Now that Amazon has given the latest Echo the same rate as the Echo Plus at $149.99, the company can offer a bigger, louder new Echo for $99.99. As mentioned, the Echo Studio is 7000% louder and is Amazon’s largest and most sophisticated Alexa. It has five drivers to give you stereo audio and surround sound
compatible with Dolby Atmos in a single smart speaker that will respond to your voice commands. It’s as large and assertive as the Apple HomePod and Google Home Max, with superior sound processing and imaging, and a third of the price at $199.99. Its size and price point are imposing and our Editors’ Choice for smart speakers.
Design
With 168.9mm in height, 108mm in width, and 106.4mm in thickness, the Echo Studio is most voluminous compared to any $200 speaker we have tested, including the Sonos One. It’s an 8.1-inch tall black cylinder with a 6.9-inch diameter and a total mass of 7.7 pounds. It is not exactly subwoofer dimensional
, but the open ports on the bottom of the down-firing woofer make it look like a subwoofer. The most similar one is the $399 Sonos Move, which is a little taller but a little thinner than the Echo Studio, and the former is “portable,” meaning it has a battery. At the same time, the latter uses a cable to draw power continuously.
Fabric covers the side of the studio, and two bass ports are located at the front and rear of the speakers. The outer ring is a black plastic casing on top, with a far-field microphone array, far-field control, volume up and down buttons, microphone mute, and Alexa.
The signature Echo light ring is a continuous light-emitting ring that is trained along the inner circumference of the outer plastic ring. On the interior of the outer plastic ring is a fabric grille panel that shields the upward-firing driver.
A small cut-out below the rear bass port accommodates the power connector that comes with the unit. There is also a micro USB port for servicing, and finally, there is a 3.5mm combined aux and optical port. No cables are included, while optical is available only if you use a 3.5mm-to-TOSLink adapter.
Amazon Alexa
Like any other Echo device, the Studio provides all of the conveniences of the Alexa voice service. All one has to do is say ‘Alexa’ (or ‘Amazon,’ ‘Computer,’ or ‘Echo,’ if you set a new command word in the Alexa application). Alexa can provide answers on general knowledge like weather, latest scores, and unit
conversions; play music from Amazon Music, Apple Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, SiriusXM, Spotify, and Tidal; read an audiobook from Audible; set or change an alarm; control smart home devices; make a call to any number in North America or make a Drop-In voice call to another Alexa user; and get hundreds of Third-Party.
Alexa is a powerful voice assistant with perhaps the most extensive range of supported smart home devices and third-party skills, but it can be a little rigid. Alexa expects a fair bit of grammatical correctness, especially when you’re telling her what to do to your smart house. Google Assistant is slightly more forgiving in the
natural language understanding department, making up for its slightly shorter list of supported home automation platforms and fewer third-party integrations.
The Echo Studio, like the Echo Plus, comes with a Zigbee home automation hub, which means that you can use the speaker to operate other compatible devices.
3D Sound
Five individual drivers are positioned behind the fabric grille cover of the Echo Studio in different orientations for Dolby Atmos-compatible spatial audio. A 5.25-inch woofer mounted on the bottom of the cabinet fires to the front of the cabinet, a one-inch tweeter fires directly forward; additionally, three two-inch mid-range
drivers are firing upward, left, and right. The woofer produces the bass, while the tweeter and three midrange drivers contribute to the sound field that describes a more accurate (and more vertically) suspended image than a stereo speaker.
The five drivers are powered by 330 watts of combined power at its maximum.
The Echo Studio does attempt to do some cool things with five drivers and 3D audio blending. It doesn’t get as good as an Atmos-compatible soundbar or an even more premium Atmos surround sound system. Still, at that kind of Money, you are talking several times the price of the Studio for the auditory perspective.
In this regard, the Echo Studio has a large acoustic power output, which is moderate but surprisingly directional.
However, to fully appreciate this feature, you will need to pay for Amazon Music HD to access Amazon’s Ultra HD music format. This is the only streaming platform the Echo Studio comprehensively supports in terms of Dolby Atmos surround sound. These files are mixed with Dolby Atmos in mind, and the Echo Studio’s processing and drivers are best suited to deploy over the stereo tracks played over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
The Echo Studio can also mix any other genre of music to 3D on its own, but this is not nearly as striking or responsive. But it goes without saying that the speaker can do only this much, even with drivers sending out noise in various directions. Performance
For 3D-mixed music available in Amazon Music’s Ultra HD, the Echo Studio offers high clarity and imaging. Listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” in Ultra HD is clean, clear, and defined regarding sound quality. It seems that the guitar and the drums are each at their own volume, with a slight reverb on the strings
as they just slightly follow the vocals. The bass drum is loud and can be placed mostly in front of other elements without overpowering the greatest extent other instrumentals or vocals. The Echo Studio doesn’t look like a sound system with a huge subwoofer or rear satellites, yet it can deliver vast, detailed sound from a compact unit.
Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” in Ultra HD demonstrates the Echo Studio’s 3D sound capability even further. The timing of the theremin is perfectly spooky for the beginning of the track, and the confused laser-ridden horseback fight seems to give clear directional imaging, as if the hooves are pounding directly in front of you, and blasts and explosions in medium distance forward-right.
It can’t create a real surround sound field that envelopes you entirely. Still, the Echo Studio has good stereo separation and a forward-and-up feeling like a pair of stereo speakers, each with an upward firing element. On high volumes, there is driving capacity that is great in filling the room and bringing along with it the exciting
thunder of guitar strums and drum rolls keenly blended with the vocals of Bellamy. If he sings a note that screams no one’s going to take me alive, the tune is heard directly in front, while the backup vocals can be positioned behind, left, and right.
The last interesting example is “Lazaretto” by Jack White, demonstrating good directionality. It is closer to stereo-with-verticals than to true surround sound. Shaker and acoustic bass pick time. I’m proud to be White’s vocals sit right smack in the middle, but the opening bass notes appear slightly panned left-right.
The high-pitched, shrill, squeaky guitar strains immediately resonate from the sides of the room, showing how high-pitched sounds give much better acoustic localization than lower-pitched sounds.
Everything presented in this article results from 3D audio mixing of Ultra HD tracks on Amazon Music. The Echo Studio can also blend stereo tracks into 3D itself, which it will do if you play any music format other than Ultra HD. As with most mixing, the effect is not as profound or good as with proper intentional mixing.
Of course, The Crystal Method’s ‘Born Too Slow’ also translates well as a stereo track on the Echo Studio, with a strong impact on bass drums, more than adequate driven snares, and cymbals. Vocals and guitar riffs are less dominant here at this speaker position but are clearly distinguishable from the drumming.
However, none of the verticality heard on the Ultra HD tracks is audible here, and the stereo balance is more modest and focused directly in the center rather than attempting to create a sense of a sound field greater than the speaker’s physical size.
See How We Test Speakers
Regarding bass, it can be stated that with the Echo Studio, the perceived low-frequencies during the play of the test track The Knife’s “Silent Shout” are considerable. It doesn’t rattle the walls, but it makes the table the speaker is sitting on wobble at certain highs and certainly never distorted at top gears.
It doesn’t go quite as low as sub-bass levels, but you can add Echo Sub to provide full subwoofer capability to the experience. Since bass below about 80Hz is omnidirectional, it doesn’t integrate with the Studio’s direction-aimed and calibrated convolvers.
Big Sound for a Small Price
All in all, the Amazon Echo Studio creates a rather remarkable sound experience for its dimensions and cost. It looks like an Amazon version of the Apple HomePod, which might be confusing. Still, then it’s just $200 and can generate that directional sound that you never expected from a speaker with five drivers, all in all
outperforming the HomePod. While testing the speaker, I constantly had to glance at the price tag for several reasons: it looks, sounds, and even feels like a speaker of a completely different league.
The Echo Studio isn’t a magic surround sound speaker that makes you feel that instruments and singers are all around you. Still, it provides great stereo and vertical imaging, better than regular speakers and way better than the costlier speakers you get for similarly small sizes. To really enjoy it, you really need
Amazon Music HD: if you really want that 3D sound, you are restricted to a fairly small collection of Ultra HD tracks; even as a Bluetooth speaker mixing from the stereo, it creates a powerful, clear sound.
If you prefer portability, there’s the $399 Sonos Move, a smart speaker you can wheel to the shore or somewhere else you don’t want to take a wired speaker. If you like just a bit more oomph for your cash in a considerably more retro design, there’s the $399.99 Marshall Stanmore II Voice, but it isn’t portable, either.
Once more, these speakers are twice as expensive as the Echo Studio. In return for the lack of portability, if you are looking for incredible amounts of power for an incredibly low price, the Studio is simply the best smart speaker on the market and the recipient of our Editors’ Choice.
