TLDR: After a few days of intensive listening I have no choice but to conclude that this problem is, indeed, an issue with Spotify and/or its Airplay component . It surprised me as I thought that the Airplay 2 implementation only was up to Apple. But whatever is going on happens only when i use Spotify, so there's definitely something wrong in Spotify.
Following up on my post from two days ago, I'll try to be as thorough as possible in the hopes that someone else could replicate or (even better) for Spotify to respond.
Equipment: Two Apple Homepods (12.0); iPhone 7 Plus (12.0.1); Ipad Mini 2 (12.0.1), Apple Macbook Pro 15 (late 2016) (10.14); Apple Time Capsule router.
When listening to music played on Spotify, though Airplay 2, the sound exhibit two major flaws:
- Intermittent sync problem. One speaker sometimes lag slightly and create a reverberated effect. The lag is so short that it is impossible to hear which speaker falls behind. Pausing and playing again makes no difference. Pausing, rewinding and playing makes a difference – sometimes (about half the time) it gets into sync. Once in sync it stays in sync until the stream is interrupted by changing tracks or stopping the music. I find "Streets of Philadelphia by Bruce Springsteen to be a good test track as it start with a clean drum beat.
- The balance is off. Both homepods make sound but one of them (most often the right one) appears to be slightly lower in amplitude (although not always on all frequencies?) than the other. The result is that the sound is unbalanced with a significantly worse sound stage. This seem to be easier to remedy and is often fixed, for a while before returning, after a restart of the Homepods.
I've restarted and reset everything but to no avail.
To narrow down the error, I've tried several other methods to play music in order to compare streams from other sources:
- Apple Music direct from the Homepod (trough Siri).
- Apple Music though Airplay 2 from iPhone and iPad.
- Apple Music from iTunes/Mac.
- MP3, AAC and FLAC playback though Airplay 2 from iPhone, iPad and Mac.
(Note that I've not tried to Airplay from Spotify on a Mac. Mojave does not support dual speakers though Airplay yet.)
None of the above exhibits the same problems as Spotify does. The sound never lag and is always balanced. This makes me fairly convinced that this is indeed an issue on Spotify's side of things.
I've been airplaying music to my old hifi system for almost a decade now and was not so irritated by Apple's decision to make Apple Music the Homepod's only integrated music service. I figured I would just continue to use Airplay as I've always done. However, these problems are of course deal-breakers and I'm left with the options of transitioning to Apple Music (which I'd really rather not, for many reasons) or abandoning the plan of having stereo Homepods as my primary system.
Is there anyone else who have experienced the same thing? Is this an Homepod issue or is it the same in, for example, Sonos?
EDIT: I previously stated that my iPad Mini was of the third generation. In actual fact it's a second generation device. Sorry about that.
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random