Nest is a relatively powerful speaker that is worth the money

AFFORDABLE home hifi used to mean a Sanyo triple deck system with a small rubbery equaliser and grey plastic speakers.

Today, it is a standalone, wifi-connected smart speaker.

There are two dominant smart home ecosystems: Amazon and Google. Buy a speaker from either ecosystem and it’s likely that you’ll stick with it. While Amazon holds a lead with its Echo speakers and Alexa voice control system, Google is right behind with support from quite a few other manufacturers.

What used to be its standard €100 smart speaker, Google Home, is now called Nest Audio. I’ve been listening to one for a few days and have found it to be fairly impressive, if a little constrained by the physical audio limits of its size.

The Nest Audio’s design is clean and simple, almost to a fault. It resembles a large, sleek, fabric-covered rectangular pebble. The advantage is an unobtrusive presence that will disturb your room’s curated look a lot less than most other speakers. This is worth some brownie points, in my view, our homes are getting cluttered up with tech devices to a degree that is becoming a little excessive. The Nest Audio is something of an antidote to this.

There are some usability consequences, however, to its extreme simplicity. The speaker controls (volume and pause) are invisible, located on the top-front of the device. If you prioritise appearance, this won’t bother you. But it might cause a little confusion at first.

While looks are one thing, the main metric to judge this by is its audio quality. Google is making big claims about it, promising that it can provide ‘room filling’ sound. My experience with it is that it’s definitely better than the Google Home speaker it replaces and is fairly impressive within its price bracket (€100).

This is partly because Google has augmented most of the important audio tech under the hood, including a 75mm woofer and a 19mm tweeter.

On the other hand, the audio is not as good as some rival smart speakers that cost about €50 or €60 more, such as Amazon’s Echo Plus. This isn’t surprising: aside from being a lot cheaper, the Nest Audio is simply smaller than the Echo Plus. Switching between the same song on both speakers shows a sizeable gap in bass tones, in particular.

So no, on its own, this isn’t capable of room-filling sound, unless it’s a particularly small box room. It may do this more successfully, however, when paired with another Nest Audio. My review didn’t encompass this capacity, but Google says that the Nest Audio is designed as much to be part of a multi-speaker setup as a standalone one.

One of the Nest Audio’s other strengths is the sensitivity of its microphones. It has three now, compared to its predecessor’s two. I never had any difficulty being heard by it, even from right across the room when there was other noise.

As has become customary on smart speakers, you can switch the microphones off on the back of the device.

Setting the speaker up, as with almost all of Google’s smart home devices, is done through its Home app. For the most part, this is fairly straightforward. However, there are occasionally usability hurdles.

For example, it’s much harder to change your Nest speaker from one wifi network to another. As luck would have it, our family switched home internet provider two days after setting up the Nest Audio speaker on the original home wifi. Changing the Nest Audio speaker over to the new wifi network proved to be surprisingly difficult, with guidance for the entire process hard to find online or within Google’s Home app. If you find yourself in this situation, turn the microphone on the rear of the device off and press down on the unmarked ‘pause’ section of the upper part of the front of the speaker. You may then also have to set up a new ‘home’ within Google Home app for it to pair a second time.

By contrast, switching our Amazon Echo speaker took about 90 seconds within Amazon’s Alexa app.

Overall, Google’s Nest Audio is a fairly high-quality, good looking, relatively powerful smart speaker that is worth the money.