(Credit: Emily Forlini)
New Fire TVs and a Fire TV-powered media streamer aren’t the only—or even the biggest—home theater announcements Amazon made this week. The company also revealed a new, entirely different use for its Echo smart speakers: replacing a soundbar.
Alexa Home Theater allows you to build a surround sound system using a handful of Echo devices and can even support spatial audio. I attended a demonstration of Alexa Home Theater at the company’s New York event, and it seems promising.
What Is Alexa Home Theater?
Alexa Home Theater is a new feature of Fire TV that wirelessly connects multiple Echo Dot Max or second-generation Echo Studio smart speakers to a compatible Fire TV Stick. Place two to five speakers around your living room, and they will sync with each other and the media stick to play any audio streamed through the stick.
Depending on the type and number of speakers, you can configure a basic, two-channel system up to a full, multi-speaker spatial audio setup. A pair of Echo Dot Maxes flanking your TV will provide stereo sound, and five will deliver a 5.1-channel surround experience. If you have Echo Studios instead of Dots, Alexa Home Theater can utilize the higher-end speaker’s three full-range drivers to generate precise directional sound, including height channels, and create a Dolby Atmos effect. Amazon says you can add a subwoofer, although its own Echo Sub wireless subwoofer is seven years old and has been discontinued. A new model may be available later in one of the Alexa Home Theater bundles the company plans to offer.
How does it work? Alexa Home Theater uses the AZ3 chips in the Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio to synchronize speakers with a nearby Fire TV stick and automatically configure and tune the sound based on the number and placement of speakers. Each speaker’s microphone array and other sensors can identify nearby speakers, locate them, and determine how they are reacting to the room’s acoustics in order to adjust their own output.
How Does It Sound?
Amazon representatives arranged five Echo Studio speakers around a room in a standard 5.0 surround layout (left, right, and center around the TV, and rear left and rear right). The speakers faithfully produced Dolby Atmos sound, whether it was music via Amazon Prime Music or videos from Amazon Prime Video. Effects seemed to come from overhead thanks to the Echo Studio’s upward-firing drivers bouncing sound from the ceiling.
The demo space was crowded, however, and I couldn’t get the best sense of how precise the spatial audio imaging was due to my position in the room and the large number of other people absorbing some of the sound. Still, what I could pick up gave at least some sense of directionality and leads me to believe it might be effective in your home.
How to Put an Alexa Home Theater Together
The options for configuring Alexa Home Theater are simultaneously flexible and not. While you can use between two and five speakers (not including a subwoofer), and the system will automatically configure them to best fit your space, you can’t mix and match Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio Speakers—at least at launch. You have to pick one or the other for your home theater. Amazon’s on-site representatives said you’ll be able to mix and match the different speakers eventually, but not when the new speakers roll out in October and November.
Even more puzzling, Alexa Home Theater isn’t compatible with any of the new Fire TV devices Amazon just announced. You’ll need a Fire TV Stick 4K or Fire TV Stick 4K Max to incorporate Echo speakers into your home theater. This isn’t too much of a problem for watching movies and listening to music, since those two Fire TV Sticks are inexpensive and work with all major streaming services. But it’s surprising that Amazon would introduce a new feature that doesn't work on its latest products, including the high-end Fire TV Omni.
It’s slightly less surprising that Alexa Home Theater isn’t available on the Fire TV Stick 4K Select. The newest Fire TV media streamer is an entry-level device that sits below the standard Fire TV Stick 4K and Fire TV Stick 4K Max in the lineup. It has less processing power and utilizes an entirely new operating system, Vega OS, to optimize its hardware performance as efficiently as possible. With weaker hardware and a different OS, it’s understandable from a technical level that the 4K Select can’t handle the audio analysis and synchronization Alexa Home Theater requires.
Amazon didn't demonstrate Vega OS at the event. The same operating system core powers the newest Echo smart displays, the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11, but according to Amazon, the interfaces differ between the two categories. An Amazon representative stated that Vega OS on the 4K Select will offer the same front-end (user interface) as standard Fire TVs and provide an identical experience to any other Fire TV device. In other words, you won’t know the difference.
If you want to assemble a surround sound system with Alexa Home Theater, you can start at the end of next month: The Echo Dot Max will be released on October 29, and the Echo Studio ships on November 15.