Amazon Echo Studio (newest model - 2024)

The Amazon Echo Studio is the one you buy for the music. Five speakers inside a single cabinet: three 2 inch midrange drivers, a 20 mm tweeter and a 5.25 inch woofer with a bass aperture, driven by a 24 bit DAC with 100 kHz bandwidth.

• What is inside an Amazon Echo Studio
• It measures the room and keeps measuring
• The formats it does not throw away
• It is also a hub, and a television speaker
• Who it is for

What is inside an Amazon Echo Studio

Five drivers in one cabinet: three 2 inch midrange units, a 20 mm tweeter and a 5.25 inch woofer venting through a bass aperture, run by a 24 bit DAC with 100 kHz of bandwidth. That is a real speaker specification rather than a smart speaker specification, and it is why this one weighs 3.5 kg and the Dot weighs a few hundred grams. You are buying drivers and amplification, and the assistant comes along with them.

It measures the room and keeps measuring

This is the feature worth understanding. The speaker listens to the acoustics of wherever you have actually put it and adjusts its filters while music plays, rather than assuming it is in the middle of a well proportioned listening room. In a real house, where a speaker ends up in a corner, against a wall or on a shelf full of books, that correction is doing more for the sound than most of the driver count.

The formats it does not throw away

Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio, plus CD quality and hi-res up to 24 bit, along with FLAC, MP3, AAC, Opus, Vorbis and the Dolby Digital family. Most smart speakers quietly downsample anything better than a compressed stream. If you keep a library of proper files, or pay for a lossless service, this is one of the few of these that will play them as they are.

It is also a hub, and a television speaker

Zigbee and Matter are built in, so bulbs and sensors pair straight to it with no gateway. A combination 3.5 mm and mini optical socket takes a turntable or a television, and it connects wirelessly as the audio output for compatible Fire TV devices, which is the cheapest way to get a television sounding like something other than a television.

Who it is for

Anyone whose first question about a smart speaker is what it sounds like. If the answer to that question is that it only has to be loud enough for the kitchen radio, the Echo 4th Gen costs a great deal less and does the assistant part identically.

For Zigbee devices to pair with it, start with the Zigbee door sensor or a Zigbee motion sensor. Dolby explain what Atmos actually is if the term is new.