AMZN Amazon.com Inc

By Matthew Kitchen 

THROW SOME GOOGLY EYES on the Echo Studio, Amazon's latest smart speaker, and with the cutout at the base, it resembles a wide-mouthed robot ready to yammer all its stellar benefits, powered by Alexa.

In the past, these Echo devices have been best for shouting out weather updates and setting to-do lists and cook timers. But what the speakers have rarely been good for is playing decent-sounding music -- something Amazon claims it can fix by cramming five speakers into its new 8.1-inch-tall cylinder.

Inside, the Studio ($199, amazon.com) houses three mid-range drivers, a tweeter and subwoofer, resulting in a surprisingly powerful sonic boom. To enhance all this speaker tech, Amazon also uses Dolby Atmos processing to create what it calls "immersive 3-D audio." Where surround sound often relies on five directly aimed speaker channels that literally encircle a listener, Atmos can, in theory, help free these individual sounds from their channels and envelope you with audio from all around using just the one device.

"Every sound you hear in a song is treated as an object," said Phil Hilmes, Amazon's director of audio technology. "The mixer can take those objects and place them in different locations around the room relative to where you're hearing it," so someone on the right side of a room might experience the opening tones of Ariana Grande's "7 Rings" differently than someone on the left. To pull this off, the Studio smartly and continuously calibrates itself to any room, taking into account the size and shape, tones and sound reflections.

The 3-D playlist is limited, but one of the Studio's smartest features is it can always play music in the best available format, from mono to immersive. Smarter still, if you're more a film buff than a music nerd, the Studio can be paired with Amazon's 4K Fire TV devices for a home-theater experience. You don't even need to daisy-chain a tangle of cables together -- it's all linked wirelessly via Alexa's app.

You can sync two Studios together, doubling the power as they smartly split duties between left and right orientations to enhance movie-watching. But while "Mad Max: Fury Road" was thrilling as cars whizzed by on each side of the room, the paired Studios were unable to create rear and overhead sounds, so feeling the jets scrape past your ceiling as they buzz the tower in "Top Gun" won't happen.

Amazon's 3-D audio still can't compete with surround sound, but as a music-only device, it's much easier to set up than any stereo system, it's better at blaring tunes than any smart speaker to date and it still lets you know when the chicken's done.

The Wall Street Journal is not compensated by retailers listed in its articles as outlets for products. Listed retailers frequently are not the sole retail outlets.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 14, 2019 12:07 ET (17:07 GMT)

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