It Produces Great Sound
We’re not going to mince words here. While the HomePod mini is a great speaker for its price, it’s still a $99 speaker. The HomePod mini has sound quality that punches above its weight class, in our opinion, but there’s no way it should be expected to hold its own against any of the more premium speakers on the market.
Arguably the HomePod’s biggest failing as a mainstream product was that Apple made it a premium speaker, but that’s a good thing for anybody who wants great, room-filling sound quality that’s tied tightly into the Apple ecosystem. Granted, that makes it a niche product — we can’t argue that you can get comparable sound quality from a wide range of other speaker makers, possibly with even more features — but it doesn’t change the fact that if you want the best-sounding HomePod, then the HomePod mini is not it.
While it’s a somewhat more pricey option, a pair of full-sized HomePods provides even more outstanding sound quality, since you can easily combine them into a single stereo speaker, offering an even more expansive soundstage that’s enhanced by all the amazing technology that Apple has packed into it.
In fact, if you’ve never heard a pair of original HomePods playing in stereo mode, you owe it to yourself to try to give it a listen if you still can.
However, even a single full-sized HomePod provides impressive sound, thanks to its ability to adjust its audio profile to the room, compensating for different kinds of acoustic surfaces to eliminate echo, excessive bass, and unwanted reverb. It’s arguably the smartest speaker ever made when it comes to audio, but so many of those “smarts” are things that you don’t really get to see, simply because it works like technology should, improving your experience quietly in the background rather than giving you dozens of different settings to monitor and tweak.
The original HomePod is to audio what the modern iPhone camera system is to taking photos.