Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Home Max Review: $400 Smart Speaker?”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd 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 this is 49 and then we have google home. This is the original it’s about the size of like a large coffee mug and it’s 119 bucks, and then this is google home max this. It’S like the size of probably a watermelon right now pretty heavy too, and this will cost 3.99. So the design here is pretty solid inside it’s it’s dual 4.5 inch woofers behind the mesh here and then dual 0.7 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 and when it’s sideways here in landscape mode, these drivers are going to give you stereo audio, which pretty much no other smart speaker does apple homepod. 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. So 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 this little magnetic circular pad that it comes with it’s pretty dense and then there’s some magnets in the bottom of the speaker.
Right here and it just kind of slaps onto the bottom like that 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 and what’s even cooler is that if, for some reason you buy two of these, you can set them up vertically, like bookshelf speakers and they pair with each other and each one is a channel in the stereo audio.
So you can get some real separation and these little isolation pads just slap on the side now, so they can stand up and look great and 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 gon na do that now. The rest of the hardware, if you flip it around to the back you’ll, see up at the top, is your mute switch i mentioned. I wanted it to be a button because on the mini you could get out of sync, but now you can’t mute the mics with just your voice anymore.
So it’s just a switch, so i guess that’s less confusing and 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 usbc 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 the power cable, the cable itself on the white one is like this 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 in 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 400 premium, smart speaker, so it better sound great.
So how does it sound? It sounds great. It gets ridiculously loud. The speakers are 20 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 trippy, hey, google. How tall are you i bet if we printed out all my code and stacked it up, it could get pretty tall since i’m software.
That might be the only way 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, and it does distort a bit at this volume. But at 70 75 volume it sounds great and is still pretty damn loud. The original google home sounded alright, but i guess let’s attempt an audio comparison. [ Applause ]. 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 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 these 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, but it also uses those mics for, what’s called smart, sound see 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 bass and then makes its adjustments accordingly, it doesn’t seem to make a drastic difference to me in the way it sounds like it sounds good anyway, but the idea is really smart. It’S machine learning and this speaker definitely likes to be in the corner of a room in the first place. It’S not an omnidirectional 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 and 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 bass than you’re 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, but most high quality speaker systems, don’t have the machine learning and the google assistant built in unless you could grab a chromecast audio 35 bucks Plug it into some existing nice speakers and then get google home mini 49 bucks and set the default audio output of the google home to be that chromecast audio. So it’s always using those speakers boom. Now you have your smart speakers. I really do like this thing, though i’m not gon na lie like i, 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 likely to listen to music on it. Things like that, if you don’t already know having a google home, is like this never-ending discovery of just asking it stuff and finding out cool things, it can do. Hey google play the song that goes now. I really wish that i knew how to swim. All right i’ll make a man out of you by donny osmond playing on spotify, hey, google, stop playing hey google change your voice here is an example of my other voice. Would you like me to use this one? No. Is this thing really worth the money at 400 bucks? It’S definitely not an insta buy for most people. I say wait until the apple homepod comes out, not because you might buy that instead.
Well, you might buy that instead, but that’s supposed to come out at 350 bucks and once it does, i wouldn’t be surprised to see the price of this drop to match that they’re still pretty different in a lot of ways. Google assistant is way better than siri home pods like half the size, but it’ll have some different, smart audio features and i think that’ll make it competitive. But if that doesn’t convince you, then you’ll probably just be better off getting the original google home. And then you can use the money you save to buy an actual nice set of bookshelf speakers or tv speakers or whatever you want, but until then i actually really like this thing.
I happen to fall in the extremely narrow niche of people who will love it, and i do and i’m keeping it that’s been it thanks for watching talk to you guys, the next one peace you .