8 months later, the Amazon Echo Studio is still the best-sounding smart speaker

Google just announced its new Home Speaker, and after reading through the launch materials, I can’t help but notice just how little of it is about sound. Google calls it a device “engineered from the ground up for Gemini,” built around a single 58mm driver — one speaker cone doing all the work. To me, it’s a clear sign yet of where this whole category is heading: the smart speaker is quietly becoming a microphone you talk to, with just enough audio hardware to play a podcast in the kitchen. Which makes now a good time to revisit the one mainstream smart speaker that still treats sound as the main event. Eight months after its launch last October, the Amazon Echo Studio (2nd Gen) is still the best-sounding smart speaker you can buy.

The difference comes down to what’s under the hood. The Echo Studio packs four drivers — a 3.75-inch woofer plus three 2.25-inch full-range drivers angled to fire left, right, and upward — and it supports Dolby Atmos, the surround format that adds a sense of height and space to compatible tracks. Compare that to the rest of the assistant-first crowd: Google’s new Home Speaker has one driver, the older Nest Audio has two, and most Echo Dot–class speakers aren’t far behind. The Echo Studio is really one of the last mainstream smart speakers still built like a real speaker.

To be fair, it isn’t the only one, and it isn’t even the most loaded. Apple’s HomePod (2nd Gen) carries six drive units — a woofer and five tweeters — and sounds excellent, but it costs $299 and only really makes sense if your house already runs on iPhones. Sonos’s Era 300 has six drivers too and is the better pick if pure sound quality is all you care about, but it’s an eye-watering $449 and isn’t a smart-home hub in the way Amazon means it — it’s a speaker that happens to take voice commands, not a control center for your lights and locks. That’s why I think the Echo Studio threads the needle the best: a multi-driver design and a built-in hub that supports Zigbee, Matter, and Thread (the standards most smart bulbs, plugs, and sensors use, so you don’t need a separate bridge), all at a price that undercuts both.

For a single speaker, there’s a real sense of width — my music sounds more spacious than the box it’s coming from. That’s more than most smart speakers near this price can manage, where a lone driver usually means thinner bass and instruments that blur together once a track gets busy with multiple elements. It’s the best-sounding speaker Amazon has shipped, and in a living room or kitchen, it actually sounds good.

That’s really the key part I can’t stress enough as AI eats this category. More and more, the “speaker” in “smart speaker” is the part that gets cut to make room for the AI assistant. If all you want is a pod to talk to, $99 buys you plenty. But if you want a smart hub that also sounds good — one you’d actually listen to an album on — the Echo Studio is still the one to beat, eight months on.