Google Home Max
The Google Home Max is a beast of a smart speaker, but far more expensive than it should be
“It’s punchy, it’s not overly bassy, and there’s plenty of control at the low end – it’s a great speaker for listening to Kraftwerk”
SCORE PRICE £332 (£399 inc VAT) from store.google.com
Big brother to the Google Home and Google Home Mini, the Google Home Max has taken almost a year to reach shops in the UK – so has it been worth the wait? It’s certainly bigger, louder and much more expensive than its smaller siblings. Google hopes this hits the spot for customers who want a smart speaker, but don’t want to compromise on sound quality.
The company’s ambitions arguably go further than this: it wants the Max to be the smart speaker people use as their main home hi-fi speaker. It’s not designed as portable speaker – there is no battery inside and it’s not waterproof – but it’s flexible in terms of how you connect to it, with voice control, Wi-Fi support, Bluetooth and a 3.5mm analogue jack.
Smart design
Build and design quality is every bit as good as you would expect for this sort of money. It’s solidly put together and weighs a substantial 5.3kg. Give it a rap with your knuckles and it sounds satisfyingly tight and resonance-free, just like a top-quality speaker should.
In terms of appearance, the Max is pleasingly familiar as if Google shot a Home Mini with a grow gun and flattened the sides – although not everyone will love its cutesy looks. Grey cloth covers the drivers, here facing forwards instead of up, while the rest of the body is made of tough, soft-touch plastic.
Four circular LED dots lurk beneath the cloth grille on the front of the speaker, indicating various statuses; they light up when the speaker is listening to you and show volume levels when you make adjustments. A touch-sensitive area on top of the speaker allows you to do just that, sliding your finger right and left to increase or reduce the volume and tapping it to pause and play.
At the rear, meanwhile, is a switch for muting the microphone and a small cutout hosting the speaker’s various connections: a figure-of-eight mains port, a 3.5mm audio input and a USB-C socket. The latter is used not for audio, disappointingly, but for connecting an Ethernet adapter (not included) in case you’re having problems with Wi-Fi connectivity.
To stream music using Bluetooth, you must first put the speaker into pairing mode via the Google Home app, which is a bit of a faff, and there’s no support for the more advanced Bluetooth codec, aptX.
Smart features
Google Home Max’s digital assistant features work much the same as on the Google Home and Home Mini. Via Google Assistant, you can use your voice to ask the Home Max to play music and radio; set up timers, reminders and calendar entries; and ask questions about the weather and various other trivia.
There’s nothing new here, but Google Assistant remains an excellent resource. It’s generally better than Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri at recognising the things you ask, and it’s much more likely to give you a cogent response to a random trivia question. Assistant on the Home Max supports up to five different voices, meaning it can recognise who is asking it to play music and tailor recommendations accordingly. It’s worth bearing in mind that Amazon’s Alexa remains more widely supported by hardware manufacturers, however.
Google Assistant is pretty good, though, when it comes to the number of music and radio services it supports. It’s on par with Alexa and beats the Apple HomePod roundly. With Apple’s smart speaker, you’re pretty much restricted to Apple Music if you want to search for music or podcasts by voice, while there’s very little support for radio.
The Home Max supports voice search, control and playback via Google Play Music, Spotify (Premium and free), Deezer and YouTube Premium. Radio playback comes via TuneIn and iHeartRadio, while podcasts are played via Google’s own library. There’s no synchronisation between progress on the speaker and your phone, though, which is slightly annoying.
The Home Max isn’t so hot on far-field voice detection. The speaker uses an array of six microphones to pick up voice instructions, and it’s reasonably good at doing so across the room with moderate background noise. However, I found that I needed to raise my voice or any of the Echo speakers I’ve tested. With the music turned up beyond 60%, you
practically have to shout “OK Google” to get a response.
That’s not the only thing the Max uses its microphones for, though. As with the Apple HomePod, Google Home Max uses them to sense its surroundings and adapt the sound output automatically. Called Smart Sound, the idea is to avoid the boomy bass caused by placing speakers close to walls and in corners, or the lean, bass-light sound you can get from a speaker in a large, open space.
With the HomePod, you can clearly hear this working as you move the speaker from location to location, but with the Google Home Max I couldn’t hear any noticeable change. When I moved the speaker deep into a corner, the bass sounded stronger than with the speaker out in the open, although not overly so. Google’s adaptations, assuming they’re happening at all, are clearly more subtle than Apple’s.
Sound quality
So, how does the Google Home Max sound? In a word: loud. This is one beefy speaker, capable of filling medium to large domestic spaces and pumping up the volume sufficiently to kick out house-party levels of volume without distorting.
Behind the grille at the front is a pair of 4.5in, high-excursion woofers accompanied by a pair of tweeters. This combination provides controlled, deep bass and a wonderfully rich lower-mid range. I like the sound this speaker produces. It’s punchy, it’s not overly bassy, and there’s plenty of control at the low end. It’s a great speaker for listening to Kraftwerk, which, in my book, can only be a very good thing.
Where the Home Max falls short, at least to my ears, is in the higher frequencies. Live tracks, where I’d expect to hear some kind of atmosphere wrapping around the music, lack the presence you deserve from a speaker this expensive.
Whether you have the speaker laid on its side or up on end, it also suffers from a disturbing lack of width in the soundstage. Close your eyes and all sound appears to emanate from a narrow channel directly in front of you. In comparison, the Apple HomePod has a far wider, deeper soundstage that, while far from perfect, is more engaging and fun to listen to at quieter volume levels.
Things do improve if you add a second Home Max and set them up in stereo pairing mode – which is remarkably straightforward to do within the Google Home app – but that ups the price to a steep £800. For that sort of money, I would be thinking about buying a pair of decent active speakers and pairing with a Google Home Mini for smart features instead.
Sound decision
Despite these weaknesses, the Google Home Max is the best allrounder of the smart speakers produced by the big three brands: Google, Amazon and Apple. It’s the most flexible in terms of its connectivity; its digital assistant works extremely effectively; and there’s a good balance between the music services and devices it supports and its sound quality.
The Home Max is a great product, no doubt, but the problem here is the high price. At £400, it’s also far and away the most expensive of the big three’s smart speakers and Google doesn’t do enough to justify that premium.
SPECIFICATIONS 2 x 114mm high-excursion woofers 2 x 18mm custom tweeters six-microphone array ambient light sensor orientation sensor 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 337 x 190 x 154mm (WDH) 5.3kg limited warranty