For 3D-mixed music available in Amazon Music’s Ultra HD format, the Echo Studio brings some strong clarity and imaging. Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” in Ultra HD is crisp, full, and layered. The guitar plucks and drums sound separate from the vocals, giving the effect that the string plucks float a bit above the singing. The bass drum is prominent and stands mostly in front of the mix without overcoming the other instruments or vocals. You won’t mistake the Echo Studio for a sound system with a subwoofer or rear satellites, but it manages to put out big, nuanced sound from a small package.
Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” in Ultra HD shows off the Echo Studio’s 3D sound even better. The opening of the track’s theremin sounds properly ghostly, while the chaos of the horseback laser fight gets clear directional imaging, giving the impression of galloping hooves directly in front of you, while blasts and explosions can be heard in the distance, to the forward-right.
Again, it can’t produce a true surround sound field that completely wraps around you, but the Echo Studio offers some impressive stereo imaging and forward-facing verticality that gives the impression of a pair of stereo speakers with additional upward-firing drivers. At high volumes, the speaker fills the room easily, bringing the exciting thunder of guitar strums and drumrolls while letting Bellamy’s voice come through clearly. When he sings that no one’s going to take him alive, his voice can be heard directly in center, while the harmonies can be placed in the distance, to the left and right.
“Lazaretto” by Jack White also shows good directionality, again closer to stereo-with-vertical channels than full surround sound. White’s vocals stand in the center along with a time-keeping shaker, while the opening bass notes seem to bounce a bit left and right. The squeaky, shrill guitar riffs clearly come in from the sides of the room, demonstrating how higher frequencies bounce off of surfaces with much more acoustic precision than lower ones.
All of these effects come from 3D audio mixing of Ultra HD tracks on Amazon Music. The Echo Studio can also mix stereo tracks to 3D itself, which it will do if you stream any non-Ultra HD music to it. Like most upmixing, the effect isn’t nearly as noticeable or good as intentional, professional mixing.
The Crystal Method’s “Born Too Slow” sounds good on the Echo Studio as a stereo track, with generous presence for the bass drum hits and plenty of energy in the driving snares and cymbals. The vocals and guitar riffs sit slightly behind the percussion on this speaker, but they can still be easily discerned. However, none of the verticality heard in the Ultra HD tracks can be detected, and the stereo balance is a bit more modest and center-focused rather than trying to produce a sound field that makes the speaker sound bigger than it is.
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As for bass, the Echo Studio reproduces our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” with appreciable low-end power. It doesn’t shake the walls, but it did vibrate the table the speaker was sitting on, and at maximum volume levels, it didn’t distort. The Studio doesn’t reach quite into sub-bass levels, but you can pair it with an Echo Sub to add full subwoofer power to the mix (and, since deep bass isn’t directional at all, it doesn’t need to be integrated into the Studio’s specifically-aimed-and-calibrated driver setup).
