Review - 4 months later, the Nest Audio is still a smart speaker champ - Android

Nest Audio review The hardware

Whereas the original Google Home felt like an experiment in design that happened to pay off — its top-mounted capacitive ring is still one of my favorite ways to change volume — the Nest Audio sits clearly in Google's family of fabric-covered speakers and smart displays.

In its most basic sense, it's a much smaller vertically-mounted Google Home Max, around 20% taller and 25% wider than the third-generation cylindrical Amazon Echo, and at a surprising 2.6 pounds, around 50% heavier. It also dwarfs the OG Google Home, and is even slightly taller than, though not quite as deep as, the Sonos One.

Google clearly put a lot of effort into keeping the Nest Audio compact. Its heft comes from a surfeit of metal — aluminum in the front and magnesium in the back — meant for heat dissipation and rigidity that should prevent distortion at high volumes. Other than the weight, though, you'd never know there was a metal frame inside; the whole speaker is covered in a soft woven fabric, the majority of which Google says is derived from recycled water bottles.

The Nest Audio looks, unsurprisingly, like a smaller Google Home Max

Available in five colors, I got to try the least colorful two — Chalk (white) and Charcoal (black) — but I don't think it really matters much; this is a speaker that will be cast off to the side of a room to be called upon to play music or a podcast when the mood strikes. That said, the Sage green, Sky blue, and Sand options are sure to be popular for people who do want to make the speaker a bit more prominent.

Back in July, Google teased the Nest Audio with a couple of photos and a video, in which it looked like the speaker could be used portably. Unfortunately, that was just a mirage, since the Nest Audio, like all Google speakers, is meant to be used plugged in — though it does support Bluetooth if you want to connect it directly to a phone.

Google told me that it wanted to ensure the highest-quality Google Assistant performance in every environment, making it important that, when connected to Wi-Fi, the speaker had a consistent source of power. While surely disappointing to some who were perhaps looking for a miniature version of the Sonos Move, adding a battery large enough to power the Nest Audio for ample time, even just connected to Bluetooth, would have upended the compact form factor Google achieved here.

I bring this up early in the review because, other than improvements to design and sound quality, the Nest Audio is practically no different from the original Google Home. Like the Nest Mini, there's a dedicated microphone mute switch on board, along with four LEDs that light up when playing and pausing music or changing volume. Top of the speaker also houses the capacitive touch zones: left for volume down, middle for play/pause, and right for volume up. These regions are large enough that precise placement isn't necessary, and the whole interaction model feels like Google has spent the last three years atoning for the Google Home Mini's defective touch controls.

The Nest Audio's design purposefully doesn't draw attention to itself. You may not even be able to tell it's on unless you're interacting with it.

I like the Nest Audio's design despite its near-monolithic austerity. Unlike the Amazon Echo or even the Sonos One, there are no physical buttons, or hints at button placements, unless you know where to tap. The speaker's LEDs stay unlit while audio is playing, and only maintain their presence when the rear mute switch has been activated (which, again, isn't visible unless you're looking for it). Google has learned that people would rather hear than see a speaker — which is exactly the way it should be.

What the Nest Audio is very good at, like its predecessor, is hearing its key phrases even while muttered quietly or when the music is blaring. The three far-field microphones do a fantastic job picking up even the faintest hint of a "Hey Google," quieting the current song to get a better earline to a follow-up phrase. This has always been a huge advantage of Google's first-party hardware over competitors like Sonos that integrate the Assistant into its hardware, and that's true here, too.

Nest Audio review The sound

The Nest Audio sounds good, but not amazing. That fact should be obvious, but we're used to big tech companies subverting our expectations by subsidizing their hardware to encourage ecosystem lock-in.

The promising news is that if you're coming from either an OG Google Home or a Google Home Mini or Nest Mini, this will be a big upgrade. Unlike the Alexa ecosystem, which has seen huge growth because Amazon seems willing to work with literally any company that can throw together a tweeter and a microphone, there aren't a lot of capable Google Assistant speakers. And as Google spent the last few years working with partners like Lenovo, LG, Sony, and JBL to pair speakers with screens, and even as it built out its own Nest Hub products, audio quality has never seemed like a priority.

The Nest Audio sounds much better than the Google Home, but that wasn't a high bar to reach.

On its own, the Nest Audio speaker is 75% louder, and has 50% stronger bass, than the original Google Home, according to Google. While that's immediately apparent upon first listening, it's the clarity and dynamic range that I appreciate more when comparing the two. The Google Home, praised when it was released for its room-filling fidelity, sounds muddy and boomy in comparison.

The Nest Audio has a fairly flat sound profile, not boring or lifeless, but without adding its own color to what's being played. Google says it employs its own automatic tuning algorithms to the sound profile once the speaker has been placed for a few seconds, reading the ambient noise and reverb in the room to determine how to equalize the sound. While I didn't notice a huge difference in sound signature between the speaker placed in the middle of a large room or the corner of a small one (though the results were obviously more enjoyable in the latter scenario), the Nest Audio does adjust its volume, as well as the room-thumping low-end, depending on the environment.

The speaker does very well playing most genres of music, but it will need to be equalized to increase the bass if you're going to drive really thumpy hip-hop or dance music. Still, the low-end is clean and inviting, vocals come through beautifully, and there's no sharpness or sibilance at the high-end.

I spent a lot of time listening to music on the Nest Audio, cycling between four other smart speakers: the third-gen Amazon Echo ($100, but now discontinued), the Sonos One ($199), the Ikea Symfonisk WiFi bookshelf speaker ($100), and the Google Home ($100, now discontinued).

Of those five connected speakers, the Nest Audio finds itself firmly in the middle of the pack, both in terms of overall audio quality and how it reproduces most genres of music. It's far less muddy and bass-forward than either the Google Home or the Amazon Echo, the latter of which sends audio from its tweeter upwards and its woofer down towards the floor, exaggerating its bass response as it sends music in all directions.

Google says that the Nest Audio isn't just directional, but that it's a waveguide speaker, which means the tweeter is designed to more precisely target exactly the spot the speaker is pointing. This is supposed to result in what hi-fi enthusiasts call a "sweet spot," the point in a room, relative to a speaker's placement, that ostensibly sounds the best. I actually found this to be true, almost to the speaker's detriment; given its small size and directional output, a song's musical soundstage appears narrower than on the Sonos One or Ikea Symfonisk, which have better-quality drivers and a larger enclosure, respectively.

Still, the Nest Audio holds its own, especially when playing music where it's important to hear a clear separation between the vocals and instruments; and at its higher volumes, a single Nest Audio gets the room vibrating, if not modestly thumping.

But this is clearly Google tuning its speaker for an audience that listens to just as many podcasts as top-40 hits, just as many news clips as freestyles. I think it was the right choice, too, because at half the price of a Sonos One, you're getting 90% of the performance.

The Nest Audio really has a chance to shine two units form a stereo pair.

Where the Nest Audio really excels is when paired to a second unit. Google began offering stereo pairing all the way back in 2017 with the Home Max, but at $600 that likely wasn't a very common use case. Now all of Google's first-party speakers support the feature, which physically divides the speakers into dedicated left and right channels, just as sound engineers intended. It's in this configuration the waveguide tweeters shine, building a lovely and capable little wireless speaker system for just under $200.

Nest Audio review The Google Assistant

Being a smart connected speaker, the Nest Audio has access to everything the Google Assistant has learned over the years, from requesting songs or podcasts to setting timers to asking common facts to controlling smart home gadgets and lots more. By now you likely know if you'd benefit from the addition of a smart speaker, and I'm guessing if you're considering the Nest Audio, you've interacted with the Google Assistant in some form or fashion.

Google Assistant is still better than Alexa for getting questions answered, but Amazon is improving its assistant faster than Google.

The good and bad news is that the Assistant works identically on the Nest Audio as it does on every other smart speaker connected to Google's ecosystem; there are no exclusive or unique features here. It's a competent and capable vessel to all facets of Google's ecosystem, though I did encounter a few bugs when asking Spotify to play specific albums — any album that came out in the last couple of weeks didn't appear to exist in Spotify's database, though they could manually be pushed to the speaker using Spotify Connect — but the request worked on the Google Home or Nest Mini.

Of course, like Amazon's mainline Echo speakers, the Nest Audio is in a precarious position in its parent company's ecosystem. Google gives away the Nest Mini at every opportunity — I've received and given away at least five of them over the past year — because it's a cheap entry-point to the Assistant. On the other side, Google's Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max have screens, all the better to interact with the Assistant, while also offering a handy Google Photos ambient display.

Google told me that the Nest Audio is for people who explicitly want a speaker dedicated to audio, and specifically music, where a smart display isn't appropriate and a Nest Mini isn't powerful enough. I use my Home Max in my living room for its power and a Hub Max in the kitchen for its display, but I can think of a few places around the house — my office, my daughter's room — where the Nest Audio's smaller size and lack of a display would come in handy.