Amazon Echo Tech Of The Future
- johnnysilverkid22
- Feb 14, 2018
- 2 min read
Will the Amazon Echo be the new tech of the future? It depends because they have competition. AI and other companies will probably have a better version of it. I think this tech is just starting out and it will give other companies new ideas for AI. Click here to buy.
So it’s been an interesting first few weeks with the Echo and am happy to say Echo 2nd Gen has finally delivered on its promise of improved sound quality over 1st Gen Echo, with the 3rd firmware since launch. If you are confused about a lot of the negative reviews, old firmware is the likely cause of most of them regarding poor sound quality.Want to keep this short and spare all the gory details, but there was a bug in the launch version of the firmware, which was fixed after a few days, but the first fix, while satisfying some, was not, in my opinion a full fix and left the mid-range frequencies muted and tinny. Today I noticed that Alexa’s voice in this unit sounded much more like Alexa’s voice on Gen 1 Echo’s I own and, after playing some music, suspected they had upgraded the firmware again, and indeed they have. The current firmware is 592452720 and it’s a massive improvement over both the original and updated version 592452420.
So I decided to do some more side-by-side comparisons with the Gen 1 Echo and can honestly say in many areas the sound quality is now actually better than Gen 1 Echo. This is how the product should have sounded at launch! If I have any complaints at this point it’s that the low-frequencies loudness could stand to be bumped up just a tad. (Better yet, PLEASE add an EQ feature to the Alexa app so users can adjust EQ for the room and music type they prefer). I did my comparisons at volume level 8.
Anything above that and Gen 1 Echo dynamic range starts to break down, while Gen 2 maintains quality but doesn’t get quite as loud and Gen 1. It’s the right trade off, I would rather it sound good than be louder and sound harsh. At that volume level I went thru a range of music, streamed over Bluetooth, switching between Gen 1 and Gen 2 devices, and found Gen 2 to be an improvement over Gen 1 for the vast majority of the music I tried. I’m impressed with the quality of the audio coming out of this form factor, and impressed how quickly Amazon has responded to feedback on the problems. Kudos, this Echo is a keeper.
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