"will definitely sound better than the HomePod" -- hard to make that statement without actually hearing it. The technology behind it looks promising.

Audio enthusiasts tend to already own speakers presumably changing speakers unless its truly phenomenal may not be a feature valuable to audio enthusiasts.

I think that's just marketing bait trying to get to amateurs' ego for them to become self declared audio enthusiasts.

Have you even heard the speaker yet? Pretty hard to critique the audio quality if you haven't heard the audio quality.

Yeah, you can pair an Echo Dot with a nice speaker like a Sonos Play 5, it'll probably sound even better.

Of course, at that point you're paying $549 instead of $349, so that's not really the same thing at all.

The Echo Dot is not really usable on its own as a device to play music because of the poor audio quality. You can have a conversation with Alexa, but that's about it.