There's only one reason to buy the Google Home Max and that's to crank the volume up... all the way up.
With a $400 price tag, the Home Max is the most expensive smart speaker, when compared to an Amazon Echo ($100), Google Home ($130), and even Apple's HomePod ($350). The hefty sticker price is worth it, though, if you want to feel the bass... because you will feel it.
Since the launch of Google's Home speaker in late 2016, the tech giant has expanded its Google Assistant-powered smart speaker family with the Home Mini ($50) and Home Max.
The Home Mini is great if you're just starting out with a smart home, but the sound quality isn't a top priority. The Home is still Google's best value for both a smart home hub and good, room-filling audio. The Home Max occupies its own class with the loudest sound and deepest bass in the group.
Whereas the Home and Home Mini are compact and blend in with your home decor, the Home Max is a big honking speaker. It's nearly twice the size of a HomePod and about as large as a Sonos Play:5. There's no hiding it in any room.
The Home Max is also heavy, weighing 11.68 pounds, which means you'll want to carefully consider where you place it. Delicate bookshelves are a no-no.
Google offers the Home Max in two colors: Chalk (white case with gray fabric front) and Charcoal (black with black fabric front). Both look fine, but I feel like Google missed an opportunity here to make the fabric fronts customizable. You can swap out different bottoms for the Google Home so why not on the Home Max?
Props to Google for rounding the corners and keeping the design as clean as possible. Frankly, there are only so many ways to make a directional speaker and the Home Max's design is one of the least visually offensive once you've figured out where to put it.
With a name like Home Max, you don't even need me to tell you it's a loud-ass speaker. Inside, Google's packed in quite the sound package.
The speaker's got a pair of 4.5-inch woofers for your bass and dual 0.7-inch tweeters for your highs. There are also six Class-D amplifiers, two for each of the woofers and one for each tweeter.
Combine these beefy specs with six far-field microphones for picking up your voice and measuring the acoustics of the room it's in for auto-sound calibration and, well, you've got one powerful speaker that'll raise the roof.
Compared to a Google Home or Amazon Echo, the Home Max is in another realm of loud. Apple's HomePod gets pretty darn loud at its highest volume, but the Home Max is louder.
Source:
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/google-home-max
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-home-max-latency/