HOW TO BUY WIRELESS SPEAKERS

From simple Bluetooth speakers to premium networked all-in-one systems with multiroom — can one speaker replace a whole system, streaming music, looking great, sounding fine? It’s a tempting proposition.

Today’s wireless speakers are clever products, sometimes with personal voice assistants and all of the latest streaming technologies inside. Constantly taking note of new design trends and how people listen to music, they now incorporate features such as waterproofing, multi-room functionality, long battery lives, voice control, and the likes of AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect. All this, and they can sound great too.

Our Buying Guide pages will point you to the current models which have excelled in our reviews and won our Sound+Image Awards. But with such a variety of wireless speakers on the market and sometimes-baffling levels of technology, how do you pick the device that’s best for you? Here are the things to consider when narrowing things down.

Shape and size

Before we even begin to get technical, the shape and size of your wireless speaker is something that will dictate how you use it.

Wireless speakers come in all shapes and sizes: they can be big and boxy; they can be small and cylindrical. Some are built to be rugged and waterproof; others put style and design high on their list of priorities. The question is, what will you use yours for?

Is portable better? Well, portable speakers have a rechargeable battery, so you’re not tied to a mains socket. You can simply pick up the speaker and take it with you. Depending on how big it is, that might mean to another part of the house, into the garden, or all the way to the beach or a summer festival.

If that’s what you’re after, take note of the speaker’s battery life. Five hours is fine if you’ll be listening in your own garden, close to a power supply, but you’ll probably want eight hours or more if you’re taking it out and about, to avoid those perfect beach moments coming to a crashing curtailment.

But if you’re looking for a wireless speaker to be your main music system, be prepared to spend rather more money. And potentially to make space in your room. You can’t expect room-filling, dynamic and articulate sound from a small, portable speaker. But you can expect increasingly impressive performance from more ambitious one-box units priced from $1000 upwards.

One or two?

We highly recommend considering a pair of stereo wireless speakers, especially in a room where speakers will double for music and TV/ movie use. With a TV in play, where do you position a one-box speaker to deliver sound for movies? Some upmarket speakers now have an HDMI ARC connection to receive sound from a TV, but you’re pretty much restricted to having a wall-mounted TV with the wireless speaker centrally positioned below it. Whereas stereo wireless speakers could go either side of your TV, playing movie sound with full width, and delivering true hi-fi reproduction for music. The downside is that we’ve seen few wireless speaker pairs which get it really right, and fewer still that do it affordably. That points many people towards a soundbar solution for TV, even though wireless speakers can sound better and appear neater.

Often individual speakers from multiroom ranges (such as Sonos) can be paired up to operate in stereo. While this can significantly boost their sonic delivery and deliver the TV-flanking positioning, it’s often an expensive way to use such speakers compared with those primarily designed to work as a pair.

How will you stream your music?

Once you’ve decided on what your wireless speaker will look like, where it will live and what it will mostly be used for, the next thing you need to think about is which streaming method is best for you and your circumstances.

How will you be sending music from your smartphone or laptop to the speaker? Will you be sticking with standard Bluetooth? Are you invested in Apple’s ecosystem and therefore need AirPlay 2? Are you a big fan of Spotify Connect or Tidal? Or are you thinking paying for Roon delivery?

Bluetooth is the most common tech in wireless speakers. It’s the quickest and easiest way to let your devices talk to each other wirelessly, taking only a couple of seconds to pair your smart device to your wireless speaker. It’s often the sole method of streaming in portable and affordable models. And Bluetooth doesn’t care if you’re an Apple or Android user, although the transmission quality can vary depending on the best Bluetooth codec available which is common to both your send device (e.g. your phone) and the receiving speaker. Apple devices can use the AAC codec, so will benefit in use with wireless speakers that support AAC. Android phones and tablets may (or may not) support still higher-quality codecs such as the only-slightly-lossy aptX and aptX HD codecs, or Sony’s “near-high-res” LDAC.

If you’re an avid Spotify user, look for Spotify Connect, which hands the streaming duties to the wireless speaker, leaving your phone in control. It’s far more reliable than Spotify via Bluetooth, though check whether your preferred speaker requires a Premium (e.g. paid) Spotify subscription. Some do, some don’t.

AirPlay 2 is Apple’s own way of streaming files wirelessly over your home Wi-Fi network, so that it can deliver full lossless resolution. So long as your iPhone, iPod or iPad and your wireless speaker are on the same network, it’s a simple and reliable solution. AirPlay 2 increasingly appears also in home hi-fi components.

As did Chromecast, for a while, which provides a similarly generic streaming destination for Android devices, Chrome browsers and a great many iOS apps too. Again it connects using your home Wi-Fi network.

There’s also network streaming, which means playback of tracks from hard-drives somewhere in your home, whether on your computer or a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, including high-res files, though bear in mind, however, that it’ll take a good wireless speaker to deliver the difference between CD-quality and high-resolution. One common protocol is DLNA’s UPnP, but it’s really down to the app how well this works. Control and browsing of network streaming is often tricky — external devices are involved, and your music collection has to be indexed and presented in a pleasing efficient manner. This is where Roon’s software has made its mark; it analyses your collection and uses metadata from online to provide a gorgeous interface which also integrates Tidal music subscriptions. The interface can then address any Roon Ready or compatible speaker, anything with AirPlay, or Chromecast. Its only downside is cost — Roon software doesn’t come cheap.

Ferrari, Zune, and the rise of multiroom

What was the first premium one-box speaker? Bowers & Wilkins’ Zeppelin in 2007 often gets the recognition, although Meridian was out earlier in that same year with its then astonishingly expensive F80 CD-receiver system, all cool curves and bold red Ferrari livery. But almost invariably forgotten is the Australian-born VAF Octavio, which launched in 2006, and could well have been a worldbeater 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 others had already 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, initially a surprisingly long time, a variety of Sonos-style systems have arrived which use the home network to combine wireless playback with multiroom capabilities, while the cheaper tier of standalone wireless speakers stick with the lower-quality Bluetooth for direct streaming.

For many users, the whole multiroom thing may not be a main priority. It’ll 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.

We often worry that the attractions of wireless speakers turn listeners away from traditional hi-fi systems, which are capable of far higher performance levels. But if it’s a wireless speaker you’re after, seek out a box that sounds good, looks good, connects to what you want easily — and just works. Our buying guide lists our award-winners — a very good place to start.

“Physical inputs provide future-proofing — apps may disappear, wireless standards change, but you’ll always get music out of an input.”