[OtinG]

After a full week of trying to use my Echo Studio connected with my Fire TV Cube, I have to say I cannot recommend doing this. The Studio is a very good Hi-Fi speaker system, and Atmos and Amazon’s UltraHD sound formats sound amazing. But when connected to the Fire TV Cube there are too many failures, skipping sound, frozen video, black screens for a second or two, and general mayhem.

I think the decision by Amazon, and Apple with their HomePods, to not include HDMI, much less HDMI-CEC connections is stupid beyond belief. The Studio has to be “paired” to the Fire TV Cube via Wi-Fi which of course is causing all sorts of issues. Take away that Wi-Fi connection and both the Fire TV Cube and Studio work fine, but paired together they are just too glitchy. Every day I have had to fiddle around with the pairing settings to keep them working.

They can also be paired via BT, but if Wi-Fi is such a failure I can only imagine the horror show with BT. Plus BT does not have the bandwidth to deliver surround sound, UltraHD, or Atmos.

The Studio can be connected directly to a TV by a 3.5mm audio cable or a mini optical cable, but again the narrow bandwidth would prevent surround sound, UltraHD, or Atmos.

I saw several reviews on the web of people pairing two Studios to a Fire TV, and seemingly being impressed. But those were influencers and sites that tend to support Amazon stuff. I get the feeling they are too reluctant to bad mouth the products since they probably get a lot of freebies from tech companies. But I have since read a lot of complaints from actual users having the same issues I’m having. If I’m having this much issue with one Studio, I would think two would be even worse. I have stable 200+ Mbps internet and tried both ethernet and 2G and 5G Wi-Fi with the Fire TV Cube as well as 2G and 5G Wi-Fi with the Studio and still had issues. Granted the system works most of the time, but it fails a lot too, especially when trying to watch Prime Video that is in 4K HDR. My guess is that the Fire TV Cube just isn’t up to the task.

I’m keeping the Studio though because it is a really great Hi-Fi speaker system and absolutely rocks with UltraHD and Atmos sound. But standalone. When it works with the Fire TV Cube it is great too, but it fails too often to be considered stable when paired to the Fire TV. I bought it for a standalone system, and that is how I will use it. Pity though, because the feature that enhances voice audio was extremely good (when it worked) while watching TV. I’ll miss that feature.

ETA 20 Nov 2021: Good grief! I’m making about as much headway with my Studio paired with my Fire TV Cube as Charlie Brown did with keeping his kites out of the tree, or convincing Lucy to let him kick the football!

I tried putting my Cube, Studio, and Recast all on the same 5G Wi-Fi network to see if they could finally communicate better. First, the really stupid part. You setup Wi-Fi on a Fire TV itself, but you need the Alexa app to setup Wi-Fi on a Studio, and you need the Fire TV app to set up Wi-Fi on a Recast. Cube and Studio are fairly easy to get setup to the 5G Wi-Fi, but the recast will not see the 5G network, ever. A gillion restarts of every device in a five mile radius later and it still cannot see the 5G, and the Recast is sitting right next to the router! Googled it and found that Recasts seem to be blind to 5G even though they are specified to have it. Gave up, put all three devices on the same 2G network. Not enough bandwidth I guess because TV became unwatchable. Then tried to put Recast back on ethernet, but that pretty much was more difficult than getting a unanimous vote on anything in Congress. Finally succeeded, but with other two devices still on 5G the Cube went bezerk, had a meltdown, made horribly loud clicking noises and was still unwatchable. Screw it, I put Cube back on ethernet, and that went well. Then I put the Studio back on 5G because there was no audio now. That was another
PITA, but finally got it done. But then the Cube wouldn’t pair to it anymore. More loud cursing and hair pulling and a long while later I finally got them to pair again. So that was two or mores hours and got right back where I was to begin with: Cube and Recast both on ethernet, Studio on 5G and paired to Cube as a Home Theater, and no progress made… @#$&!