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It was a A few years ago 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 slowly filled my house with review units from Amazon. These days, I mostly use speakers made by Google and Apple for comparison testing. The fact is, Amazon’s smart speakers work so well that there has never been a reason to change my entire system.
In terms of price, compatibility, audio quality, and now, thanks to a sleek, round design, the new Echo is still one of the best smart speakers for most people. As long as you don’t care about Alexa, or don’t have a Bezos-related vendetta, I’d go so far as to say this is the best $ 100 speaker.
Round sound
The biggest difference between the new Echo and older tube-shaped models is the rounded design. It looks like one of those foam dodgeballs they used to throw at me in high school, but with four rubber buttons on the top and a power cord as a tail.
This new shape is not just an aesthetic change, it also modifies the way the loudspeaker interacts with acoustic environments. I found that the redesigned stereo speaker pushes sound across a room more evenly than the last-gen Echo, making it a whole room speaker than it used to be.
This makes it more usable like the goldilocks of Amazon’s line of smart speakers, which ranks between the smaller Echo Dot (which comes in standard, kids, and clock editions) and the larger Echo Studio. I just know what it is make they have a slightly larger footprint than before.
It sounds bigger, better and more balanced than ever. I left my review unit on the kitchen counter, one of the most useful places for a smart speaker, as I can set timers, and it easily filled both the kitchen and my attached living room with enough sound for quarantined dance parties. 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 and foremost is a new adaptive equalization engine, which allows the speaker to listen and adjust to the room they are playing in, using the information it gets from the built-in microphones.
Place it close to walls or corners, and you can tame the bass to sound a little better. It’s not what you hear, it’s what you don’t hear; adaptive sound is meant to make your music sound the same everywhere. I moved it around my room and didn’t notice a big change in balance or soundstage (how “big” the music feels in the space), but I did notice that it sounded much less booming in the tighter corners than the last generation.
The new speaker drivers also improve low-end performance, with the 3-inch woofer stretching quite deep into the frequency spectrum for a speaker of this size. It’s also much louder than competitors like Google Nest Audio (8/10, WIRED recommends), which he had sitting next to him on the counter (though the bass gets muddy at full volume).
Then there’s the built-in Zigbee receiver that lets you easily connect a ton of smart home devices, and an Amazon Sidewalk receiver, a soon-to-launch Amazon service that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to keep devices connected outside but close to your home.
Family favorites
As a longtime Spotify user, I’ve always been impressed by how easy it is to set up Echo devices with Spotify Connect, and this time it was just as simple. I set it up in the Alexa app and it was streaming Mariah Carey’s Christmas hits in no time.
