Two of them are located in our living room and were set up as a stereo pair. This only worked occasionally. Frankly, we haven’t been using them at all lately.
My wife is traveling for the next couple of weeks. If bloody hot in Santa Barbara, CA and my office has turned into an oven. So I hijacked her office that has AC
Doing so I decided to give the two Apple Airpods another try. Reset them to default settings. Removed all configurations from the “home” app and did a clean set up as a stereo pair. Initially it works great but after a while the setup doesn’t work any more. They disappear or only one speaker plays etc etc
Things are worse when trying to use them with my iMac.
I have confirmed that all devices are on the same network etc
Waisted hours resetting and starting from scratch only to end up with the same disappointment over and over again. My conclusion is that using Apple Homepod as a stereo pair doesn’t work.
Hoping that the Airport Mini will come with a firmware upgrade that will solve this relatively simple problem to solve.
I have four homepods, two of which are set up on my desk as a stereo pair. The initial setup was very difficult, in part because when I got the pair their OSes were horribly out of date (they must have been sitting in the warehouse for a very long time). However, since I got them paired they’ve been rock solid. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with the pair.
I have had one instance of an issue with multiroom audio (playing audio on more than one HomePod outside a stereo pair) but power cycling took care of that.
I will say I have basically given up on playing audio to them from my Mac. The current implementation is far too limiting. I either AirPlay to them from an iOS device or stream to them directly from Apple Music.
Can you expand on this? Also, do you still have your Sonos players and do you use them in conjunction with the HomePods(ie - same music playing on both HP and Sonos)?
Chris thanks for your reply
I had to look up how to update the firmware on the HomePod. Turns out both of them are up-to-date.
You are right about playing from the Mac. The HomePods either show as individual or a s pair. It changes all the time. Also changes made in the Home app sync very slowly across devices. For sure the stereo pairing breaks after connecting them to my iMac. Playing from iOS only might be more consistent.
Still its a poor user experience… Hoping Apple will improve this soon.
From macOS you can only stream the system audio output to a single speaker, not a stereo pair or multiroom audio. You can AirPlay to stereo pairs or multiroom audio from the iTunes app, but this doesn’t help you listen to a youtube video or some other audio source.
I still have a Sonos 5.1 setup on my TV (Beam+Sub+2xPlay One). It’s set up so that I can AirPlay or stream music to it along with my HomePods, but I usually don’t bother. Three HomePods (two at my desk in the living room and one in the kitchen) are more than enough to fill the space.
I have five, two as a stereo pair. They work great, though I haven’t tried playing from a Mac to the pair. Playing from iOS works fine. They are also connected to my Apple TV 4K, and work fine when I switch from tv speakers to them.
