Talk is cheap...
Is hi-fi and AV getting better all the time? Or do companies largely reinvent the wheel in order to deliver “this year’s model”? And is technology pushing us ever more into convenience and away from quality? How come lovers of classic designs like the first-ever Marantz preamp (see restoration article on p86) can claim something so early was one of the best preamps ever? Haven’t we, er, moved on?
It’s true that with some categories and in some years, it can seem like things are only iteratively improving. That’s the usual way of things — we can’t expect everything to be reinvented all the time.
But new standards and new technologies do regularly shift things significantly. Not always quite as expected, of course. The quality hike from 1080p to UHD was not as dramatic as we might have hoped given the four-fold increase in pixel count. Instead it has turned out that the real advance was hidden behind that change, in the performance gains from High Dynamic Range and the wider colour gamuts thereby released — these can be a real eye-opener, especially when combined with a shift in display technology, and notably OLED. Spend time in a low-lit room (not on a shop floor) with the likes of the Sony A1 reviewed on page 26 and the advances made in the last handful of years become spectacularly clear.
Online media delivery is another wholesale change. It came in audio first, bringing bolt-on and now in-built smarts to sources, amps and wireless speakers, and then to TVs — the interface on your TV is now ever more important when selecting a television.
Android TV is proving itself a winner in that regard, especially as it meshes so seamlessly with audio and equipment control. Android TVs include a video Chromecast inside, while audio Chromecast (aka Google Cast) is rapidly becoming a leading platform in hi-fi, and on top of those is the sweeping gamechanger of voice control. I’ve had a Google Home since the day it was officially released here, and while its speaker sound is pretty average, the novelty and convenience of voice assistance rapidly overcame the privacy concerns of it listening to everything we say, and of having my commands sent off to a data farm in America, where my words are stored forever as part of Google’s ongoing speech recognition database. The sudden accuracy of voice recognition, after decades of amusing demonstration fails at product launches, is entirely down to this accumulation of vast amounts of sample speech by the market leaders. These devices may (underline may) only be storing your words after the key command ‘Hey Google’ or ‘Alexa’, but they listen all the time in order to hear those keywords. One market guru recently showed me two projections for global smart speaker sales — one rising inexorably if all goes to plan, the other nose-diving if there’s suddenly a smart-speaker privacy backlash.
The other amazing thing is the cost of having this gamechanging technology in the home. The new Google Home Mini is just $79. At this rate, our problem is going to be not whether we can afford a voice assistant, but what will happen when we have two or three of them in the same room. In terms of choice I note some companies are releasing different devices for different platforms, while Sonos is hedging its bets with plans to be platform agnostic, beginning with Alexa (though not here in Australia until Amazon launches Alexa officially), adding Google and Siri later. Those three may be enough. With the speech flowing into those systems (and I suppose we should include Cortana), it’ll be hard for latecomers to catch them.
Google certainly seems to be getting in there quickly. Where smart home connections used to take inordinate planning and cost, a Google network now forms almost by accident. As various Chromecast-enabled products moved through our home on review (see above), I soon found a large network of connected products had formed itself by default. Once I’d renamed devices to sensible names for casting, I could tell my Google Home to play music to a big Riva or a little Riva (p68), to a Naim Uniti, to an audio Chromecast plugged into an amp in the music room, to a video Chromecast plugged into an Oppo Blu-ray player’s rear HDMI input, or direct to the Sony A1 TV while it was in residence. I recently gave away some smart-home lighting products, otherwise I could have had it turning lights on and off too.
(As with anything, you learn and adapt to the limitations. If I say “Play Led Zeppelin” to Google Assistant, it will always play the same Spotify playlist of Led Zeppelin, so always Whole
Lotta Love first. So I say “Shuffle Led Zeppelin” instead. Also notable at this early stage is that some products can take minutes to respond to a Google command, while others take merely seconds.)
The smart voice-activated speakers from hi-fi brands are now rolling out — we’ll be pulling together a group of them for our first issue of the New Year to see which of them can put a decent sound on the back of the voice smarts. But first, next issue, our annual Sound+Image Awards special. And if you’re seeking the current advances of significance in hi-fi and AV, that’ll be the place to find them, in all their glory.