No, I welcomed Alexa into my home with the sole purpose of pitting her against Siri to see how the voice assistants did side by side.
Out of the box: A white Echo Studio
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Sleek or monstrous?
The Echo Studio isn’t meant to fit into a tiny shelf or be tucked away next to a little plant; it’s here to serve a purpose, and that purpose is to deliver room-filling, calibrated, 3D, Dolby Atmos audio. This smart speaker measures 8.1 inches tall and 6.9 inches in diameter, and it weighs 7.7 pounds. The Echo Studio has four buttons at the top to summon Alexa, mute the mic, and adjust the volume up or down. There’s a light ring at the top of the speaker that comes on when Alexa is listening, when a notification is available, or when the volume is adjusted. Jam-packed with sound, the Echo Studio has a horizontal gap at the bottom to openly distribute audio and maximize bass output from a 5.25-inch woofer, and it also has three 2-inch midrange speakers, plus a 1-inch tweeter.
Setting it up
Part of the setup process involves calibrating the Echo’s acoustics by having it play a series of sounds and listening to how they reverberate around the room. Also: The 5 best smart speakers
Audio: The verdict
Once the Echo Studio is calibrated, the sound quality is nothing short of outstanding, which is surprising, really. When you hear that the Echo Studio retails for $200, it sounds like too high of a price for a smart speaker with Alexa. But the truth is that the upgraded sound quality of the Echo Studio is on par with high-end speakers twice its price. It’s apparent the calibration is successful as the speaker can certainly put out room-filling audio with deep, rich bass that rivals that of other high-end speakers, like the Sonos One. But intensity, though overwhelmingly satisfying, is not the only benefit. Whether or not it earns the title of best-sounding smart speaker on the market, in audio quality it’s leaps and bounds above audio quality of other smart speakers like the Echo Dots, and it’s also better than the HomePod Mini. If you want full stereo sound, you can pair two Echo Studio speakers in one room, and you can also add the Echo Sub for fuller audio.
More than music
Obviously, the Echo Studio is a smart speaker with Alexa built in and works as a fantastic speaker for parties, gatherings, or music in general. But we’ve found a pretty nifty alternate use for it as part of our living room’s media console as the speakers to our TV. We haven’t bit the bullet to buy a sound bar for our televisions just yet. It’s on the list, sure, but it continues to stay low on our priorities. Since my home resembles a smart speaker graveyard, we’ve made the HomePod Mini the speaker for an Apple TV 4K, we’re using the Echo Dots as stereo speakers for a Fire TV Stick 4K, and now the Echo Studio is joining the lineup. As the speaker for both the Apple TV 4K and the Fire TV Stick 4K, the Echo Studio became an outstanding speaker for our television, putting out immersive cinematic audio for movies and, in my opinion, effectively replacing a quality sound bar. The audio is intense, yet maintains crispness. It is several steps above the defunct HomePod in sound quality. And since the Echo Studio has a line-in and optical-in port, it can be used with televisions as a sound bar regardless of the streaming device you have. Aside from the benefits and drawbacks of having Alexa built in (though there is a mic mute button), the Echo Studio also supports Zigbee, a communication protocol used in low-power smart home devices. This means you can easily add any Zigbee devices to your smart home network via the Echo Studio, effectively making it a hub for compatible smart home devices.
Wrapping it up: Is it worth it?
I’m not torn – I can’t pretend I am. Sure, the Echo Studio is fairly large, but I like it. The resulting sound quality from the five speakers packed into the device makes both the size and price well worth it. It’s built and engineered to rival some of the best speakers of its size on the market, and it does that in performance. Though I am currently unsure of when we will buy a soundbar for our living room television, the Echo Studio sits prominently in the center of our media console table, working several jobs as a smart voice assistant, a Zigbee hub, TV speaker, and music player.
