New lows for Amazon

While smart speakers are handy for answering your queries and controlling your smart home gear, we’ve found the smaller models to be wanting when it comes to decent sound quality — which is at least partly because of their size. Hence Google and Apple have both addressed sound quality by creating larger smart speakers (as have some third parties, including JBL). But not Amazon. Rather than release a larger top-shelf speaker to rival the Google Home Max and Apple HomePod, it has instead decided to beef up its sound by adding a subwoofer to the mix. This has been the solution chosen already by some of the more hi-fi-styled multiroom speaker brands — Sonos, HEOS, Bluesound and Yamaha all have separate subwoofers available which can be paired with