It has been 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 gradually filled my house with Amazon rating units. Nowadays, I mainly use speakers made by Google and Apple for comparison tests. The fact is, Amazon’s smart speakers work so well that there was never a reason to switch my entire system.
In terms of price, compatibility, audio quality – and now, thanks to an elegant and rounded redesign, appearance – the new Echo remains one of the best smart speakers for most people. As long as you don’t care about Alexa, or don’t have a vengeance related to Bezos, I would go further and say that this is the best $ 100 speaker out there.
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 that I used to pick up in high school, but with four rubber buttons on the top and a power cord for a tail.
This new form 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 sound around a room more evenly than the state-of-the-art Echo, making it much more of a speaker for the entire room than it used to be.
This makes it more usable as the goldilocks in Amazon’s line of smart speakers, located between the smallest Echo Dot (which comes in standard, kids and clocked editions) and the largest Echo Studio. Just know that does have a slightly larger footprint than before.
It looks bigger, better and more balanced than ever. I left my assessment unit on the kitchen counter – one of the most useful places for a smart speaker, as I can set timers – and it easily filled the kitchen and living room with enough sound for dancing parties in quarantine with my fiancee and our awkward rescue dogs.
The new Echo has a few things under the hood that allow it to outperform its predecessors. First, there is a new adaptive EQ mechanism, which allows the speaker to hear and adjust to the room in which he is playing, using the information he obtains from the built-in microphones.
Place it close to walls or corners, and it can tame the bass to sound a little better. It is not what you hear, it is what you do not hear; adaptive sound was created to make your music sound the same everywhere. I moved it around my room and didn’t notice a big change in balance or on the sound stage (how “big” the music looks in space), but I noticed that it sounded a lot less loud in tighter corners than the last generation.
The new speaker drivers also increase low-end performance, with the 3-inch woofer extending deep into the frequency spectrum for a speaker of this size. It is also much louder than competitors like Google Nest Audio (8/10, WIRED recommend), which I had sat next to him at the counter (although the bass is cloudy at full volume).
Then there’s the integrated Zigbee receiver, which lets you easily connect a ton of smart home devices, and an Amazon Sidewalk receiver, a soon-to-be-launched Amazon service that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to keep devices connected outside, but close to your home. .
Family favorites
As a longtime user of Spotify, I have been constantly impressed with the ease of configuring Echo devices with Spotify Connect, and this time it was as simple as that. I set it up on the Alexa app and was broadcasting Christmas hits from Mariah Carey quickly.