MAKE EVERY ROOM SOUND BETTER

How to get the most stunning sound from your multi-room system

When it comes to sound quality, there are three crucial factors. The first is the speakers themselves; the second is where you put them; and the third is what you send to them in the first place.

Speakers first. You can’t do much about the laws of physics, so the little speaker in an Amazon Echo is not going to displace as much air or displace it as beautifully as the much meatier driver you’ll find in a high-end product such as Naim’s Mu-so QB, and their sound will start to become harsh as you turn up the volume. Yes, you get what you pay for, but you can still get surprisingly nice sound from a couple of small speakers and a subwoofer.

Speaker placement makes a difference too. Objects between you and the speaker can block higher frequencies, and larger speakers and subs should be placed away from walls and corners to prevent boomy reflections.

With the audio source itself, there’s huge variations in amplifiers, digital audio converters and other key components but even the greatest hi-fi hardware can be undone by a poor quality audio stream.

Most multi-room systems can deliver at least CD quality but most streaming services’ default versions don’t, especially in their free incarnations: Spotify Free is 160Kbps, while paid subscribers get 320Kbps.

Those are compressed music formats, designed to reduce file sizes rather than deliver peerless audio performance; even at 320Kbps a great deal of music detail is removed. Listening with high-end hardware it can sometimes be painfully obvious.

If you’re serious about sound quality, look for a platform that supports uncompressed audio services. Some have a higher quality tier, albeit with a smaller catalogue of available music: for example, TIDAL Masters and Qobuz Studio Premier deliver music in sparkling 24-bit, 192KHz quality. If your hardware supports it, the detail you’ll hear in a 192KHz track is often extraordinary.