Thinking about HomePod

Whoa. Love. This. Speaker.

Sound quality is amazing and at 90% volume (which is VERY loud) I can just barely say "Hey Siri" almost under my breath and she hears me.

Wow. The reviews were spot on, this is truly an amazing piece of hardware in every way. The box was heavier than the speaker, though, that made me laugh.

Well, very much against my better judgement, I succumbed and bought one this morning.

My excuse, I thought it would help with the HomeKit Bridge beta testing.

Had an initial glitch with set-up as it stalled with a white screen. Googling the issue determined it was because I didn't have the Apple Music App installed on my iPhone . This obviously slipped through Apple's QA Testing or maybe they couldn't imagine anybody not using their magical music app!

Reluctantly, installed Apple Music and then the set-up completed.

Sound quality is reasonable IMHO and it is quite impressive and as previously reported the HomePod can hear you say 'Hey Siri' even when the music is playing loudly - this is better than an Amazon Echo can handle an Alexa request when loud music is playing.

Airfoil streaming (with a music source of my choice rather than Apple's) seems to work well - Currently streaming from Qobuz running on my iMac in 24bit - 192kHz - not sure the mono HomePod speaker justifies the higher quality music, but a useful test all the same.

So you're saying any source can used via Airfoil? I currently have no desire to buy one but I am intrigued. And if that's the case my intrigue is growing.

Airfoil streaming (with a music source of my choice rather than Apple's) seems to work well - Currently streaming from Qobuz running on my iMac in 24bit - 192kHz - not sure the mono HomePod speaker justifies the higher quality music, but a useful test all the same.

So you're saying any source can used via Airfoil? I currently have no desire to buy one but I am intrigued. And if that's the case my intrigue is growing.

Yes, in The Airfoil App you can select system audio or an Application (in this case Qobuz) and then you select which speaker (or speakers) you want to stream to. It works very well.

I also use Audio Hijack (also from Rogue Amoeba) in quite a useful way. I have a set of Yamaha NX-N500 speakers as my desktop speakers. They are very good but lack a sub-woofer connection. So I use Audio Hijack to capture the audio from Qobuz and then I split it in two, sending stereo output to the NX-N500 and separately mono output via a Explorer2 USB DAC to my sub-woofer.

Rogue Amoeba produce excellent software IMHO.

[jay (support)]

Rogue Amoeba produce excellent software IMHO.

+1

Rogue Amoeba produce excellent software IMHO.

+1

Agreed.

FYI, even without Airfoil you can send the system sound (which means anything you are playing basically) to the HomePod via Airplay. Just select it in System Preferences->Sound->Output. Or click the volume control in the menu (prior to 10.12 hold option when clicking). You will get a list of all available outputs, including airplay targets.