Amazon Echo Studio

The Amazon Echo Studio is claimed to be not only the best-sounding Echo speaker yet, but also a smart speaker fit for audiophiles – bold claims for a product costing just £190.

As well as boasting upgrades so it can play Cd-quality and hi-res audio – now both available from Amazon Music HD – the Echo Studio also promises to deliver 3D audio via tracks encoded in Sony's 360 Reality Audio and Dolby Atmos.

So can the Echo Studio make Amazon's smart speakers a realistic proposition for those who value good sound, and give Sonos, Audio Pro and Apple a run for their money?

Beefed-up appearance

The Echo Studio continues the same design language of previous Echo speakers, being cylindrical in shape and covered with a charcoal-coloured fabric mesh. It’s considerably larger than any previous Echo and manages to dwarf the Sonos One and Apple Home Pod.

Its beefed-up appearance helps to pack in 330W of power, driving two 5cm midrange speakers positioned left and right, a 25mm forward-firing centre tweeter and a 5cm upward-firing midrange speaker. Bass is taken care of by a downward-firing 5.25in bass driver. There are volume buttons on the top, along with a mic mute and Alexa-wake button. The blue ring of light remains so you know when Alexa is listening.

The position of the drivers allows the Echo Studio to use a new feature of the Amazon Music HD service, its library of songs available in Dolby Atmos Music. Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are offering tracks in the Dolby Atmos Music format, while there's also a rival format in the shape of Sony's 360 Reality Audio, which is also supported by the Amazon Echo Studio.

The Studio has all the typical features of Echo devices. You can set timers and reminders; control smart home devices; play music; get facts – all by asking questions or barking orders at Alexa.

Fire up the Echo Studio for the first time and Alexa will tune its sound for your room's acoustics by firing out a number of test tones and reacting to its readings. The whole process doesn't last longer than a few seconds, but you will need to recalibrate the speaker if you move it around.

You can access tone controls through the Alexa app for Android and IOS, plus change volume manually and pair another Echo Studio or manage and group any other Echo speakers you own.

Amazon has built added flexibility into the Echo Studio. You can wirelessly connect one or two of the speakers with either a Fire TV Cube (1st or 2nd Gen), Fire TV Stick 4K or Fire TV (3rd Gen) to create a Dolby Atmos home theatre set-up. It's not 5.1 surround-sound, but hooking up a stereo pair presents a decent opportunity to upgrade the audio coming out of your TV.

Producing immersive, directional audio is always going to be difficult, but doing it from a single speaker source is even more challenging. So how does it fare? We begin with a couple of tracks designed to showcase the Echo Studio’s handling of 3D audio. Ariana Grande’s

7 Rings via Amazon Music HD is presented with height and space, elevating the lead and background vocals.

It’s an open, airy presentation that suits the 3D environment well. The speaker sits you in the jaws of a tall soundstage, where there's a good amount of detail to percussion and high frequencies. The deployment of the track’s bass raises an eyebrow, though. There’s power and weight, but also a tendency to overpower the track. The Echo Studio isn’t the most controlled or subtle when it comes to dropping the tune's big, bold bassline.

We switch to Gregory Porter’s Mona Lisa cover and the speaker is in its element with this 3D mix. There’s impressive height to the various sections of the orchestra, mixed with good dynamics and an impressive sense of scale. There isn’t much in the way of bass, so you’re left with an ensemble of detailed and entertaining mids and highs.

Positive attributes

With only a few songs mixed this way, it's important to note that many of the positive attributes transfer over to stereo tracks. Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name delivers a clear vocal cutting through and a good sense of separation between the different percussive elements.

The Studio is also capable of a little processing wizardry to add height to stereo mixes – just enable the 'upmixing' setting on the Alexa app – but don’t expect the same quality you’d get from a well-tuned Atmos mix. The Manic Street Preachers' Motorcycle Emptiness sounds solid, cohesive and balanced in normal mode. But enable the ‘Stereo Spatial Enhancement’ and it sounds a little unbalanced and over-processed. We’d be tempted to turn this setting off.

There's no doubt the Amazon Echo Studio sounds bigger and goes louder than some rivals, such as the Sonos One. But the Sonos offers a more cohesive sound and higher-quality bass. It can't summon the 3D processing of the Echo Studio, but we prefer its overall balance.

Amazon's eagerness to push sound quality and its adoption of hi-res audio has to be a good thing, and the Echo Studio is a capable contender. We're not entirely convinced by the way it handles bass, and we wouldn't call it audiophile quality, but, for the money, the Echo Studio has a lot going for it.

"WE WOULDN'T EXACTLY CALL IT AUDIOPHILE QUALITY, BUT FOR THE MONEY, THE ECHO STUDIO HAS A LOT GOING FOR IT"