You're struggling to find that A/B comparison because no review site considers them comparable products. If you're aware of cars, it would be like pitching the
Skoda Karoq against the
VW Golf R. Whilst both are available as 5-door hatch hatchbacks, and the price difference is inline with the Homepods/LSX II, the markets they're aimed at are very different.
The Golf R is the model above the GTI, and it's a driver's car. Yes, it seats four adults and has a modicum of boot space, and there's all the useful everyday driver's facilities such as SatNav, Cruise Control and the rest, but first and foremost is the engine and handling. By comparison, the Karoq is a good all-rounder as family transport goes. It's practical, easy to use, economical, all those things, but not a driver's car. So it is with the Homepods vs the LSX IIs. The Homepods have the advantage in all-round practicality if you have the Apple ecosystem. They do okay in most roles, and they do some things that the LSXs can't. The catch is that they'll never give you that wow with music that really good speakers can.
Neither system is perfect. Folk will complain that the £900 KEF speakers don't do deep bass. What they may be overlooking is that a 4.5" driver in a 10" tall cabinet can't do deep bass unless it's seriously over-egged. "
But the Homepods do better bass." is the reply. Actually, they don't. The bass driver is smaller (4") but upwards firing and heavily influenced by the room measurement DSP. Working your way down the frequency range, by 100Hz the bass is starting to fall off, but you won't hear it that way. That's because the overall bass level is seriously over-egged. Then there's a hump in the bass response at roughly 80Hz which could be the port resonance. It's very much like the Bose sound when it comes to bass. Quantity over quality. The KEF is making cleaner bass, and a little deeper too, but less of it.
The midrange and treble from the Homepods is heavily processed too. Not just in room EQ terms, but also because the speaker splits the sound, directing voices forwards and instruments backwards to reflect off the side and front wall to make a bigger but more diffuse sound stage. (No, I don't know how it does this either. I think it must be magic.) Again though, this is very 'Bose'. It's a more sophisticated version of what Bose 901 speakers were doing back in the late '60s. They used the room boundaries to make a larger-than-life sound. KEFs approach is different.
With the KEFs, the sound is directed towards the listener, but the UniQ dual concentric drivers have unusually wide dispersion compared to a conventional tweeter/woofer configuration. This means with the KEF, the tweeter and woofer frequencies remain integrated over a much larger area, and so the KEFs have a huge sweet-spot. Their sound doesn't change much between you sitting and standing, nor if you sit well off axis. Where the Homepods are smudging the sound over a big area, the KEFs are painting in detail on a large canvas.
I'll be honest, the idea of spending almost a grand on a pair of speakers that more-or-less encompasses an entire music set-up of streamer, amp and conventional speakers is a bit hard for me to swallow. However, could I get the same performance from separates? A Wiim plus a conventional stereo amp or class D amp, but what speakers? The Q150s are £450 on their own.
I suppose it comes back to the car thing. Do you want cup holders, cubby holes and a flexible seating system, or do you want a smile on your face each time you walk towards he car with the key in your hand?
