Pros & Cons
-
- Big sound field
- Detailed mids and highs
- Multiple angled drivers enable spatial audio
- Supports Alexa+ and three smart home hub standards
- Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity
- Support for home theater setups
-
- Underwhelming bass
- Limited selection of spatial audio music
Amazon Echo Studio (2025) Specs
| Bluetooth | |
| Built-In Voice Assistant | Amazon Alexa |
| Channels | 5.1 |
| Multi-Room | |
| Physical Connections | None |
| Speakerphone | |
| Wi-Fi |
The Echo Studio has long been Amazon's flagship Alexa smart speaker, delivering the most powerful audio in the Echo lineup and featuring multiple angled drivers for immersive spatial sound. After six years, it's finally getting an update. The second-generation Echo Studio is smaller, smarter, and packed with extra sensors, connectivity options, and access to Amazon's more advanced Alexa+ AI assistant. It retains all of the original's spatial audio capabilities, and you can even link up to five units with a Fire TV streamer for a fully immersive home theater experience. Priced at $219.99, it's a bit more expensive and offers slightly less bass than its predecessor. Still, it remains the best-sounding Echo speaker available and a strong choice for filling a living room with rich sound. That said, the $99.99 Echo Dot Max is our Editors' Choice for its lower price and well-balanced audio performance.
Design: Much Smaller Than the Original
The original Echo Studio was the last holdout of the cylindrical shape in the original Echo series, but the new model brings it in line with its spherical siblings. It’s a fabric-wrapped orb measuring 6.1 by 5.6 by 5.8 inches (HWD), available in black or white versions. That’s much smaller than its predecessor, which measured 8.1 by 6.9 by 6.9 inches.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)A large, concave panel on the front serves as a volume rocker with a mic mute button in the center, making the speaker resemble the Death Star more than a little. An Alexa light ring surrounds the panel, glowing blue and pointing in the direction it senses your voice when you speak to it, and filling up white when you adjust the volume.
Besides the plate, the Echo Studio has a sensor that detects when you tap the top of the speaker. This is a multi-purpose gesture that plays and pauses music, as well as snoozes alarms.
The sole physical connection on the speaker is for the proprietary power connector, located on the back. Unlike the previous Echo Studio, there’s no aux port.
Features: Alexa+, Wi-Fi 6E, and Multiple Smart Home Protocols
For wireless connectivity, the Echo Studio features Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, with support for Amazon Sidewalk and LE Audio. It can also serve as a smart home hub for Matter, Thread, and Zigbee devices. It features ambient light, temperature, ultrasonic, and Wi-Fi radar sensors, and can detect the presence of people in the room even without sound.
Like all Echo speakers, the second-gen Echo Studio is designed to be primarily used hands-free with the Amazon Alexa voice assistant. It can be upgraded to Alexa+, which is more conversational with new AI capabilities. Alexa+ is currently in Early Access, but you can opt in to use it immediately on the Echo Studio. It will technically require a $19.99 monthly subscription after it officially launches, but it's also included with Amazon Prime. If you’re buying an Alexa smart speaker, you probably already have Prime.
I tested the Echo Studio with Alexa+, but I’m focusing more on the speaker’s audio performance than its voice control experience, which will be the same on every current Echo device. Alexa is a capable voice assistant that can search for and play music and podcasts, control compatible smart home devices, set reminders and alarms, and provide answers to general questions. I find that Alexa+ provides more useful answers to complex questions than the standard Alexa. In testing, Alexa+ offered surprisingly detailed information in response to a question about a video game I’ve been playing. Its more conversational syntax also makes it much easier to talk to.
Similar Products
Our Current Picks for The Best Smart Speakers for 2026
Audio Performance: Impressive Spatial Sound With Modest Bass
The second-gen Echo Studio is 40% smaller than the original, and it uses smaller speaker drivers to accommodate its compact design. It features three 0.8-inch tweeters and a 3-inch woofer, compared with the first Echo Studio’s trio of 2-inch midrange speakers, 1-inch tweeter, and 5.25-inch woofer. It’s a less ambitious driver configuration, but with two horizontal and one vertical tweeter, it can still output spatial audio and reproduce left, right, center, height, and low-frequency channels.
Amazon claims the new Echo Studio has three times the bass of the Echo Dot Max, which itself boasts better low-frequency power than other speakers of its size. This seems to be true, but Amazon doesn’t compare it with the original Echo Studio on this point, and it’s clear why. The second-gen Echo Studio can indeed put out much more low-end than its smaller sibling, which features a comparatively tiny 2.5-inch woofer, but it doesn't have the aural heft of its predecessor, and it won’t rattle your furniture or make you mistake it for a subwoofer. Granted, there aren't many more powerful smart speakers in this price range now that the original Echo Studio has been discontinued. The $449 Sonos Era 300 offers much more robust sound and supports Alexa, but it's twice the price of the Echo Studio, and it's not clear if or when Alexa+ will be available on it. The Apple HomePod splits the difference in price and performance at $ 329, but Siri's AI-driven updates haven't been nearly as significant or consistent as Alexa's.
When playing The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” our bass test track, the Echo Studio produces detailed but underwhelming thump from the bass synth notes and kick drum hits. It falls short of feeling palpable, but at least it doesn’t distort at maximum volume. Digital signal processing appears to reduce the sub-bass frequencies to protect the drivers and prevent distortion, which means that this type of dance track, with a heavy focus on super-deep notes, can actually sound less loud than other types of music. This is a pretty common phenomenon for many speakers.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)Yes’ “Roundabout” indeed sounds bigger on the Echo Studio than “Silent Shout,” but not any deeper. The opening guitar plucks get full-sounding resonance in the low mids, while string texture comes through clearly in the highs, a good start. When the track properly kicks in, the balance leans toward the mids and high mids. The drums, guitar strums, and vocals have plenty of presence, and while the bassline is still present, it sits in the background.
The Crystal Method’s “Born Too Slow” further highlights the Echo Studio’s relative lack of bass power. The backbeat that should ominously drive the track falls to the background against the much more prominent screeches of the guitar riffs and vocals.
Oddly, out of all the tracks I used to evaluate the Echo Studio's audio performance, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” yields the best bass performance from the speaker. The deeper beats of the drum loop sound deep and full, giving the song a good sense of balance.
Thanks to its driver configuration, which enables five separate channels from one speaker, the Echo Studio can play spatial audio, including Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio content. There isn’t a ton of spatial audio music out there, but Amazon Music Unlimited (a $10.99 monthly subscription, not included with Amazon Prime) has a good collection of it. When it’s available, the Echo Studio makes this type of music sound bigger and more detailed than it does on most other speakers. When listening to the Dolby Atmos version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” for example, Stevie Nicks’ voice and the drum loop seemed to come from slightly different positions next to each other. The effectiveness of this effect will depend on the shape of your room, and it won’t fool you into thinking you’re sitting between multiple speakers, but it’s a pleasant experience.
Spatial audio music might be rare, but movies are another matter entirely, and you’ll be able to turn multiple Echo Studio speakers into a surround sound system for your TV with the upcoming Alexa Home Theater feature. It syncs up to five Echo Studio or Echo Dot Max speakers (you can’t mix and match them) with an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus, Fire TV Stick 4K Max, or Fire TV Cube, allowing them to serve as satellites and provide immersive sound. It will be enabled later this year, and I’ll revisit this review once I can fully test it.