WIRELESS SPEAKERS
Small or large? Bluetooth or Wi-Fi? Smart or dumb? Stereo or, er, mono? The choices are many, but our reviews of wireless speakers from low to high aim to help you understand the options and the benefits as price levels rise.
Small or large? Bluetooth or Wi-Fi? Smart or dumb? Stereo or, er, mono? The choices are many, but our reviews of wireless speakers from low to high aim to help you understand the options and the benefits as price levels rise.
It’s easy to define what a wireless speaker must be, though in most cases, that definition wouldn’t actually include being completely wireless. Those with internal batteries to support portable operation aside, they all require plugging into the mains.
So the wireless bit is about how they receive their tunes. Most commonly this is via Bluetooth, streaming direct from your smart device. But many wireless speakers can also connect to your home Wi-Fi (or can be plugged in using Ethernet cable) and receive tunes that way. App control can enable internet streaming from music services like Spotify and Tidal, plus network streaming from files stored elsewhere in your home on computer or NAS drive.
Of these options, Bluetooth is invariably the easiest to set up. However, one thing evident time and time again in these tests was that Wi-Fi streaming outperformed Bluetooth streaming. Speakers that sounded bloomy or brash via Bluetooth could clean up their sound significantly when fed a higher-quality stream — this seems obvious, but hearing the differences really drove it home. This further depends on which codecs of Bluetooth are supported by both the wireless speakers and your phone. Qualcomm’s aptX codec
can deliver near-CD quality, but only if the codec is supported at both ends. Your iPhones and iPads don’t support aptX, so only Android phone users can currently benefit from aptX. If the wireless speakers support Bluetooth AAC, then iPhones will sound better than if they don’t. Even then, the Wi-Fi streams consistently sounded better. Indeed many of the speakers here can support high-res streaming via Wi-Fi, and while this could be considered overkill for the smaller units here, why not give them the best possible source?
Is this the age-old question of convenience over quality? No, because the Wi-Fi streaming can be be achieved just as conveniently, given a good app to support it, and the units here which are part of multiroom ecosystems (Bluesound, HEOS, MusicCast) have particularly well-developed apps in that regard. Set-up of Wi-Fi devices is a little more complicated (and can sometimes try our patience), but everything here worked reliably give or take a few false starts. Moreover, we have included everything from Google Assistant speakers below $300 right up to wireless speakers than deliver the new convenience together with superb sound from true hi-fi designs. We found strong performers in different price brackets, but you’ll quickly see how more funds can deliver a higher level of experience.
Voice control is the other new frontier; five of the nine here currently support either Google Assistant or Alexa. In general we find Google better understands and interprets simple language. But Alexa allows the download of device-specific skills, so can be more versatile, assuming it all works as intended. With voice control, it’s not so much ‘AI’, with the speaker learning what you mean, as ‘HI’, with us humans having to learn what the voice assistant is able to understand.
Once suitably assimilated, the human-voice-to-music interface can be a hands-free delight, while the wireless convenience can simplify your system and declutter your home. We wish you happy wireless music-making! JF