After missing its holiday shipping deadline, Apple (AAPL) is almost ready to release the HomePod, its new smart speaker — something like the Amazon Echo or Sonos One. It will ship on Feb. 9.

Apple hasn’t yet let reviewers take one home for testing. But this week, it did something uncharacteristic and a little weird: It invited us to one-on-one listening sessions in a Manhattan corporate apartment. The rules were: listen, don’t touch. (And listen, don’t take pictures.)

I’ll write a full review once I get my hands on this little rounded cylinder. But even the 45-minute demo was enough to confirm one thing: This smart speaker is more about “speaker” than “smart.”

View photos Apple is entering the smart-speaker game with the HomePod. More

All about that bass and treble

A smart speaker is like Siri for the home (or “OK Google,” or Microsoft Cortana): You can ask it questions and give it commands by speaking from across the room, rather than hauling out your phone. The killer app, of course, is music: you can just say, “Alexa, play some light jazz” or “OK Google, play some Billy Joel,” and it starts.

The HomePod is a squat, rounded cylinder (6.8 inches by 5.6 inches), available in black or white. You tap the top to pause playback or make the + and – volume buttons appear. You can double-tap for “next track,” or triple-tap for “previous track.” (Of course, you can also adjust the volume, play/pause, or skip tracks by voice.) A very cool colorful swirling LED light appears whenever HomePod is speaking or listening, and then disappears as though no screen were present.

View photos This cool LED swirl animates whenever the Pod is talking or listening. More

The HomePod joins a long list of smart speakers, starting with the original, the Amazon Echo ($100); Google, Sonos, Harman Kardon, and others make them, too. But Apple has tried to differentiate the HomePod, and justify its high price ($350), by giving it better sound than any competitor — and in that, it has succeeded.

In a devastatingly effective demo, Apple lines up four of these things: The Google Home Max ($400), Sonos One ($200), Amazon Echo ($100), and the HomePod. They’re volume-matched and rigged to an A/B/C/D switch, so a single song can hop from one to the other. (Apple even installed a halo backlight behind each speaker that illuminated to show you which one was playing.)

The HomePod sounded the best. Its bass, in particular, was amazing: full and deep, but also distinct and never muddy — you could hear the actual pitch of the bass notes, not just the thud. That, unsurprisingly, is where other small speakers have trouble.

The Amazon Echo is a much smaller, slimmer device, one-third the price, so it’s forgiven for sounding thin compared with the HomePod. The Sonos One came awfully close to the HomePod’s rich sound; you’d really have to hear the A/B test to declare a difference. The real shock was the Google Home Max, a massive, 12-pound machine that’s supposed to be all about the sound; it sounded like cardboard compared with the HomePod and Sonos.

Maybe that’s because it contains only two tweeters and two woofers; the HomePod contains seven tweeters, arrayed in a circle, and a gigantic, 4-inch woofer, capable of moving 0.8 inches, pointing out the top. Or, as Apple describes it, “array of seven beam-forming tweeters, each with its own amplifier and transducer. And each custom designed with a precision acoustic horn that focuses sound for tremendous directional control.”

View photos Apple says that the HomePod detects whether it’s in a corner or against a wall, and adjusts the speaker output automatically. More