There's
only one reason to buy the Google
Home Max and that's to crank the volume up... all the way up.Otherwise,
it's like having a crazy powerful and expensive gaming computer with the best
graphics card, but only using it to play Minesweeper. It'd be a complete waste
of your money.
With a
$400 price tag, the Home Max is the most expensive smart speaker, when compared
to an Amazon Echo ($100), Google Home ($130),
and even Apple's HomePod ($350).
The hefty sticker price is worth it, though, if you want to feel the bass...
because you will feel it.
Since the
launch of Google's Home speaker in late 2016, the tech giant has expanded its
Google Assistant-powered smart speaker family with the Home Mini ($50)
and Home Max.
The Home
Mini is great if you're just starting out with a smart home, but sound quality
isn't a top priority. The Home is still Google's best value for both a smart
home hub and good, room-filling audio. The Home Max occupies its own class with
the loudest sound and deepest bass in the group.
One
Big Speaker
Whereas
the Home and Home Mini are compact and blend in with your home decor, the Home
Max is a big honking speaker. It's nearly twice the size of a HomePod and about
as large as a Sonos Play:5. There's no hiding it in any room.
The Home
Max is also heavy, weighing 11.68 pounds, which means you'll want to carefully
consider where you place it. Delicate bookshelves are a no-no.
Google
offers the Home Max in two colors: Chalk (white case with gray fabric front)
and Charcoal (black with black fabric front). Both look fine, but I feel like
Google missed an opportunity here to make the fabric fronts customizable. You
can swap out different bottoms for the Google Home so why not on the Home
Max?
Props to
Google for rounding the corners and keeping the design as clean as possible.
Frankly, there are only so many ways to make a directional speaker and the Home
Max's design is one of the least visually offensive once you've figured out
where to put it.
design is
one of the least visually offensive once you've figured out where to put it.
Like the
Home, buttons, controls, and ports are kept to the bare minimum. Up top is a
touch strip for controlling playback. Tap it to play and pause and swipe on it
to control the volume.
Considering
how responsive the touch-sensitive controls on the Google Home are, I was a
little disappointed to find the strip on the Home Max to be inferior. On
several separate occasions, the strip failed to register my taps and
swipes.
You're
better off just commanding the Google Assistant to
do all of these things, which is what you'll be doing most of the time anyway.
But I still think it's funny how the voice controls are more responsive than
the physical controls.
Around
back, there isn't much, but what's there is important. In the center is a
microphone mute switch. And in the lower left corner is a socket for power, a
USB-C port for connecting an ethernet adapter, and an aux audio port. The power
cable's a pastel green on the Chalk version and though it gives the speaker a
little pop, I think it's is an odd color choice to pair with the speaker's
white and gray colorway.
Turned
up to eleven
With a
name like Home Max, you don't even need me to tell you it's a loud-ass speaker.
Inside, Google's packed in quite the sound package.
The
speaker's got a pair of 4.5-inch woofers for your bass and dual 0.7-inch
tweeters for your highs. There are also six Class-D
amplifiers, two for each of the woofers and one for each tweeter.
Combine
these beefy specs with six far-field microphones for picking up your voice
and measuring
the acoustics of the room it's in for auto-sound calibration
and, well, you've got one powerful speaker that'll raise the roof.
Compared
to a Google Home or Amazon Echo, the Home Max is in another realm of loud.
Apple's HomePod gets pretty darn loud at its highest volume, but the Home Max
is louder.
The Home
Max can get so loud you can sometimes feel it. No joke, the hairs on your arm
will stick up. Its vibrations will rattle your furniture, and it's no wonder a
rubber pad for the speaker to sit on is included in the box.
If you
live in a house and want to rock out, the Home Max will not disappoint.
However, if your living situation's like mine — a post-war apartment complex
with wafer-thin walls, floors, and ceilings — you won't be able to get much out
of the Home Max's maximum volume setting. Not if you want to continue living in
your apartment without getting visits from angry neighbors or the cops.
“If you live in a spacious house and want to rock out, the Home
Max will not disappoint.”
At 100
percent volume, sound quality breaks just a little. To my ears, there's more
distortion compared when the Home Max is playing at max volume than on HomePod.
Apple's smart speaker is somehow able to maintain a cleaner sound separation at
higher volumes, which I value more than pure resonance.
If you
somehow have the dough for two Home Max speakers, you can pair them together
for even louder sound. I didn't get to test this out, but at SXSW Google had an an
activation where they had two Home Maxes paired together inside of a custom
lowrider. And holy sh*t, it double the loudness.
Of
course, this is not to say the Home Max doesn't sound good when it's playing at
"normal" room volume, because it does.
Like
HomePod, the Home Max is a warm-sounding speaker. Listening to "Sorry Not
Sorry" by Demi Lovato, her vocals are crisp and prominent and don't get
drowned by the track's beat.
"Closer"
by The Chainsmokers definitely sounded clearer than through an Echo or Google
Home; the song's gentle claps and synths never overpower Halsey's verses. On
punier smart speakers, the same song is more muddled and you don't get as much
dynamic range.
Where the
Home Max really shines is with bass. Oh, man, does it bring the bass. In a
blind listening test with several Mashable colleagues, they unanimously crowned
the Home Max the champ for bass-heavy tracks, blowing away the HomePod and
Sonos One.
I played
"Hotline Bling" by Drake and "Yeah!" by Usher, Lil Jon, and
Ludacris for each of them, and every single one agreed that, at a 50-80 percent
volume level, the Home Max is able to produce a thick low-end. At max volume,
you can feel the bass lightly punching through the air if you're standing a 1-2
feet in front of the speaker.
Sick
sound first, smarts second
The Home
Max is a smart speaker, which means it's powered by the Google
Assistant, which can do all the things the Assistant does on the smaller Google
Home or Home Mini. It can play your music, tell you the weather, search for
things on Google, and control your smart home devices — to name just a few of
the many skills it's capable of.
These are
all great — the Assistant is more intelligent than it was when the Google Home
launched and it's far superior to Alexa and Siri when it comes to understanding
context and voice commands.
But I'd
argue the Assistant is of secondary importance on the Home Max because if
you've got the cash to drop on this smart speaker, you're doing it because you
care about sound quality. Especially at deafening levels.
The Google
Home Max has some minor flaws like the sometimes wonky touch strip and
the Assistant has trouble hearing a "Hey Google" voice command over
loud-playing music unless you shout. But neither of these are deal-breakers.
The Home Max is overkill for most people, but at least it's an option if you're
all about that bass.
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