ideal direction

01:22:49   for a speaker to be facing, just ask any person

01:22:52   of the television with down firing speakers, which is very common these days. It's not

01:22:55   great. But I think I think the HomePod mini if it's directional, it's just because it

01:23:00   has no control over the bounce, unlike the big HomePod, which can decide how much power

01:23:05   to put in any of its five or seven right, right. There's pointing in different directions.

01:23:09   What the hell can the mini do? It's like, well, I have one speaker and it's facing the

01:23:14   direction it's facing. And that direction is down or up. I don't know if it's up or

01:23:18   down. I think it's I think it faces down anyway. You're right. Yeah, I forgot about that.

01:23:22   Anyway, so again, this is an area where the HomePods really excel.

01:23:25   And so when you're looking at what should you buy, what should you have for your area,

01:23:29   again, if you're setting up things like a TV speaker system, you'll probably be better

01:23:34   off with regular bookshelf or other speakers because you're not going to be watching TV

01:23:40   from 90 degrees off-axis.

01:23:43   You're going to be like--

01:23:44   No, you have an LCD TV.

01:23:45   Yeah, you're going to be watching the front of it pretty much from the front.

01:23:50   from enough distance that minor variations

01:23:53   and being a few degrees off axis here

01:23:55   and they aren't gonna matter.

01:23:56   Whereas if it's on a kitchen counter

01:23:58   or in the smallest rooms of your house

01:24:00   or wherever else you might use a HomePod

01:24:02   or if you only have room for one of them

01:24:04   or various, you'd be on a budget for one of them,

01:24:06   it's just a much more versatile speaker

01:24:07   for many more different spaces

01:24:09   than you can fit bookshelf speakers

01:24:10   or other systems like that.

01:24:12   So anyway, I'll try to be quick here

01:24:14   with the rest of these things.

01:24:16   Let's see.

01:24:17   Compared to the Echo, the Amazon Echo,

01:24:19   fourth generation.

01:24:21   When I was talking earlier about being able to EQ away

01:24:24   certain flaws or not, one of the common strategies

01:24:27   that cheap electronic designers will use

01:24:30   to make up for the fact that their speakers suck,

01:24:32   again, they'll use some kind of EQ, especially in treble.

01:24:35   It's commonly done in treble where you know the sound

01:24:39   when in the 80s and 90s or whatever,

01:24:41   when you had the treble knob on your boombox

01:24:43   and you would turn it all the way up

01:24:44   and everything would sound kind of really crisp

01:24:47   and everything, but it would sound a little aggressively

01:24:49   crisp and it would even that crispness would be a little distorted it wouldn't

01:24:52   it was not smooth or natural sounding it just sounded artificially boosted too

01:24:57   much that's how the Amazon echo sounds they it sounds like they took a very

01:25:02   cheap speaker and used EQ to really crank up something it really was not

01:25:07   able to do very well and it just sounds like a very over processed harsh you

01:25:13   know sharp sound it just sounds awful to me I like the Amazon echo the original

01:25:18   like cylinder shape one from a million years ago,

01:25:21   that was a totally fine product for its time.

01:25:24   There are many better products now.

01:25:27   And the modern Echo is not one of them.

01:25:30   I mean, it's better than the old cylinder,

01:25:31   but it's not, it isn't as much better as you would think.

01:25:34   So I did also compare Siri versus Alexa.

01:25:40   And this is, again, so much variation here.

01:25:45   In general, and this will kind of speak

01:25:47   to the Siri performance in the new HomePods.

01:25:49   Like Siri has gotten way faster with the new SoC.

01:25:54   It is just noticeable.

01:25:57   It's like I measured, you know,

01:25:59   we're saving like five or six seconds in certain responses

01:26:03   depending on what you're asking.

01:26:04   Siri is now almost as fast as Alexa

01:26:08   with most common things.

01:26:11   There's a couple of exceptions

01:26:12   which I'll get to in a second.

01:26:13   But for the most part, like,

01:26:13   so I would do things like I would say, you know,

01:26:15   hey Dingus, stop and measure how long after,

01:26:19   from when I stopped saying the word stop

01:26:21   until it actually stopped.

01:26:22   How long did it take with each voice system?

01:26:24   I did a whole bunch of tests to make sure

01:26:25   it wasn't some kind of weird fluke.

01:26:26   I did it in different noise levels,

01:26:28   whether the music was playing loudly or not,

01:26:29   how close I was, how far I was.

01:26:31   Both the Echo and the new HomePod and the old HomePod

01:26:35   and the HomePod Mini all have really great microphones.

01:26:39   And they were all able to hear me ridiculously well,

01:26:42   even from like, I would like walk to the other side

01:26:45   of the floor and kind of just say at regular volume,

01:26:48   like, hey, things stop.

01:26:49   And just kind of see, like, while music's playing

01:26:51   and see if they can hear me, and they did.

01:26:53   It was remarkable.

01:26:55   The microphones on all of these are extremely good

01:26:58   and can pick up you speaking at normal volume,

01:27:02   even with music playing, even from far away.

01:27:05   If you're concerned about privacy, that should terrify you.

01:27:07   And that should maybe sway you more in the Apple direction,

01:27:11   I would say, compared to the Amazon system

01:27:15   for the police.

01:27:16   So anyway, overall performance, Alexa is still faster.

01:27:20   And it's more consistent.

01:27:21   And it's faster to do things like set timers.

01:27:24   It's faster to return knowledge.

01:27:26   It's faster to begin music playback.

01:27:30   Music playback is an area that I had problems with Siri.

01:27:33   Because I would do things like, hey thing, play so and so.

01:27:38   And it would say, okay, playing for Apple Music.

01:27:40   And so the speed that it would recognize what I wanted

01:27:43   and would give me a response playing so and so

01:27:46   from Apple Music, that speed matched Alexa

01:27:50   in almost every case.

01:27:51   Alexa was a little bit faster sometimes

01:27:52   but it usually matched it.

01:27:54   But then Apple Music would take like 20 seconds

01:27:57   to actually start playing the track.

01:27:59   So it would say, okay, you know, playing Weezer, whatever,

01:28:02   and then 20 seconds of silence

01:28:05   and then it would start playing.

01:28:07   And this is just one example of many,

01:28:08   and this isn't, that isn't typical,

01:28:10   But what is typical is random weird failures of Apple Music.

01:28:15   And so I don't know if that's Siri,

01:28:17   I don't know if that's Apple Music,

01:28:18   probably some of both if I had to guess.

01:28:21   But the actual Siri performance of giving me responses,

01:28:26   you know, listening, basic things like stop

01:28:28   and pause and stuff, Siri was almost as fast

01:28:31   or as fast as Alexa most of the time.

01:28:34   And that is very impressive, that is not how it always was.

01:28:38   The old HomePods were way slower.

01:28:40   and those delays would be even longer, so that's good.

01:28:45   The Alexa device was also extremely chatty

01:28:48   with trying to upsell me things constantly.

01:28:52   - Yup.

01:28:53   - Everything you'd say, all right, here's the timer,

01:28:54   you said, "By the way," it's like, "Shut up,

01:28:57   "I don't care what else you can do."

01:28:59   It always--

01:29:00   - It's time for you to reorder

01:29:01   that weirdly shaped pasta again.

01:29:02   - Yeah, right. (laughs)

01:29:03   - Do you want me to add it to your cart?

01:29:05   - No.

01:29:06   - By the way, did you know you can ask me to do so?

01:29:09   I don't want to be handheld through all

01:29:12   of your new promotions, Alexa, thank you though.

01:29:14   So yeah, overall, Siri is now fast enough.

01:29:20   Whether it can stay consistently fast, that's the question.

01:29:25   And HomePods, I even had bugs with the stereo pairing still.

01:29:30   HomePods have been around now for a long time.

01:29:33   They've had stereo pairing since, I believe,

01:29:35   like the third week they were out or something.

01:29:37   It was very fast, so like,

01:29:40   they've had stereo pairing for a number of years now.

01:29:42   It should be fine.

01:29:43   It's not.

01:29:44   It's not rock solid.

01:29:45   Even now with the new ones,

01:29:46   the stereo pairing is not rock solid.

01:29:48   Now, it's way better than the old ones so far.

01:29:50   Am I limited time with them so far?

01:29:52   But that could change over time.

01:29:53   We'll see, I'll tell you how that goes.

01:29:55   But I would still have bugs like,

01:29:58   one of them would occasionally just drop out of the pair

01:30:01   and rejoin it a few seconds later.

01:30:03   So one of them would be silent

01:30:04   and then rejoin it a few seconds later.

01:30:06   Or when the song would change, like between tracks,

01:30:11   only one of them would start playing the next song

01:30:14   and then the other one would jump in

01:30:16   like five or six seconds in.

01:30:18   And it's like, you just, this is a brand new product

01:30:21   based on a five year old, four, four and a half year old

01:30:25   product, like why?

01:30:26   These products sound so good in stereo pairs.

01:30:32   I wish they would fix these ridiculous software bugs

01:30:36   that they still have with them.

01:30:38   The performance papers over a lot of this.

01:30:40   It is still now, now it recovers faster from those bugs

01:30:44   than the old ones did, but the fact that they still

01:30:45   have those bugs is really disheartening,

01:30:48   'cause this is such a great product

01:30:50   and you have them in stereo pairs,

01:30:51   and it should work better.

01:30:53   What year is this?

01:30:55   - Well, the reason it's so difficult for them

01:30:57   to get it to work is kind of the same reason

01:30:59   this happens with your AirPods.

01:31:00   These are two independent little computers

01:31:03   that have no idea, like they're manufactured separately,

01:31:06   you buy them, they have no idea about each other

01:31:08   until you introduce them to each other

01:31:10   and you have to say, hey, there's another one over there,

01:31:14   you two coordinate with this third party source of audio

01:31:17   or maybe just with each other

01:31:19   to make sure that you are both playing and are both in sync.

01:31:21   And we've all heard the AirPods

01:31:23   where you put them in your ear

01:31:24   and one starts playing the music before the other ones.

01:31:25   AirPods are also tiny little computers

01:31:27   that coordinate with each other to get in sync

01:31:30   so they're gonna play the audio.

01:31:31   It's kind of a little miracle that they work at all.

01:31:33   - They're also buggy as hell, by the way.

01:31:35   My AirPods Pro also incredibly buggy in that way.

01:31:38   - Right, but because it's a hard,

01:31:40   it's a split-brain scenario to use,

01:31:42   like, server-side things.

01:31:43   So you have two separate little brains

01:31:45   that have to coordinate.

01:31:46   This is a problem that is avoided

01:31:48   if you have a central brain

01:31:50   that then sends sound to the speakers

01:31:52   that reproduce it, like in a traditional receiver

01:31:55   with passive speaker setups.

01:31:57   Now, I don't think you want HomePods to be passive speakers,

01:31:59   and for people that we've always been asking,

01:32:01   "Well, why don't they just put audio inputs on them?"

01:32:03   I think it's not quite that simple

01:32:04   because of the processing that goes on in the HomePods,

01:32:07   that in the end, even if you had a central brain,

01:32:09   still with the processing,

01:32:11   if the brain was in the individual speakers,

01:32:12   you'd have to move the brains into the central thing as well

01:32:15   but it's like inherent in their design

01:32:16   that you can just have one of these

01:32:18   and it's got all the brains

01:32:19   and all the amplification or whatever,

01:32:20   that when you get two of them,

01:32:22   it is really trying to get two things

01:32:24   to be synchronized down to seconds.

01:32:25   I mean, this is arguably the--

01:32:27   - Well, hold on though,

01:32:29   'cause I can plug a turntable into my Sonos setup.

01:32:33   - I was about to say Sonos.

01:32:34   - Okay, and it will play perfectly synchronized

01:32:38   no matter where I put the speaker in my hand,

01:32:41   the speakers in the porch,

01:32:42   the speakers in the living room.

01:32:46   It does not compute to me

01:32:47   how they can be so perfectly synchronized.

01:32:49   - Well, that's kind of arguably what the entire Sonos,

01:32:52   why does Sonos exist as a company?

01:32:54   It's because they were dedicated to solving

01:32:57   this very specific problem and they solved it

01:33:00   way before other people did,

01:33:01   which is how do I make the audio come out

01:33:03   of all the speakers at the same time,

01:33:04   even when those speakers are independent little computers?

01:33:08   There is a, I mean, I'm sure what they do structurally

01:33:11   and architecturally is probably wildly different

01:33:12   than what Apple does, if only because Sonos

01:33:14   was created so long ago, and I do think they have

01:33:17   more of a central, the ability at least

01:33:19   to have a central brain thing going on,

01:33:22   but what I'm getting at with the Apple thing

01:33:23   is I'm not excusing their bugs,

01:33:25   I'm just saying that Apple has chosen

01:33:26   to try to solve a harder problem

01:33:28   because of the way they have architected this product.

01:33:31   If they were more fully dedicated to the idea

01:33:34   that we want to provide a premium audio experience

01:33:39   with more than one speaker, right,

01:33:42   they would choose to do something different architecturally,

01:33:45   whether that's having the Apple TV contain all the brains

01:33:47   and making the speakers more passive,

01:33:49   or selling an Apple receiver,

01:33:51   or even selling an Apple soundbar,

01:33:53   where at least the soundbar is not,

01:33:54   never gonna miscoordinate between it,

01:33:56   right in its left speakers, right?

01:33:58   So I feel for the people trying to solve this problem,

01:34:00   but they've kind of brought it on themselves

01:34:02   by assigning to them, and I have to say with the AirPods,

01:34:04   it's more acceptable to me for one AirPod

01:34:06   to take a half second to the other one,

01:34:08   but for a set of expensive speakers

01:34:10   that I want to be a stereo pair,

01:34:12   I find that much less acceptable.

01:34:14   They should never do that.

01:34:15   They should never, never.

01:34:16   It's like, I almost wish they had a mode where it said,

01:34:19   look, nobody gets to make any sound

01:34:20   until you're sure the other one is in lockstep with you.

01:34:22   Just wait, and that would just make them even slower,

01:34:24   which then you'd complain about that, right?

01:34:27   But anyway, I feel like this is a big Sonos advantage

01:34:30   and it is a big advantage for dumb ass speaker wire

01:34:32   going to dumb ass speakers from a central receiver

01:34:36   where you will never have this problem.

01:34:37   - Yeah, and that's entirely right.

01:34:40   You would think for these devices that are hard wired

01:34:44   to power, they always have power, they're stationary,

01:34:47   and they're usually not very far from each other.

01:34:49   You would think that this would be better.

01:34:52   AirPods are a much harder problem

01:34:54   because they have your head in the way in the middle

01:34:57   between the two of them, and your head's full of water,

01:34:59   and it blocks RF.

01:35:00   - And you're taking them out of the case,

01:35:02   and before they were like off?

01:35:03   - Yeah, like the AirPods are in a much more

01:35:06   high-needs, demanding situation for this kind of coordination

01:35:11   whereas the HomePods, you're just sitting on a counter.

01:35:13   It plugged in, like always connected to WiFi.

01:35:15   What's changing about this environment

01:35:17   that they have to somehow drop out sometimes?

01:35:19   Anyway, so the area of stereo pairing is still buggy

01:35:24   and still needs work, but with that exception,

01:35:28   everything else about this is an improvement.

01:35:32   Even that is improved, it's just not correct yet,

01:35:34   but it's still improved.

01:35:36   Everything about this new HomePod is better.

01:35:39   I am so happy they not only didn't screw it up,

01:35:43   but actually made it even better.

01:35:44   It sounds so much better,

01:35:46   and I thought the old one sounded pretty good.

01:35:48   So this is again a really great product,

01:35:52   not for every role, as mentioned earlier,

01:35:54   like this is probably not your best home theater choice,

01:35:57   but for the size that it is,

01:36:00   and how simple and clean the setup is,

01:36:02   and for all the different advantages it has

01:36:05   in terms of things like not only the privacy angles

01:36:07   I mentioned earlier with your Amazon Police cylinders,

01:36:09   or your Google Creepy cylinders,

01:36:11   you have this as a good option there,

01:36:13   and to things like off-access listening,

01:36:16   where it truly is way better than everything else

01:36:18   in its category.

01:36:19   If you want something that is good looking enough

01:36:22   to put in your kitchen counter

01:36:23   and maybe needs to be partner compatible for aesthetics,

01:36:28   but also you want these different capabilities that it has,

01:36:31   there is no other option on the market,

01:36:33   or the other options are worse.

01:36:35   So this is a great product.

01:36:37   I am extremely happy with it so far.

01:36:40   It's only been a couple of days with that disclaimer.

01:36:43   But I expect that this is gonna be pretty good

01:36:47   for a pretty long time, I think, I hope.

01:36:49   - I'm excited to receive my shipment of your old HomePods.

01:36:52   (laughing)

01:36:53   What are you gonna do with all of them?

01:36:54   You got a lot of those old ones.

01:36:56   I mean, granted, some of them don't work anymore, but.

01:36:58   - Yeah, I have four, two of which work okay,

01:37:00   two of which work less okay.

01:37:01   So I was thinking of maybe, you know,

01:37:04   I might upgrade one of the small rooms in my house

01:37:06   to a full-size HomePod, or maybe I'll set up

01:37:09   the two old ones as TV speakers

01:37:12   to our downstairs secondary TV,

01:37:16   although that's usually used for video games

01:37:18   that would probably be bad.

01:37:18   - You should do that so you can tell us how good the,

01:37:21   speaking of stereo pairing and flakiness,

01:37:22   what is the reliability like on that setup?

01:37:25   - Yeah, I mean, we don't use that TV that often.

01:37:28   And when it is used, it's almost always for gaming.

01:37:31   So this is not what these are good at.

01:37:33   - Yeah, no, you're just, yeah.

01:37:35   Someone was saying that it was a latency-related bug

01:37:37   that they supposedly fixed in 16.3 or something.

01:37:39   But yeah, I think that for things that are really

01:37:42   latency sensitive, you really kind of need,

01:37:44   it helps to have like the thing that I went through

01:37:46   for all the struggles I went through to get my sync up.

01:37:49   I had a central box that was controlling it all,

01:37:51   including the video.

01:37:53   And so, you've got the input lag of your TV,

01:37:56   which you're at the mercy of,

01:37:57   and there's not much you can do there

01:37:58   except for going to game mode.

01:38:00   But if you want something to align the audio latency

01:38:04   to match the video, it helps to have sort of one traffic cop

01:38:07   in the middle there.

01:38:08   don't have that with these two home pods

01:38:10   just hanging off the end of your TV.

01:38:12   - Yeah, and as mentioned earlier,

01:38:14   for gaming you really want dumb ass wires

01:38:17   going to dumb ass speakers.

01:38:19   That's what you want.

01:38:20   When you want to minimize latency, you want wires.

01:38:22   Simple as that.

01:38:23   So anyway, thumbs up on the HomePod 2

01:38:27   and I'm really happy it's here.

01:38:29   - So is there anything that you feel is worse or degraded

01:38:33   as compared to the last one?

01:38:34   'Cause this sounds like it was a freaking home run.

01:38:37   with the exception of there being less bass at high volume.

01:38:41   That's the one thing that seemed like a regression.

01:38:44   But again, at low to medium volumes it's fine,

01:38:48   and all the other aspects of the sound

01:38:50   are significantly improved.

01:38:51   So I'm willing to take that loss.

01:38:55   - No, that's awesome.

01:38:57   I'm super impressed.

01:38:58   - We are brought to you this week by Collide.

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01:40:15   - All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:40:20   Gavin Whitaker writes, "Do you think large enterprises

01:40:22   "will ever set up Mastodon instances

01:40:24   "and would there be business opportunities in doing so

01:40:27   "or would it be too much hassle to manage

01:40:29   "like you have previously discussed?"

01:40:31   I noticed recently that a couple of our mutual friends,

01:40:36   this is Jason Snell, Stephen Hackett, Mike Hurley,

01:40:39   have all been setting up their own bespoke Mastodon

01:40:42   instances, I think using, what is it, masto.host,

01:40:46   if I'm not mistaken, which is something,

01:40:48   it's less than 10 bucks a month if you want to do

01:40:51   a very, very small instance, not a sponsor, maybe should be.

01:40:54   But anyways, they've been doing that,

01:40:56   and that I think makes some amount of sense,

01:41:01   perhaps for organizations,

01:41:04   but I don't think most organizations

01:41:06   are gonna care about Mastodon enough to have a presence,

01:41:09   to be honest with you.

01:41:11   I would be very surprised if most corporations

01:41:15   are gonna care, and if they did,

01:41:17   I presume there would be some particular instance

01:41:20   that would try to cater to those sorts of clients,

01:41:24   but I just don't see this happening.

01:41:26   - I think if Mastodon ever gets enough critical mass

01:41:29   that companies care that it exists, which is not implausible but hasn't yet happened.

01:41:34   I think that the Washington Post is verifying their reporters' profiles, at least on Mastodon,

01:41:40   so they get the green checkmark.

01:41:42   So there's some kind of awareness.

01:41:43   But anyway, if Mastodon ever grows to the point where big companies want to be on it,

01:41:49   I think the big companies will run their own instances, just because the lesson they will

01:41:54   have learned by this whole thing of "We've got to deal with this again, why can't we

01:41:57   just be on Twitter?"

01:41:58   Like, because again, if Mastodon gains

01:41:59   some kind of critical mass,

01:42:00   it means things continue to go crapily over at Twitter.

01:42:03   And they're gonna feel burned by that.

01:42:05   And if they feel burned by that,

01:42:07   someone in the company will say,

01:42:08   "You know, the only silver lining to this hassle

01:42:11   "that we now have to deal with is that on Mastodon,

01:42:14   "we don't have to have a repeat of the scenario

01:42:16   "where we invested all this time and effort into this thing."

01:42:19   Like, a lot of these companies have, like,

01:42:21   their only customer support is through Twitter,

01:42:22   which is a company they don't control, right?

01:42:24   So now they're gonna be paying for API access

01:42:26   and everything for their automated system

01:42:28   to be able to talk to, you know, like,

01:42:30   and they're gonna be cranky about that.

01:42:32   And, you know, obviously it takes technical expertise

01:42:34   and cost money to run an instance,

01:42:36   but big corporations like to control stuff.

01:42:38   That's why big corporations will like to control

01:42:40   their own IT, maybe their own, you know, email thing.

01:42:43   That's why Microsoft makes money.

01:42:44   They let people run Exchange in-house

01:42:46   instead of outsourcing it to Google's business thing,

01:42:48   'cause they're like, oh, we gotta control it all ourselves.

01:42:50   So I think if mass.com becomes popular,

01:42:53   big companies will run their own mass.com instances

01:42:56   and they'll like it.

01:42:57   Like, they will want to run it because they're like,

01:42:59   we controlled it just for our stuff.

01:43:00   No one can ever kick us off.

01:43:02   No one can ever, you know, like, they could be defederated

01:43:05   if they just do something super terrible.

01:43:06   But in general, I think they will want to run their instances

01:43:09   not to be at the mercy of people like Elon Musk.

01:43:13   - Nathan Roberts writes, "I am always hearing

01:43:15   how iOS developers have to redownload Xcode

01:43:17   when Apple announces new features.

01:43:19   I don't fully understand how you need to download

01:43:20   the entire IDE rather than a set of updates

01:43:22   to support new features.

01:43:24   For those of us who are more familiar with IDEs,

01:43:25   like Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ,

01:43:28   can you elaborate on the integration between Xcode

01:43:30   and developing for Apple platforms?

01:43:32   Who would like to handle this?

01:43:34   - So this is an instance where Apple could provide

01:43:38   incremental updates to Xcode, but they do not, right?

01:43:42   So Mac OS has, and has for most of its history,

01:43:47   the ability to do incremental updates.

01:43:49   You don't have to redownload the entire OS.

01:43:50   At various times, you'd need to redownload way more

01:43:52   than you thought you should for the update size

01:43:54   that they give you, but in general, over the years,

01:43:56   there have been various systems to send less

01:43:58   than the entire operating system every single time.

01:44:00   And Mac OS is way more complicated than Xcode, right?

01:44:04   So they could do that.

01:44:05   - Is it?

01:44:06   Modern Xcode is pretty complicated.

01:44:09   - No, but the OS is way bigger, right?

01:44:12   But they don't do that.

01:44:14   Why don't they do it?

01:44:15   This is not important enough to do it.

01:44:17   Like the number of developers versus the number

01:44:19   of Mac users is a small fraction.

01:44:22   The download size used to be reasonable,

01:44:23   then I was like gigs or whatever, but still it's like whatever. It's just easier to make one

01:44:29   one artifact as they say, one thing that's the same for everybody, you don't have to worry about

01:44:35   your update or going weird or whatever, they even got to the point where you know everything is

01:44:38   packaged in the thing and the first time you launch it it says do you want to install these

01:44:42   sdks and then it does all the stuff where it does you know whatever it needs to do like one thing

01:44:47   that's one chunk. So the answer is yes, they could do incremental updates. It would be less download

01:44:53   time, but Apple doesn't because it's simpler and more straightforward. And honestly, of all the

01:44:57   things that are annoying about Apple's development, having to download Xcode and waiting for it to

01:45:02   un-XIP, unzip, takes a long time. Maybe that encourages developers to buy faster Macs, I don't

01:45:08   know. But in the grand scheme of the thing, it's not a big deal, right? Just don't do it through

01:45:12   the Mac App Store because you'll be sad. Yeah, that's the thing. The Mac App Store does do

01:45:17   Delta updates, but Xcode is such a large app with so many files in it.

01:45:25   Does it do Delta updates to Xcode?

01:45:28   I mean, the Mac App Store, I think it does in general, but because Xcode is so big, it doesn't matter.

01:45:33   It ends up being slower than it would be to just download the whole thing.

01:45:38   And it's not because of the size, because 8 gigs is big, it's because of the number of files.

01:45:43   Just go, you know, do a find command on the Xcode.app

01:45:45   and see how many files are in there, it's ridiculous.

01:45:48   - Oh my God, so it's like,

01:45:50   whenever you have to like empty your recycle bin,

01:45:53   or your trash, excuse me.

01:45:54   I forgot what platform I was on there for a second.

01:45:56   Whenever you have to empty your trash

01:45:57   and there's a version of Xcode in there,

01:45:59   it takes forever because there's so many files

01:46:03   in that bundle.

01:46:04   - I'm counting the files right now.

01:46:05   That's how long it's taking on an SSD here.

01:46:08   Just watching the command, it's way down waiting.

01:46:10   And I'll chime in when it tells you.

01:46:12   Yeah.

01:46:13   All right, and Darren Kelkoff writes, "I'm fairly new to iOS and macOS development.

01:46:19   One thing I've struggled with is when I want to search the web for how to do a certain

01:46:22   something in a code for an app, that I'm not sure exactly the best way to tweak my search

01:46:27   terms to get hits relevant to a developer rather than iOS or Mac user.

01:46:31   For example, if I wanted to add code to an iOS app to automatically run an iOS shortcut,

01:46:35   if I search for, quote, iOS launcher shortcut, quote, the results are all about how to run

01:46:40   shortcuts as an end user.

01:46:41   The best strategy I've used to date has been to add the term "Swift" to my search terms,

01:46:45   but I was wondering if you guys had any recommendations or successful experiences to share.

01:46:50   That's my trick, is add Swift.

01:46:52   But Marco, as the old hat of the three of us, what's the right answer?

01:46:56   All right, before he goes, I've got the number of files.

01:46:59   Without cheating, you want to do Price is Right rules.

01:47:01   What are your two guesses?

01:47:02   I'll say a million.

01:47:03   Oh, come on now.

01:47:04   One dollar!

01:47:05   Price is Right rules!

01:47:06   One dollar!

01:47:07   One dollar!

01:47:08   You're gonna go one?

01:47:09   No, all kidding aside.

01:47:10   I know to do Price is Right rules, I would guess one file,

01:47:13   but I think it's something to the order of 5,000

01:47:17   to 7,000 files, so we're in that neck of the woods.

01:47:20   - So your guess is five to 7,000, Marcos is one million.

01:47:23   Do you wanna converse with each other

01:47:26   to figure out why you're this far apart

01:47:28   and maybe think about which one of you is closer to right?

01:47:30   - I'm closer to right, Marcos bananas.

01:47:33   - It includes all the headers and all the SDK files.

01:47:37   That's where I think so many of the files are.

01:47:39   All the different device support.

01:47:40   It's like there's so much.

01:47:42   We're talking like multiple OSs,

01:47:44   multiple versions of those OSs oftentimes being bundled.

01:47:47   Like it's just, it's a massive, massive thing.

01:47:50   - So I feel like if we weren't playing

01:47:53   by Price is Right rules, I feel like Marco should win

01:47:56   because at least he understands the scale of the problem.

01:47:58   5,000 files, Casey, I think Switch Glass has more than,

01:48:02   nothing, are you kidding?

01:48:04   5,000 files? - No, shoot, I'm thinking,

01:48:06   no, 'cause what I was thinking of is when I empty the trash

01:48:08   - No, it is in the tens of thousands, isn't it?

01:48:10   I don't think it's anywhere near a million though.

01:48:11   - So anyway, the answer from the current version of Xcode,

01:48:15   this is on an Intel Mac in case it's different,

01:48:16   is 398,311.

01:48:19   - Oh, that was way more than I thought.

01:48:21   - I was not that ridiculous.

01:48:22   - Especially at 400,000 and Marco pretty much doubled it,

01:48:25   which is, you know, in the ballpark.

01:48:27   - I was fewer orders of magnitude away than Casey was.

01:48:31   - No, that's fair, that's fair.

01:48:33   I gotta pay attention next time I empty the trash

01:48:34   'cause that's what I was thinking of

01:48:36   is when I empty the trash after an Xcode update,

01:48:38   you know, how many files does it say it has to delete?

01:48:40   And I think it, well, maybe I'm wrong,

01:48:42   I must be wrong if it's really hundreds of thousands,

01:48:44   but I thought it was somewhere between like 10

01:48:46   and 30,000 files when I emptied the trash.

01:48:48   But I'll try to pay attention.

01:48:49   - Well, anyway, I just counted them.

01:48:50   And by the way, Switch Glass has 23 files,

01:48:52   so sorry, Switch Glass, for saying bad things about you.

01:48:55   - I was gonna say, how did you get that?

01:48:56   There's no NPM in there.

01:48:57   - And keep in mind also, like, the whole, like,

01:48:59   you know, developer, or, you know, library developer,

01:49:01   there's different places that it puts files

01:49:04   once you actually use it to do anything.

01:49:07   So it isn't just the files in the bundle

01:49:09   that it's also dealing with.

01:49:10   Like there's also then all the device support

01:49:13   and all that crap that gets spewed all over your desk.

01:49:15   - Is it a spew Simlinks these days?

01:49:17   I never watched what it's actually doing these days.

01:49:19   It used to be way more complicated,

01:49:20   but now it's all in the bundle

01:49:22   and then it does some, the quote unquote installation stuff.

01:49:25   I thought it might have just been a bunch of Simlinks

01:49:26   that it sets up, but maybe it does spray files too.

01:49:29   - I don't know.

01:49:30   Anyway, so to answer Darren's question

01:49:33   about how to search for things.

01:49:36   I would, so there's two tricks here.

01:49:39   Number one is if it's more like generic words

01:49:44   you have to search for, you can always go to Stack Overflow.

01:49:47   Site colon StackOverflow.com, that's where most

01:49:51   of the good answers for stuff like that are anyway,

01:49:53   with the exception of there's also sites like

01:49:55   Hacking with Swift that have really good Swift tutorials

01:49:59   and certain examples, things like that.

01:50:00   There is some stuff out in the general web that's good,

01:50:03   but if you're really having trouble finding things

01:50:06   and you're kind of name colliding with common words,

01:50:10   oftentimes the search of sacoverflow.com

01:50:12   is oftentimes better.

01:50:14   The other thing is if you search for an API name

01:50:18   in particular, usually you're good.

01:50:20   And so oftentimes to find that API name,

01:50:22   that might take a little bit of searching,

01:50:24   but one thing I would try to do

01:50:25   is search the Apple developer app,

01:50:27   because, or the documentation of course,

01:50:29   the Apple documentation.

01:50:30   'Cause then you'll at least hit upon a W2C talk

01:50:34   or a code example or a documentation example,

01:50:38   you'll at least hit upon something

01:50:39   that will tell you the name of the API.

01:50:41   And then you can search for the name of the API

01:50:43   specifically on the web,

01:50:45   and that will cut out almost all of that other stuff.

01:50:47   So that's the real answer.

01:50:49   - Oh, that'll cut out all the other stuff if you're lucky.

01:50:51   Back in the old days with name prefixes,

01:50:53   you'd have NS in front of things,

01:50:55   or you'd have CF or something like that.

01:50:56   But now with Swift where the thing is called View

01:50:58   and stuff like that,

01:50:59   then you have to add whatever proper nouns you can find.

01:51:01   So add SwiftUI, no space after the T,

01:51:04   and before the SwiftUI all in Word instead of just adding Swift.

01:51:08   I found that sometimes you can also throw in Xcode.

01:51:10   What you're trying to look for is words that you think will come up in close proximity

01:51:14   to that, like conceptually, that someone might mention Xcode in their question, especially

01:51:19   if they're a novice and don't know the name of a thing or whatever.

01:51:22   If you're lucky enough to come up with an NS or a UI, a UI table view, NS string, NS

01:51:28   -- that will definitely get you -- what you want to do is you want to weed out the non-dev

01:51:33   of answers because the problem is you end up with all these people putting questions

01:51:38   that have nothing to do with development and have to do with using your Mac and you don't

01:51:41   want to see those and if you have a word overlap with them it's very difficult.

01:51:44   But if you throw in the word Xcode no one's going to mention that in their question about

01:51:47   iOS shortcuts unless they're actually developing it now.

01:51:50   The problem is most developers, experienced developers are not going to mention Xcode

01:51:55   in their question probably so yeah it's a bit of a challenge but domain specific searches

01:52:00   and even just doing stuff like Apple has dev forums, right?

01:52:02   If you're on that thing where you're like,

01:52:04   I don't even know what word to search for yet,

01:52:06   if you limit your search to the dev forums,

01:52:08   either by using a Google site colon search

01:52:10   or by using the dev forums own search,

01:52:11   I don't know if it has one, but I assume it does somewhere,

01:52:14   then that will let you find the proper nouns

01:52:17   and then you go back to the bigger Google

01:52:18   and throw in the proper nouns.

01:52:20   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:52:22   Draft, Pushcut and Collide.

01:52:25   And thanks to our members who support us directly.

01:52:26   you can join atp.fm/join and we will talk to you next week.

01:52:33   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:52:39   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:52:45   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:52:49   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:52:55   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:53:00   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:53:05   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:53:10   So that's Kasey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:53:14   Auntie Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C

01:53:19   USA, Syracuse

01:53:21   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:53:25   They didn't mean to, accidental (accidental)

01:53:30   Tech podcast so long

01:53:34   So did your family listen to the cavalcade of fuzzy cylinders as well?

01:53:40   Or were they just ignoring you while you were there playing mad scientist and making the house noisy?

01:53:44   They were not a fan of this test, and so I did it while Tiff was working in the basement and Adam was at school.

01:53:51   Because I was wondering if they had opinions about old vs. new or did none of them really care and they just want you to get this over with and get it back to just having a normal kitchen where you can play music?

01:53:59   can play music. Definitely the latter. I will occasionally ask, like you know, Tiff

01:54:05   is usually pretty amenable to like, "Hey, try these headphones, what do you

01:54:09   think?" You know, something like that. But this was a larger scale

01:54:12   thing that, you know, nobody in the house cares as much as I do. They just

01:54:17   want things to work and be good and fast. She took your AirPods Max though, right?

01:54:20   Aren't there like her favorite headphones now? Yeah, she wears them much of the

01:54:24   day when she's working up here because they're just, they're very comfortable on

01:54:27   and that's great, I mean, and I even went,

01:54:31   I figured like the AirPods Max have been out for what,

01:54:33   almost two years now, and so I figured surely

01:54:36   somebody has made a wide array of third party

01:54:40   magnetically attaching ear pads that can go on them

01:54:43   instead of the stock ones.

01:54:44   - That was the part that was uncomfortable to you?

01:54:46   'Cause I tried them on, I tried them on whenever

01:54:48   and I'm an alzle store just hanging out,

01:54:50   and I find the headband to be the thing

01:54:52   that's objectionable to me.

01:54:53   - So it isn't that the headband was pressing

01:54:55   against my head, it was, the AirPods Max,

01:54:57   as we discussed at great length when they came out

01:55:00   and I kind of reviewed them on the show,

01:55:01   whenever that was, two years ago,

01:55:03   their main problems are weight, they're very heavy

01:55:06   and that makes it hard to make it comfortable for headphones

01:55:09   it's not impossible, but it is harder.

01:55:12   And that their ear pads, like the contact area

01:55:15   that the ear pads touched your head

01:55:17   was almost too narrow of a rim,

01:55:19   and so it wasn't spreading that weight

01:55:21   across a very wide area, so it was like

01:55:24   digging in almost to your head,

01:55:25   and I find them to be okay for a few minutes,

01:55:29   but then if I wear them for like, say a whole morning,

01:55:31   I'll take them off and be like, I'll have a headache

01:55:33   and my head will hurt the rest of the day.

01:55:35   It's like, you don't realize how uncomfortable they are

01:55:37   until you take them off after a while,

01:55:38   then you're like, oh no, I feel terrible.

01:55:41   - And Tiff doesn't have that problem when she wears them?

01:55:42   - No, many people don't have that problem,

01:55:44   but it's just, yeah, whatever it is,

01:55:45   they're not comfortable on me,

01:55:47   and apparently you for different reasons.

01:55:49   - Yeah, 'cause I was wearing them for 30 seconds

01:55:51   in the Apple store and I was like,

01:55:52   hell no on this headband, cannot handle it.

01:55:54   - I know, and it's a shame because they sound amazing.

01:55:57   But I even tried, I bought, I found finally

01:56:00   there was one company I found on all the internet,

01:56:03   one company on Amazon that I found that had

01:56:06   third party ear pads for them, and they are softer.

01:56:09   But they look, they are made to look almost the same.

01:56:13   So they aren't wider, they don't have,

01:56:15   there's so many great aftermarket third party

01:56:20   ear pads for most regular headphones.

01:56:23   like Brainwaves is a popular brand of them.

01:56:25   There's these companies that make aftermarket ear pads

01:56:28   and they're like big and plush and they're really nice

01:56:30   and if you have a pair of headphones

01:56:31   that isn't very comfortable,

01:56:33   I suggest you try one of these,

01:56:34   like one of these ear pad things

01:56:35   that you can get on Amazon for like 25, 30 bucks.

01:56:38   They're oftentimes much more comfortable

01:56:41   and much more plush and everything like that.

01:56:43   And for AirPods Max, that just seemed not to exist.

01:56:45   And so I did find this one company that made this one

01:56:47   and it was a little more comfortable

01:56:50   but it wasn't enough to make a difference.

01:56:52   Like it was still, it was more comfortable,

01:56:54   but it was still very uncomfortable after a long time.

01:56:58   So it's a shame.

01:56:58   I wish those fit me, but they just don't.

01:57:01   - And speaking of third party things for Apple products,

01:57:04   when you got the shorter power cords,

01:57:07   did you find ones that are like color matched

01:57:09   and like nice and pliable?

01:57:11   Like I would like to see the setup of your like,

01:57:13   when you again get everything off your counters again

01:57:15   and just set it up the way you want it.

01:57:16   Did you find a nice cord that just is long enough

01:57:19   to reach your outlets and isn't like stiff and weird

01:57:21   or the wrong color?

01:57:23   I found basic white, like, you know,

01:57:26   lamp cord-looking kind of ones.

01:57:28   So, you know, the basic, you know,

01:57:29   like two-conductor, you know, standard, you know,

01:57:32   white plug that comes straight out.

01:57:33   Like, I was hoping to get a right angle plug, at least,

01:57:35   so I could make it a little more flush against the wall.

01:57:37   But, you know, I just did a quick Amazon search

01:57:39   during the last episode and just, you know,

01:57:41   ordered it after the show.

01:57:44   But, you know, they're fine.

01:57:45   You know, it was $10 on Amazon for a two-pack.

01:57:48   It was-- it's fine.

01:57:49   I have one foot cables now.

01:57:51   And you can see from the picture,

01:57:53   they're right next to the outlets.

01:57:54   I don't need a whole bunch of extra cable.

01:57:56   And it was totally fine to just pop out the stock cables,

01:58:01   pop these in.

01:58:03   It doesn't look as nice 'cause they aren't braided.

01:58:06   And they have the regular cheap lamp plug ends.

01:58:10   - Are they kinked from how they were wrapped

01:58:12   when they were packaged?

01:58:12   - No, they're only one foot cables.

01:58:14   They're too short to have those problems.

01:58:16   And they're flexible and it's fine.

01:58:17   It isn't like pushing them out from the wall or anything.

01:58:19   So it's fine.

01:58:20   Speaking of that, I went down this little rabbit hole

01:58:23   briefly and never actually ordered anything.

01:58:25   I should revisit it.

01:58:26   All of my speakers are connected with just plain old speaker

01:58:29   wire.

01:58:30   And--

01:58:31   That's all you need.

01:58:32   Well, there's lots of different ways

01:58:34   that you can connect speaker wire to a speaker.

01:58:37   And the way I have done it is the laziest way,

01:58:39   which is you just strip off a little bit of the insulation.

01:58:42   And then you twist the wire so it's a stiff little thing.

01:58:45   And then you--

01:58:45   I forgot what it's called.

01:58:47   There's a name for it.

01:58:47   Someone in the chat room will say it in two seconds.

01:58:49   but there's like a post with a hole through it

01:58:50   and you shove the wire through the hole

01:58:52   and then you screw down--

01:58:53   - A binding post.

01:58:54   - Yeah, and then you screw down the little thing

01:58:56   and then it's interesting.

01:58:57   It's fine, it works fine.

01:58:58   But the problem is it is like,

01:58:59   put the wire through a hole and you screw a thing.

01:59:01   It's in there, right?

01:59:03   You're pressing the conductor against the little metal thing

01:59:07   with the screw thing, right?

01:59:09   And that sounds fine, except for the fact

01:59:11   the back of my receiver has lots of those things

01:59:15   plugged into it because you've got all the speakers

01:59:17   going there, and each of them have two conductors,

01:59:19   and they all go to the back of the receiver,

01:59:20   and all of them are screwed into these little posts,

01:59:23   and those wires are all routed all around the room,

01:59:26   and then behind the TV and into the thing,

01:59:28   and it's such a pain in the butt to like,

01:59:31   I don't have enough slack to like pull the whole receiver

01:59:33   out of the entertainment center,

01:59:35   but you have to pull it out enough

01:59:36   to be able to get to the wires,

01:59:37   and God forbid you have to like turn the thing around,

01:59:39   and it's just, so another solution that would solve this is,

01:59:42   that's supported by lots of different receivers

01:59:44   and speakers, including my receiver and my speakers,

01:59:46   what they call a banana plug, which is an actual plug that plugs into and out of that

01:59:51   thing that you screw down. I don't know if banana plugs are considered to be worse or

01:59:56   better or whatever. All I know is that I don't have them and I wish I did. But then I started

02:00:00   looking into that. You can easily convert them. Yeah, no, you totally can. Like, these

02:00:05   are banana plug ready. All I'd have to do is buy some little banana plug-ins. You just

02:00:09   buy these things, they're pretty cheap, and you take your speaker wires out, you probably

02:00:14   cut them and strip them again, or whatever.

02:00:16   And then you put them into the bin.

02:00:17   - You screw them in.

02:00:18   - Yep, and then you're all set.

02:00:19   But there's like 17 different ways to do that,

02:00:21   and there's lots of very strong opinions

02:00:23   about which ones are and aren't good,

02:00:24   and which ones are gonna corrode,

02:00:25   and which ones are gonna do this,

02:00:26   'cause this is audio, and I'm like,

02:00:28   how much of this is real, and how much of this is people?

02:00:30   - I can tell you, I've used these before.

02:00:32   None of that matters at all.

02:00:35   Because the great thing about Speaker Wire,

02:00:37   you know, there's all the audio files,

02:00:39   you know, the high-end audio, you know,

02:00:41   shops and blogs and magazines,

02:00:43   They will tell you how much cabling matters

02:00:46   and it really, really doesn't.

02:00:48   You could unbend a coat hanger

02:00:51   and run it to power your speakers

02:00:53   and it would sound just as good as the $5,000 a foot,

02:00:57   gold infused, never seen air.

02:01:01   There's so much ridiculousness in speaker cables.

02:01:04   - I'm not worried about the electrical conductivity.

02:01:06   I'm worried about physically speaking

02:01:08   because it's stranded wire.

02:01:09   My speaker wire is stranded.

02:01:10   It's not a coat hanger. - Yeah, most is.

02:01:11   - It's a solid conductor.

02:01:12   I'm worried about that stranded wire being crimped

02:01:15   in some weird thing and then eventually just cracking off

02:01:17   and just my speaker wire going bink

02:01:19   and then no longer being connected

02:01:20   because I put it into the banana plug

02:01:21   and screwed it down too hard or something.

02:01:23   So anyway, I haven't gotten around to it.

02:01:25   - It's way easier than you think it is.

02:01:27   It's really not a problem.

02:01:29   It's very idiot proof, lots of idiots do it

02:01:31   and they're fine.

02:01:33   Keep in mind with speaker wire,

02:01:34   typically speakers are stationary.

02:01:37   And so any crazy way you might hook up the wire,

02:01:41   it's not gonna be under a lot of stress

02:01:43   'cause it's not moving and flexing.

02:01:44   - Well, but it's not the speaker end

02:01:46   that I'm worried about, it's the receiver end.

02:01:47   I wouldn't put banana plugs on a speaker

02:01:49   because who cares, they're fine, I can see them.

02:01:51   I can get to the back of the speakers real easily, right?

02:01:53   It's the stupid receiver.

02:01:54   And part of the thing that's keeping me from doing it

02:01:56   is like, oh, if I get banana plugs,

02:01:58   now I have to get to the back of the receiver again.

02:02:00   And this time, when I initially do it,

02:02:02   there's no banana plugs on it now,

02:02:03   so I gotta do the whole thing of like finding a way

02:02:06   to pull the stuff through and rotating the thing sideways

02:02:08   my stupid glass shelves that are on.

02:02:11   Like when you try to rotate the receiver,

02:02:12   the glass shelves go off the little nubbins

02:02:14   that it's supposed to be on and it crashes down.

02:02:16   It's just, it annoys me so much.

02:02:18   Like every time I see someone who has an AV setup

02:02:21   where they can just walk behind their equipment,

02:02:22   I'm like, oh my God, how much?

02:02:24   I would love to have that.

02:02:25   Can you imagine just walking behind your equipment

02:02:27   and being able to get access to all the back panels?

02:02:30   I do not have that luxury.

02:02:31   It's jammed into a corner that's really hard to get to.

02:02:34   And it's just, it's such a mess.

02:02:35   So then every time I think about the Benet plugs,

02:02:37   to look at my setup, I'm like, well, it's working now,

02:02:40   just don't touch it, but if I ever have to go back there

02:02:42   again, I'm gonna order a mess of banana plugs probably

02:02:44   and just get back, and the reason the banana plugs

02:02:46   will help is that I can just yank the freakin' receiver out

02:02:49   and the banana plugs will pop pop pop out, who cares?

02:02:51   - Oh no. - I'll pop 'em back in

02:02:51   when it goes back in.

02:02:52   - No, that's not, they don't work the way you think.

02:02:55   So there's two things. - They're not that easy

02:02:56   to get out. - Number one,

02:02:57   banana plugs are huge, so they actually might not,

02:03:01   like they're way bigger than you think from pictures.

02:03:02   - Oh, I have plenty of room behind it,

02:03:04   they're not gonna hit into it.

02:03:04   - Okay, and then number two, they hold on really tightly

02:03:07   in the sockets, 'cause they have little springy ends

02:03:10   that kinda get compressed, and so they're--

02:03:12   - Oh yeah, no, that's the banana part of it.

02:03:14   - Yeah, so they don't pop out easily.

02:03:16   You gotta give 'em a good yank,

02:03:18   and so I don't think this is gonna do what you think it is,

02:03:20   and I don't think it's gonna save as much.

02:03:22   - Well, I mean, maybe I just reach behind there

02:03:24   and pop them out, because here's the thing.

02:03:26   If you don't have enough slack to get them in or out,

02:03:30   that means you have to thread, you know,

02:03:32   you know what I just said, it's like,

02:03:33   it's threading it through a hole in a post

02:03:35   and then screwing a plastic thing down.

02:03:36   If you ever look at the back of the receiver,

02:03:38   there's like a dozen of those right next to each other.

02:03:41   So imagine trying to like lay on the ground

02:03:44   and shove your body into the AV cabinet

02:03:46   and crane your head around with a white on your forehead

02:03:49   so that you can shove in the middle wire

02:03:51   of the center channel speaker between 17 other ones

02:03:54   like with very little slack, shove it through a hole

02:03:58   and the little post that's in the middle of that

02:04:00   and then screw the thing down and it's so hard to do.

02:04:02   It is just like, I need like a, what do you call it?

02:04:06   Endoscopy equipment, like the surgeons use

02:04:08   with like a fiber optic cable and a little thing

02:04:10   'cause it's just, it is not fit for humans.

02:04:13   And I guess the solution would be,

02:04:14   just put seven feet of slack on all your speaker wires,

02:04:17   but that ship is sailed 'cause I made a mistake

02:04:19   when I laid down all the speaker wire

02:04:20   and I do not have enough slack at the receiver end.

02:04:25   And I don't wanna run all the wire again.

02:04:26   - I had forgotten that like, you know,

02:04:28   you have a billion speakers and I only have two,

02:04:30   so it's different, you're dealing with a different degree

02:04:32   of complexity here, so yeah, I'd say,

02:04:34   yeah, go ahead and get 'em.

02:04:35   But, and they're very easy.

02:04:38   The great thing about speaker wire, again,

02:04:40   like it's, speaker wire is so dumb,

02:04:42   and it is so tolerant of mistakes or sloppy work.

02:04:47   Like, literally, as long as the positive and negative wires

02:04:51   aren't touching each other, and you're not shorting it out,

02:04:53   you're fine.

02:04:54   Like, anything else you do, it's fine.

02:04:56   You can use regular lamp cord, you can use,

02:04:58   like, you don't have to get fancy cable,

02:05:00   You don't have, like, if a few little strands

02:05:03   break off on one of your ends,

02:05:04   you don't have the full number of strands

02:05:06   to shove into the hole, it's fine, doesn't matter.

02:05:08   It's so easy, you can do pretty much whatever you want

02:05:11   and be as sloppy as you need to be,

02:05:13   and again, as long as you're not shorting it out, it's fine.

02:05:15   - So were we doing ATP when the mouse chewed

02:05:18   through my speaker cable, do you remember that?

02:05:20   - Might have been before we started this one.

02:05:21   - I don't know, I don't remember that.

02:05:23   - I don't think so.

02:05:24   - It was shortly after I had first set up speaker wire

02:05:26   in my house, maybe it was after I just moved in,

02:05:29   We had a mouse problem chewed right through the speaker wire.

02:05:33   Oh, I'd be so mad.

02:05:34   That's bad.

02:05:34   I don't know.

02:05:35   It chewed through one of the conductors of the speaker wire.

02:05:37   It was like a clean surgical cut.

02:05:39   Like, you saw a speaker wire with the two little conductors,

02:05:41   and all of a sudden, one of the conductors just stopped.

02:05:42   And it was like a three-inch gap where

02:05:44   there was none of that wire.

02:05:45   And then it started again.

02:05:46   I was like, well, how would I explain why the speaker--

02:05:48   and speaking of the different things,

02:05:50   we just had recently the thing where my tweeter stopped

02:05:52   working on my standard channel, and I

02:05:53   couldn't figure out what was going wrong,

02:05:55   and I eventually figured it out.

02:05:56   It's real important to have all those different cone sizes.

02:05:58   'cause if you're missing one, you notice.

02:06:00   [beeping]

02:06:03   [ Silence ]