HomePod mini as Apple TV Speakers

One of the biggest Apple mysteries of our time is why the company chose to add a new Home Theatre Audio experience to the Apple TV that required the use of a discontinued product.

While the full-sized HomePod sounds great with the Apple TV, enabling a rich Dolby Atmos soundscape, that’s not going to be an option for everyone, since the original HomePod is getting really hard to find, and we imagine that a replacement is probably still a long way off.

Unfortunately, when Apple debuted its Home Theatre Audio, allowing one or two HomePods to be used as default speakers, the smaller HomePod mini was left out of the experience entirely. You could use a HomePod mini as a standard AirPlay speaker, but you can’t set it up right now as a Default Audio Output — which also means that you can’t use the HomePod mini with the new eARC feature in the 2021 Apple TV 4K.

The good news is that Apple will be fixing this in tvOS 15 and the corresponding HomePod mini update.

While we’re pretty sure you’re not going to get Dolby Atmos out of a pair of HomePod mini speakers, you will be able to use them as the Default Audio Output from your Apple TV 4K. This will still provide better sound than simply using them via AirPlay, since like the same feature on the full-size HomePod, the system will be able to take advantage of computational audio to provide richer and more balanced sound.