@matigo The beep was the spoken word.
Me: "Hey, Siri, what's the time?"
HomePod: "At the tone it will be 1535. Beep."
I love many different music styles, I've been doing a great deal of exploring in the 6 days of owning a HomePod.
An example is this Scottish drums & pips number https://youtu.be/2DF-pIojGME - at no stage do the thundering drums overpower the wail of the bagpipes. It really is impressive technology.
Lindsey Stirling’s Spontaneous Me video https://youtu.be/pRPOztxXWlQ is awesome when the audio goes through the HomePod. A driving, thumping base is predominant but the violin parts are never overpowered by the thundering base.
Tomorrow at a Mac User Group satellite meeting, I'll be pitting the HomePod up against a 12-year-old iPod HiFi. Should be interesting: the room is really too big for a single HomePod to effectively fill it.
At Aldi today I bought a five-way garden power tool: it is a brushcutter; line trimmer; hedge clipper; lawn edger & chainsaw depending on which of five attachments go on the power & drive end. Hell, a dedicated lawn edger costs almost as much as this implement.
The trick will be assembling the thing from various bits.
Giving the antacids a right old hammering today. Guts is in turmoil, I dare not try coffee in any fashion. Vomiting up my lunch didn’t help matters at all.
Here’s how the HomePod works its acoustic magic (extract from a Cult-of-Mac review):
Once you’ve chosen a good spot, HomePod does the rest. It takes a series of steps to perfectly adjust its sound output to accommodate the room it’s in.
Using its microphones, HomePod detects any nearby walls to determine how sound will bounce off them. It then uses its tweeters to form an array of sound beams assigned to direct and ambient sounds. The speaker shoots ambient sounds at the walls, and focuses direct sounds right at you.
When you play music, HomePod analyzes the left and right channels of your track and decides which sounds should go into which beams. It also measures the reflection of the bass from the subwoofer to ensure that the bottom end doesn’t take over your music.
Thanks to its accelerometer, HomePod knows when you move it, and it goes through this setup process again.