Jean-Louis Gassée:

As a testament to Apple’s place in the pantheon of electronics, reviews for a new product from Cupertino come fast and — often — furious. HomePod, Apple’s contribution to the “smart speaker” genre, exacerbates the venomenon, pardon, phenomenon.

And these three rules for evaluating speakers:

First, we must keep in mind the influence of the room and our position in it, how reflective material can make music sound brittle, how carpets and curtains will deaden the sound — or provide welcome balance for an overly bright room.

Second, all speaker comparisons must be double-blind, where neither the person running the test nor the evaluators know which device is on at the moment.

Third, and most important, output level differences matter. Contestant speakers must be carefully equalized to within 1db, because in any comparison the louder speaker will always sound better.

And on tuning a speaker for a specific room:

How well the device can do this depends on the number of microphones (you need at least two for spatial location) and speakers (the HomePod has seven). In theory, more speakers are better, because it means the device will have more control as it adjusts the balance of sound energy. In reality, the smaller speakers — the tweeters — are the most important; lower frequencies impart little directional information, although the computer can still decide to reduce low frequency output in general if the room “booms” too much.

And:

Put less elegantly, in consumer advertising lore we call early adopters “dogs”: They eagerly snarf any new food. This tells us nothing; we need to wait and see if they come back to the pail.

That process, the spreading of Word-of-Mouth, will be complicated by software updates supposed to appear in the next few months — and for ever after that.

Terrific read, lots more than these few pull quotes.