HI-FI IN A BOX

Can the world’s best wireless speakers replace a whole hi-fi?

What was the first premium one-box speaker? Bowers & Wilkins’ Zeppelin in 2007 often gets the recognition, but Meridian was out earlier in that year with its then astonishingly expensive F80 CD-receiver system, all cool curves and bold red Ferrari livery.

But almost invariably forgotten was the Australian-born VAF Octavio, which launched in 2006, and could well have been a world-beater had it not been designed originally to house only one breed of portable player — the Microsoft Zune. It is likely few of you remember the Zune, which was developed as Microsoft’s answer to the iPod, but sadly wasn’t. VAF did later recreate the Octavio for iPod, and magnificent it sounded too, but by then it was too late; others had filled that field.

Wireless connections and Bluetooth soon made docks redundant — it was a little daft having your music device plugged in over there where you couldn’t control it — and smartphones soon made iPods almost as rare as Zunes. Sonos was rising, showing how wireless streaming should be done. Over time, indeed a surprisingly long time, a variety of Sonos-style systems have since arrived which use the home network to combine wireless playback with multiroom capabilities, while the cheaper tier of standalone wireless speakers use the lower-quality Bluetooth for direct streaming. Although there are now codecs which raise the quality of Bluetooth, they only work if both source and sink are compatible, so that even today much casual Bluetooth transmission takes place at a dismally low bit-rate.

More recently the rise of Google’s Chromecast and Apple’s AirPlay have brought a default multiroom ability to a mid-range of wireless speakers, so that you don’t need to stick with a single brand to have your rooms playing the same music at the same time. Both platforms are increasingly appearing also in home hi-fi components, allowing them to stream in the same way, although it is mainly the bespoke multiroom systems which allow a hi-fi system to send its own sources to other speakers, rather than just receive an incoming stream for simultanous playback. At a higher level, Roon software offers a way to deliver optimised audio to multiple Chromecast, AirPlay and Roon-ready systems, though the Roon software itself doesn’t come cheap.

For many users, the whole multiroom thing may not be a main priority. It’ll only be a consideration of importance if you’re populating a whole house with wireless boxes, or planning to expand the system outward from your initial purchase in the future.

On the whole, though, the need is often for a wireless speaker to go in one particular room. You want a box that sounds good, looks good, connects to what you want easily — and just works. That’s what we’re seeking here, and we’re looking upwards from $1000, a premium level above the run-of-the-mill Bluetooth boxes, so you can hope for a bit of imaginative design in addition to a higher level of sound.

All of the models here are, in fact, multiroom capable, either with their own stable of products or more widely. But we’re judging them primarily in their place, making music, controlled from the sofa.

There’s one final question that we address. As the wireless speaker market has grown up, the premium models have crept ever higher in price, and an important question arises. Could you get real hi-fi — source, amp and speakers — at a similar price, with equal convenience of operation? Would it sound better? At $1000, this might be a challenge, especially if you want good styling as well as good sound. But at $2000, it’s achievable, and our final review in this group pitches one such solution into the ring against the one-box solutions.