PANASONIC SC-GA10 Google Assistant smart speaker
Smart Google Voice Assistant speaker it may be, but Panasonic’s GA10 very sensibly makes sound quality a priority.
It’s larger than most smart speakers, and sounds better too, while bringing all the Google and Chromecast smarts to a stylish design.
At the Sydney launch of Panasonic’s smart speaker, Aaron Waters, Panasonic Australia’s product manager for audio and video, pointed to research showing, pleasingly, that smart speakers are being used primarily to play music. A later study bore him out — eMarketer reported in May that the dominating use is for listening to music, podcasts and radio.
Yet some of these smart speakers are humdrum in terms of audio quality, as we found in our first round-up of voice-activated speakers two issues back. One solution is to use a basic smart speaker to send music to a Chromecast-equipped hi-fi system. The other is to get a better smart speaker.
Panasonic has both options available. At its recent Sydney product launch it demonstrated three slimline audio systems with CD, radio (including DAB+) and the requisite Chromecast inside. But it also introduced the SC-GA10, the company’s pitch at the smart speaker market, and it certainly looks — and sounds — a step ahead of the crowd.
Equipment
Panasonic’s smart speaker is at the large end of the scale at 28cm high with a square 10cm base, looking very smart with the silvered base and choice of black or white fabric mesh covers, with a shiny black top with clearly labelled touch buttons — these gather fingerprints quite easily, but wipe clean. Focusing funds on the quality of sound, the GA10 delivers proper stereo (the Google Home and many small to medium speakers these days are mono) and it adds connectivity, too, with onboard Bluetooth, a minijack auxiliary input, and the networking ability to stream music over your Wi-Fi not only from the likes of Spotify but also from music shares on computer or NAS drive, under the control of Panasonic’s new Music Control App.
Of course, with Google Voice Assistant built-in, the GA10 has the full functionality for answering questions, checking your calendar, all the everincreasing abilities that Google is building into that platform (see our Get Smart feature in this issue). Since all GVA-equipped speakers handle these identically, we won’t spend too much of these reviews describing the options available, other than to remind you the main music services easily accessible by voice command are Spotify and/or Google Play (we’d guess soon YouTube Music), plus TuneIn (internet radio). Rather we’ll focus on how well they respond to commands under different circumstances, the additional abilities on offer over Google’s own Google Home, and — of course — the sound quality.
Performance
In that regard, the GA10 clearly lifts the bar over Google’s own offerings. It benefits in terms of driver count, having those stereo soft-dome tweeters and a single six-inch woofer, and with 20W for each channel. Despite that power figure being quoted only at 1kHz with 10% THD, it’s enough to give the Panasonic speaker a significantly advanced performance advantage over Google Home, and over our previous champion of standalone Google speakers, the JBL Link 10 - remembering that the Link stands barely half the Panasonic’s height, costs significantly less, and offers battery operation. But switching between these players, the Panasonic easily lifted music to a higher level, with a more expansive sound and room-filling bass content able to escape the more localised performance of smaller competitors, and had a similar effect for radio and podcasts. The GA10 still lacks, of course, the dynamics, level and imaging of hi-fi speakers, and its sound begins to sound pushed and compressed at higher levels, especially at close range. We found it best enjoyed given distance from the listener, and preferably space around the speaker as well; it certainly doesn’t need the reinforcement of corner positioning.
Stereo separation is minimal but still useful, and at reasonable levels and even slightly louder, it’s certainly musical. Joni Mitchell’s River imaged beautifully. The 2003 remaster of Coltrane’s Blue Train had impressive spatial presence and tone. kd lang’s ‘Drag’ album sounded gloriously lush, as it should. On Missy Higgin’s new album, the synth bass through the second half of How Was I To Know was impressively deep and strong, rounding out a track that had emerged more radiolike in quality through the Link 10 and further reduced via the Google Home. The Panasonic clearly separated lead voice from trancy backing and edgy BVs, and best controlled its bass driver to present a true thud for the opening bass pedals.
For streaming music playback you are likely to use voice control or to open your Spotify or TuneIn or Google play app and ‘Cast’ it over to the GA10. But Panasonic’s Music Control app does offer some useful extras. It lists the main Cast-enabled apps to try, including the abovementioned Spotify, Google play, Deezer, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn (though it doesn’t acknowledge the presence of TuneIn Pro, if you have it). And, erroneously now for Australia, dear-departed Pandora.
More useful it acts as a DLNA controller to stream files from network shares to the GA-10. We were soon streaming 24-bit/96kHz FLACs of Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, and enjoying Bennie And The Jets with very pleasing clarity, as well as iPad control and onscreen artwork. AIFF, WAV, Apple Lossless, WMA, MP3 and AAC files all played through in this way, though not DSD (we worked around that limitation by playing DSD files to our iPad Pro from Roon and then Bluetoothing over to the GA10 for a PCM-ed and de-high-ressed but still enjoyably musical result).
Meanwhile that Bluetooth connection allows any non-Cast-enabled app to be streamed over at the lower quality of Bluetooth — we note Panasonic’s inclusion of ‘Bluetooth Remaster’, which we’d presume similar to the ‘MP3 Remaster’, a saucer-shaped EQ to lift these lesser quality formats. The Panasonic’s Bluetooth includes AAC, which benefits iOS users.
We gather the app will soon include the ability to pair GA10s together for stereo paired playback, and we saw party mode playback demonstrated at the Sydney launch event, where the GA10 was paired with two other music systems and a couple of Castenabled TVs as well. Of course the Google Home app allows grouping of any number of Cast-enabled devices, Panasonic or otherwise.
We noted in our JBL Link 10 review that the higher music quality over Google Home can create problems. It means you play things louder, and above a certain point, the music drowns your voice commands. Once enjoying party-level music, you’re best off controlling things by phone app, not voice. Secondly the volume of Google’s answers rises too, and if you later stop playback without turning down the volume, Google’s voice will be alarmingly loud next time you use it — especially startling if it goes off to the common false positive commands overheard from the TV. We’re stumped as to how this could be avoided, other than separate settable levels for voice and music, or a night mode.
The GA10’s height makes the top panel and lights harder to see than for smaller or sloped-topped competitors, particularly if it’s at or above your listening level. We had rare occasion to touch it, however, except to restart after a handful of network disconnects over our month with the GA10, and a few times when we ran over to mute music at playback levels too extravagant for voice to interrupt.
Conclusion
The higher price and size of Panasonic’s GA10 allows it to deliver a more musical result than all previously reviewed Google Voice Assistant-equipped smart speakers, its greater size of presentation more easily spreading into a room, while it has the useful extras of network playback and an auxiliary input. Recommended. Jez Ford