Gadgetory

hey what's up guys I'm Kim PhD 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 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 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 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 a 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 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 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 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 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 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 trippy hey Google how tall are you 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 seventy seventy-five percent 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 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 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 base 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 the 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 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 but most high-quality speaker systems don't have the machine learning and the Google assistant built-in and less you could grab a chromecast Audio 35 bucks plug it into some existing nice speakers and then get Google home many 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 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 like the 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 that can do hey Google play the song that goes now I really wish that I knew how to swim alright 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 home pod comes out not because you might buy that instead well you might buy that instead but that's supposed to come out of 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 together the next one peace