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How Amazon Is Making Its Best Speaker Sound Even Better

Amazon just improved the audio quality of its Echo Studio. An expert explains how.

an amazon speaker on a side table Tucker Bowe

By Tucker Bowe

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The Echo Studio is the most hi-fi speaker that Amazon makes. Introduced in late 2019, you can think of it as a souped-up Echo; it has the same smart speaker functionality — thanks to Alexa baked right in — but the Echo Studio is roughly twice the size, has more (and bigger) drivers and gets significantly louder.

Just as importantly, the Echo Studio can play the high-resolution audio (up to 24-bit) as well as 3D immersive audio (including Dolby Atmos) that many of today’s lossless streaming services can deliver. And at just $200, that’s a pretty darn good deal.

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This past fall, Amazon announced a slew of new hardware devices including several updated Echo devices. The Echo Studio hasn’t changed in the past three years — except now you can buy a glacier (white) version — but if you have (or are thinking about getting) the Echo Studio, the good news is that Amazon is going to roll out a software update to make it sound even better.

an amazon speaker sitting on a side table next to booksTucker Bowe

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The software update for the Echo Studio is going to do two things. First, it’s extending its frequency range. And second, it’s improving that spatial audio processing so that stereo content — which most audio files are still stereo — sounds even better.

“We’re extending the woofers, the low-frequency range, to get deeper bass out of it, but it also extends the midrange — or the three midranges in the Echo Studio — so we can get fuller sound out of each of them,” explained Phil Hilmes, the Director of Audio Technology at Amazon. “It effectively delivers clearer sound and deeper bass.”

According to Hilmes, Amazon’s audio team has been able to learn the limits of the Echo Studio — what the speaker is capable of at any different volume levels and when playing different content — and then develop new technology and implement that into the speaker (via the software update) to take advantage of those learnings. “The end effect is that we are getting another octave of frequency response out of each driver,” said Hilmes, “which is pretty impressive.”

the top of an amazon speaker sitting on a side tableTucker Bowe

Maybe more impressively is what the software update enables the Echo Studio to do with stereo content — or content that hasn’t been mixed in a 3D spatial format like Dolby Atmos or 360 Reality Audio. “We developed our own custom-built spatial audio technology that utilizes all the different speakers in our Echo Studio to precisely position the sounds where they should be in an actual stereo mix,” explained Hilmes. The end result is an immersive experience like you’d hear if listening in an actual studio.

The software update is exclusive to the Echo Studio for now, but Hilmes said that Amazon plans to it out to other Echo devices as well. “Pretty much any [Echo] speaker can benefit from this,” said Hilmes. “It’s just that Echo Studio is our best-sounding speaker and we want to make it even better.”

If you have an Echo Studio in your home, you don’t have to do anything to the speaker — the update will automatically roll out to every Echo Studio. (In fact, it should have rolled already rolled out as of the first week of November.)