Multi-room speakers

The rise of the smart speaker means it’s never been easier to create a multi-room audio system – and with high-quality streaming it’s never sounded better either

wo decades ago, sending high-quality music to more than one room meant doing a lot of planning, running a lot of cables and doing a lot of drilling. Now you can set up a multi-room system in a matter of minutes without running a single wire and control it all from your phone, tablet or PC. And a multi-room system can encompass all kinds of speakers: not just traditional hi-fi ones but bookshelf speakers, portable speakers, soundbars, smart speakers and subs.

Sonos deserves a lot of credit for today’s multi-room market. It was quick to recognise the potential of streaming over Wi-Fi and launched its first product, the ZonePlayer ZP100, back in 2005: it was a £500 wireless music player with a built-in amp that could stream from the internet, from networked storage or from a computer. It would be followed by a version that connected to your current hi-fi and then a range of stand-alone wireless speakers with their own built-in amps. The Sonos app enabled you to

Tsend music to specific groups of speakers, and to send different audio to different groups. One of the reasons Sonos is such a big player in multi-room audio is that it is a multi-room audio company first and a hi-fi company second; its current range includes impressive home cinema kit but they’re intended to join the same system as the multi-room speakers. Many hi-fi firms have gone in the opposite direction, adding multiroom to their existing product ranges with varying degrees of success. Sonos’s core business is, and always has been, multi-room audio.

There have been several key changes in the market for multiroom audio. The first was the arrival of apps that you could use to control your system; previously that required dedicated hardware or a walk to whichever room had the audio source.

Secondly, Wi-Fi got good. Early Wi-Fi wasn’t good enough for serious music streaming. It didn’t have very good range, it was very prone to interference and it wasn’t very fast even when you only had one thing connecting to it; the more devices you connected the worse things got. Modern Wi-Fi routers don’t suffer from the same problems and can easily deliver the speeds necessary to stream even lossless hi-res audio to multiple devices simultaneously.

That opened the floodgates for multi-room systems. Most wireless smart speakers can be used for multi-room audio and the biggest names in audiophile technology have embraced the power of wire-free connections too.

The multi-room market has exploded in the last few years and you can now choose from a dizzying range of products that includes budget bangers and masterpieces of musical technology. But there are a few traps for the unwary and a few important things to consider.

WHAT CAN MULTI-ROOM AUDIO DO FOR YOU?

Multi-room systems typically do two things. One, they enable you to play the same music in several places