It was a a few years since Alexa started listening to me everywhere. After an initial honeymoon with an original Echo Dot (a device I still keep is the best alarm clock ever), I slowly filled my house with Amazon review units. These days, I’ve mostly run speakers made by Google and Apple for benchmarking. The fact is that Amazon’s smart speakers work so well that there was never a reason to change my entire system.
In terms of price, compatibility, audio quality – and now, thanks to its sleek, round appearance, the new Echo remains one of the best smart speakers for most people. As long as you don’t mind Alexa or you don’t have a revenge related to Bezos, I would go so far as to say that this is the best $ 100 speaker.
Round sound
The biggest difference between the new Echo and the older tube-shaped models is the rounded design. It looks like one of those foam dodgeballs I used to get into middle school, but with four rubber buttons on top and a power cord for the tail.
This new shape is not only an aesthetic change, but also reshapes the way the speaker interacts with acoustic environments. I noticed that the redesigned stereo speaker pushes the sound around a camera more evenly than the state-of-the-art Echo, making it much louder for the entire camera than before.
This makes it more usable than the gold blocks of Amazon’s smart speaker line, placed between the smaller Echo Dot (which comes in standard, children’s and watch editions) and the larger Echo Studio. Just know that do what they have a slightly larger footprint than before.
Sounds bigger, better and more balanced than ever. I left my review unit on the kitchen counter – one of the most useful places for a smart speaker because I can set timers – and it easily filled both the kitchen and my attached living room with enough sound for quarantined dance parties. , along with my fiancée and clumsy rescue dogs.
The new Echo has a few things under the hood that allow it to gain its predecessors. First up is a new adaptive EQ engine, which allows the speaker to listen and adapt to the room in which it is played, using information it obtains from the on-board microphones.
Put it next to walls or corners and it can tame the bass to sound a little better. It’s not what you hear, it’s what you don’t; adaptive sound is meant to make your music sound the same everywhere. I moved it to my room and didn’t notice a huge change in balance or soundtrack (how “big” the music feels in space), but I noticed that it sounds much less boom in tighter corners than the last generation.
The new speaker drivers also enhance low-end performance with a 3-inch woofer that extends quite deep into the frequency spectrum for a speaker of this size. It’s also much stronger than competitors like Google Nest Audio (8/10, recommended by WIRED), which I had placed next to it on the counter (although the bass gets cloudy at full volume).
Then there’s the built-in Zigbee receiver that lets you easily connect a ton of smart home devices and an Amazon Sidewalk receiver, a recently launched Amazon service that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to keep devices connected outside but close to home. you.
Family preferences
As a Spotify user for a long time, I was constantly impressed by how easy it is to set up Echo devices with Spotify Connect and it was just as simple this time. I set it up in the Alexa app and soon broadcast Mariah Carey’s Christmas hits.