Ball Of Sound - Amazon Echo

The new Echo is the best yet for features, but isn’t necessarily the best smart speaker for everyone

With the latest Amazon Echo, we have the biggest design change in the six years since the Alexa smart speaker first appeared on the scene: cylinders are out, spheres are in.

We’re going to be honest: we preferred the old cylindrical design for the Echo. The sphere shapes that Amazon has gone all-in on in 2020 look a bit too much like a fancy paperweight or a pet toy to us, though the acoustics do seem to be slightly better with the shift in shape.

Something else we’re not particularly happy about is the switching of the status light from the top to the bottom of the device. If you’re standing up and the Echo is on a low table, you have to duck down to make sure the speaker is listening.

The Echo comes with a 3-inch woofer and two 0.8-inch front-firing tweeters and the combination works really well: this is a speaker that can fill a room with top-quality sound no problem at all. Bass is particularly well pronounced, and it’s certainly a better level of fidelity than you would get from the smaller speakers on the market.

Amazon has upgraded the Echos to support multi-room audio, so you can carry your tunes from one room to another and set up two as a stereo pair. You can also use this and other Echos as a sound system for your Fire TV device as well, while a 3.5mm audio input socket gives you even more flexibility.