hey guys it's lance at mac sound solutions hope you're doing well today well it finally came in
the mail we ordered this like a month and a half ago and i finally got my homepod mini my christmas
present from my wife so um i'm just going to do a quick unboxing we're going to test it out
see what its features are and i'm going to see how it compares to this guy which is a jbl charge 3.
it's battery powered you can take it anywhere and charge your iphone with it you can pair two
of these together just like you can with a homepod mini but these you can take outside so it's got an
advantage right there plus it's bigger chances are it's probably going to sound better so we're going
to see how it performs compared to the charge 3. i mean price range wise they're close to being
the same charge 3 is 120 bucks but the question to me is should i have bought just another charge 3
um or should i have a homepod mini and basically this is going to be my speaker in my bathroom
hi i'm siri welcome to homepod you can't tell but i'm waving let's get started
say hey siri what can you do so when you take a look at the tech specs on apple's website
the homepod mini basically is a mono speaker with a 360 sound field meaning that it pushes sound
out in 360 degrees and it does this by taking a single speaker and aiming it at the base so the
speaker is facing down as opposed to you know any other speakers where the speaker is aiming at you
this speaker is aiming at the floor so if you pick up the homepod mini while it's playing
music and you turn it over and have the bottom of the speaker aiming at you you're gonna hear a lot
more high end and it's very kind of crispy ugly sounding so apple had to do some weird acoustical
designing here to compensate putting in a very crispy speaker and then you're basically rolling
it off with the surface that you set it on so if you put this speaker on a little stand that has a
hole in the base you're going to be getting a lot more high end out of these speakers
and they're not designed to be mounted this way they are designed to sit on a flat surface so when
you're looking into stands keep that in mind and of course if you put it on something like a mouse
pad or some other carpeted surface it's going to roll off the high end even further than say
putting it on a countertop when i first turned it on i was like ooh i don't know if i like the sound
of this and it was immediately the high end part of the speaker sound and the fact that the bass
is probably between 60 and 100 hertz and it's it's kind of woofy sounding so you have this crispy
high end that you're basically setting the speaker down on its face and it cuts off a lot of the high
end when you do that and then you've got sort of an over compensated boosted low end that's in the
in between 60 and 100 hertz so when i first got it turned on and played some tracks that i am
familiar with i was like not sure i like the sound of this and i might just have to return it because
i found the high end to be a little annoying not that pleasant and the fact that it's mono
and it kind of makes you wonder what were apple's engineers thinking when they designed this speaker
aiming an overly crispy speaker down at a surface you know if the speaker was aiming
up and wasn't so overly crispy it might sound better and it's still going to get that 360 spread
with the little spreader they have in there so it's a little odd to me the way they
designed this thing now the jbl charge 3 is a stereo speaker so if you're going with just
one speaker it might be the better choice and the charge 3 also has the ability to use a wired
connection instead of bluetooth and you get the benefit of that usb jack which you can charge a
phone or an ipad off it whether it's running off its internal battery or if it's plugged
into the wall and it's waterproof so maybe the jbl is the better choice to have in the bathroom
because people take multiple showers a day and it gets steamy and maybe over time the homepod mini
isn't going to do as well in that kind of humid environment so let's compare the two speakers
i was all alone
i needed to get out
just to shake my phone
so i know that audio test is a little silly but i just thought maybe you'd like to hear
the differences even in that recording so when i listen to the two recordings to me that jbl
actually sounds better than the mini but that's not what i found when i
listen to the speakers playing the same song so to me it's pretty obvious that the homepod mini has
more high end upper high end and a little more bass which i was surprised and the jbl
was definitely more mid-rangey and as you crank up the jbl the louder it gets the more harsh it
gets it can get pretty darn loud which is good for sticking a speaker outside be able to crank it up
but it becomes kind of uglier as you turn it up whereas the homepod mini really keeps a consistent
sound through the gain stages so you can go from pretty quiet to its full on level which is not as
loud as the jbl but it sounds clean and it sounds pretty much the same at any level so that's pretty
surprising and pretty cool so i have to say i think the homepod mini wins the sound test
one other note is that if you're gonna use the homepod mini to watch television the
audio and video are always in sync now when you use bluetooth connection with the jbl
the audio and video are out of sync so it's not great for watching tv or you know beaming
your laptop to it to watch youtube videos it's fine if you plug directly in with a cable to the
auxiliary input of the jbl so basically for watching tv homepod mini really beats it out
so a few other notes um you know when you say hey siri to the homepod mini she can hear you
you can be across the room you can go hey siri dim the lights and she'll go okay i set the bedroom
lamp to one percent it's like whoa you're too loud it's 11 o'clock at night why are you yelling at me
and uh you know you can program that in the home kid app and set up a shortcut so at a
certain time of day she turns herself down but she's still too loud even at the lowest setting
she doesn't need to respond at all if i say hey siri dim the lights i don't want to hear her
say i am dimming the lights or i have just dim the lights i don't need a response apple needs
to change that it you know when you ask her a question hey siri what's the weather yes you want
to hear a response but when you say hey siri dim the lights you can see that the lights are dimming
she needs to be smarter and she's not that smart they've been working on her for a long time but
they need to work harder the other thing is when you first see the homepod mini in the presentation
you're like oh it must be battery powered there's no wires and they zoom and they pan and
they wrap around you don't see a wire and then eventually in ladder shots in the presentation
oh it's got a wire but you still think it first well it must be battery powered then you can plug
in the wire to charge it but that's not the case it's always plugged in the wire is always attached
you can't have it out in the middle of the room unless you have some power outlet in the floor
and run it up through a special stand like tim cook has nice stand there tim and actually that's
the nicest stand you could have because it's in the middle of the room and it's putting out that
360 sound when you plug it into a wall and you've only got five feet well you can't have it out in
the middle of the room overall it sounds pretty good you know for the size and you know i'm sure
there's better speakers out there you can get a stereo pair of speakers but you're not going to
have all that apple integration and i might buy a second one i'm not sure yet i've decided the
jbl is going to live in the bathroom because it can handle all the water and the humidity
and i'm going to have the homepod mini as a nightstand i like white noise at night so
you can actually ask siri to play you different types of sounds but i like the one i recorded
of a stream that i where i go fishing and that's my nightly sound at night i can't stand silence
it just drives me crazy being a recording engineer
i don't like silence okay thanks a lot for watching please subscribe to my channel give
me the thumbs up or the thumbs down and we'll see you on the next max sound solutions video