Google Home MAX vs Harman Kardon Onyx Studio

Sound comparison between the popular Harman Kardon Onyx Studio and an older but still great sounding smart speaker, the Google Home MAX. Even though the Home Max is a mains speaker and is to be expected to sound bigger and more powerful than the battery powered Onyx Studio, the Onyx still manages to pump out very clean and powerful sound not too different from the Home Max, at least at the volume level I tested them here. In the audio world, good sounding speakers are used for decades, hopefully this will be true for the Home Max as well.

[@shcon]

I'm really not sure how watching a video of 2 speakers is supposed to tell me anything about the sound output since its all being compressed, filtered, and output by completely different speakers.

[@AudioCuriosity]

Well first you should use a decent pair of headphones with as flat frequency response as possible, and not speakers to play back sound comparisons in general. You will be able to tell sound characteristics between the speakers. One can sound more bassy, one with more upper midrange, other brighter treble, etc. The encoding compression is the least you should be worried about I think. More important is the room acoustics that I've recorded them and how realistic my microphones are picking up the speakers sound. I've used a pretty decent stereo field recorder and should be enough to tell most differences between the two speakers.

[@281skunk]

Clearly the google max has lower end.