Hey what’s up guys! I’m back here and this is Google home max! It’s brand-new but you might have forgotten about it, since its announcement a couple weeks ago. So let me refresh your memory on exactly what it is.
So we already had Google home Mini, this little donut sized puck speaker which is $49 and then we have Google home, which is the original, it’s about the size of like a large coffee mug and it’s 119 bucks. After that this is Google home max, this it’s like the size of probably a watermelon.
Right now its pretty heavy too and this will cost 399. So the design here is pretty solid, inside its its dual 4.5 inch woofers behind the mesh here and then dual point seven inch tweeters. So right off the bat the biggest advantage to home max having this cabinet, that’s so big with so much more space is. Dedicated drivers for dedicated frequencies. I want sideways here in landscape mode these drivers are gonna give you stereo audio which pretty much no other smart speaker does.
Apple Home pod won’t even do that from what I’ve been told. It’s a pretty simple looking speaker. It just kind of blends in. You don’t really want it to be too flashy after all. So it comes in two colors black and white or charcoal and chalk up there. You got these lights in the middle of the mesh and then there really are no buttons up at the front or the sides or anything just a single touch bar at the top. You slide left and right to adjust the volume and you can touch in the middle to play pause simple as that and it sits on a little magnetic circular pad that it comes with.
It’s pretty dense and then there’s some magnets in the bottom of the speaker and it just kind of slaps onto the bottom and that acts as an isolation pad so it doesn’t Rumble, whatever surface it’s on. which is pretty cool.You have that in a lot of high-end speakers that sit on bookshelves or on desktops. So it’s cool that it comes with that. What’s even cooler is that if for some reason you buy two of these you can set them up vertically like bookshelf speakers. They pair with each other and each one is a channel in a stereo audio, so you can get some real separation and there are these little isolation pads, just slap on the side, so they can stand up and look great.
Now the volume control works with the correct orientation as well and if you accidentally turn it upside down you get a little warning message. By the way the Google home is upside down it’ll work best if you turn it over. So I’m gonna do that.
Now the rest of the hardware, if you flip it around to the back you’ll see up at the top is meats which I mentioned. I wanted it to be a button because on the mini you could get out of sync but now you can’t meet the mics with just your voice anymore. So it’s just a switch so I guess that’s less confusing. Then the bottom corner you get your headphone jack to plug in an external audio source. Like a record player or whatever else you got going on a USB C port. nice I don’t know what I’d use it for exactly, but nice. I plugged my phone in it charged which is cool but that’s about it.
And then you have some power cables. The cable itself on the white one is like olive off white greenish color. Not sure why, but what I do like about it is a small end to it. Meaning the power circuits are all on the speaker itself. So, it leaves room for other stuff at your outlet, unlike the other two Google homes.
But let’s get to the meat of this, which is how does it sound. it is a four hundred dollar premium smart speaker. So, it better sound great! So, how does it sound? It sounds great, it gets ridiculously loud. The speakers are twenty times more powerful than these Google home speakers, which is nuts. When you’re talking to the assistant, it literally sounds like there’s another person in the room with you. It’s kind of Crappy! To find out you really get all the benefits of the dedicated drivers though, when you just listen to music at full blast it’s stupid loud obviously, and unless they’re playing music for a party you’ll probably never use it this loud. It does distort a bit at this volume but at seventy seventy-five percent volume it sounds great and is still pretty damn loud. The original Google home sounded alright, but damn it has a lot of rich punchy bass and a nice clarity to everything across the board.
It is exaggerated like, don’t get me wrong it is a v-shaped equalizer because it’s not a reference monitor. it’s a speaker designed for listening. It’s trying to color it up and make it sound fun. So the bass is still really punchy and impressive.
And that’s also where the microphones come in. first of all it needs those mics to hear you say commands from like 20-plus feet away over the music. It’s already playing pretty loud and it does a pretty good job at that. It also uses those mics for what’s called smart sound, when speakers get big enough they can produce frequencies so low that they literally bounce off the walls in the room you’re in. like I’m sure you’ve been in a room where the sound just resonates everywhere and it overpowers everything else. This is supposed to eliminate that. It uses the microphones to measure the acoustics of the room it’s in, figure out how close the nearest wall is, so it’s not overpowering you with base, and then makes its adjustments accordingly.
Like it sounds good anyway but the idea is really smart it’s machine learning The speaker definitely likes to be in the corner of a room in the first place. it’s not an omni directional speaker like the home mini or like a 360 degree sound. All the audio is going in one direction so you tend to put it near a wall or somewhere in the corner. Then let it fill the room from there and you can also control the sound via the app. So if you want to add more or less basing or already getting you can do that pretty easily.
So that’s what you’re getting. It’s a kind of hyper smart premium speaker you’re just dragging in the best of both worlds most smart speakers like Alexa and the other Google homes don’t have. The really really nice rich high quality sound and stereo speakers.
Most high-quality speaker systems don’t have the machine learning and the Google assistant built-in, and less you could grab a chrome cast Audio 35 bucks plug it into some existing nice speakers and then get Google home mini for 49 bucks and set the default audio output of the Google home to be that chrome cast Audio so it’s always using those speakers. Boom! and now you have your smart speakers. I really do like this thing now I’m not gonna lie, like I already liked the original Google home. This thing does all the exact same stuff the Google home does but sounds a million times better. Just makes me more likely to use it more.