Amazon Echo (2nd generation) -- Always ready, connected, and fast. Just ask.

So it's been an interesting first few weeks with the Echo and am happy to say Echo 2nd Gen has finally delivered on its promise of improved sound quality over 1st Gen Echo, with the 3rd firmware since launch. If you are confused about a lot of the negative reviews, old firmware is the likely cause of most of them regarding poor sound quality. Want to keep this short and spare all the gory details, but there was a bug in the launch version of the firmware, which was fixed after a few days, but the first fix, while satisfying some, was not, in my opinion a full fix and left the mid-range frequencies muted and tinny. Today I noticed that Alexa's voice in this unit sounded much more like Alexa's voice on Gen 1 Echo's I own and, after playing some music, suspected they had upgraded the firmware again, and indeed they have. The current firmware is 592452720 and it's a massive improvement over both the original and updated version 592452420.