Echo Studio: Amazon’s best and most powerful Alexa-enabled speaker yet | Revision
The Echo Studio is the most powerful smart speaker that Amazon has in its catalog, being the only one with some important features for anyone who thinks of making the room smarter and filling the sound in a very, very efficient way. It was remodeled at the end of last year with minor changes that go almost unnoticed.
I’ve spent a good few weeks listening to music with this massive Echo at home, which is anything but portable or easy to carry around, avoiding fines for playing songs at higher volumes. Come with me and I will tell you about my experience in the next paragraphs.
Echo Studio is an old (very) stretched Dot
In 2023 the current generation of Echo Dot, in addition to the Echo without the suffix, is made in a ball-shaped body. Before that, Amazon’s cheapest speaker had a disco look. Imagine this model, but with the vertical part significantly higher and you have the Echo Studio.
It’s this shape, with a black or white fabric finish, control buttons at the top, more texture at the top, and something of a mouth at the bottom. It is there that the speaker responsible for the bass will let the air out. The controls present for touch mute, control the volume or activate Alexa manually, without the need to say “Alexa”.
On the outside, everything is plastic like the other Amazon speakers, but the structure doesn’t let even a smudge through. There is no wrong cut with the fabric out. The whole set feels sturdy with strength, even considering the weight of 3.5 kilos for the whole set.
Underneath are the cable connections, where you plug into the socket, you can send audio over the 3.2mm P2 cable, and there’s an absolutely useless Micro-USB port. Officially, Amazon uses this connector to send wired Internet to the Echo Studio, when the Wi-Fi is not strong enough. There is no such consumer utility, and the adapter is not sold.
Sound fills the room with ease
Since the Echo Studio doesn’t have a screen, let’s talk exclusively about its sound. Unless you’re planning on using this Alexa-enabled speaker in a huge shed or outdoors, it’s easy to fill even the most spacious rooms in the coolest homes and apartments with music.
For this, the Echo Studio uses a two-inch midwave speaker and is aimed at the top, with two more at the sides. The idea here is to provide stereo sound and for this you need to leave the product with the trigger buttons forward, so the power and P2 ports are on the back.
Pointing forward is a one-inch tweeter, and downwards is what’s so heavy: a 5.25-inch woofer. To move that much air, it needs a very powerful electromagnet in the opposite direction, and this component is very, very heavy.
The whole set manages to shoot sound in many directions and reinforce itself in the opposite direction of the wall. I put it in my living room, which isn’t the biggest and is just over 20 square meters, and the volume at about 40% of maximum is enough to rattle the glass of a few glasses on the shelf.
In power, Amazon guarantees a maximum of 330 watts, with support for 24-bit DACs and 100 kHz bandwidth. There is native support for FLAC, MP3, AAC, Opus, Vorbis, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio/MPEG-H files. Translating this alphabet soup: The sound is excellent.
The choice of materials and the number of speakers for the three main waves (bass, mids and highs), guarantees the presence of all even at maximum volume. There was no distortion in the bass and even with them belly-pushing, I could still identify the higher notes, like the cymbals on a drum.
Work for 360 degree audio is efficient. Even with the Echo Studio in one of the corners of the room, it was possible to hear the difference between the left and right side of a song. There are other sounds with direction coming from top to bottom. The solution is far from a sound system with speakers scattered around the room, but it gives a taste of it by reproducing everything from a precise point in the house.
An important point regarding the sound is that there are seven microphones pointed upwards, in small holes in the upper edge, where the control buttons are located. Even at high volume, I never needed to talk to Alexa more than once for her to understand that my voice was projecting over loud music.
This is already a good job on the much simpler and cheaper Echo Dot, but here the sensation is of amplified functionality and a system capable of detecting even the person speaking softly.
Closing this review, since we are with the second generation of Echo Studio and the whole review talks about it, it is important to underline the evolution from one model to another: almost nothing. The only change is a new mechanism for processing spatial audio projected onto the box’s speakers.
Ultimately it makes stereo more noticeable, even when the Echo Studio is in a corner instead of center. And that’s it, there is no change and it gives me the feeling that this box has been developed so well, that there is not much to change for the better.
It was already excellent in the first generation, also acting as a hub for the Zigbee and Matter standard, as well as receiving music via Bluetooth, which is difficult to change something that makes it look like a completely new product.
Echo Studio (2022): Is It Worth It?
Yes, but be aware that if you find someone selling the previous generation, you’ll get pretty much the same experience I’ve mentioned here in this review. I bought the model that came out in 2019 and spent all these years with it in the living room, but I’ve barely heard the evolution of the only part that’s changed: the spatial audio to better fill the 360-degree sound.
The lack of evolution could be a negative point, but the soundboard was already so good in its only proposition, which is to play songs very well with very present bass without taking away the other frequencies, that I don’t have much to complain about. There is one more point for Brazil: there is no competition here, because Apple has never launched the HomePod in our country and Google ignores it and hasn’t even brought Home Max.
If you want a speaker that can play great music, fill large rooms, and need an onboard personal assistant without putting any hanging hardware to do it, there’s no alternative to the Echo Studio. The good part is that it does it very well, calling Alexa and offering the same good experience as every other Echo – because it is the same Alexa present in everything in the company, the answer comes from the same AI and it comes from the same server.
It has one more detail that may be nice: you can use the Echo Studio as a “soundbar” for TVs with the Fire Stick. The experience is great, but for this you have to leave the sound box right under the TV, in the middle. OK?
The post Echo Studio: Still the best and most powerful speaker on Amazon with Alexa | The review first appeared in Olhar Digital.
Source: Olhar Digital
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