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After completing new testing, we have added Google’s Nest Audio as a budget pick and Bluesound’s Pulse M as an upgrade pick. V brake
A wireless multiroom speaker system offers the easiest way to listen to music, podcasts, and other audio entertainment in more than one room at a time, and Sonos is the best option for most people. It supports the widest variety of streaming services, features a diverse array of great-sounding speakers, and is easier to set up and use than most multiroom systems.
But we also have recommendations for people looking for something less expensive, as well as those who want a more luxurious, high-end streaming experience.
Wi-Fi–based speaker systems can stream uncompressed music around your home, and you can easily control them via a phone, tablet, or computer.
We looked for systems that sound great, are easy to set up and use, and have built-in support for many popular streaming music services.
Our favorite system offers a wider variety of speakers, soundbars, and audio adapters at various prices.
How easy is it to find and play the song you want? To group and ungroup speakers for multiroom playback? To use voice control?
This speaker produces a full, well-balanced sound and fits nicely in any room. It also supports Bluetooth, AirPlay, and Alexa voice control.
This speaker can play spatial audio from Apple and Amazon, and it delivers a more spacious sound even with regular stereo music. But audio purists may prefer one of Sonos’s more traditional speaker designs.
Sonos has made multiroom wireless systems for longer than anyone, and its experience shows at every level. The mobile and desktop apps rank among the most polished available and offer unified search across every music service you subscribe to. Plus, the platform supports more streaming services than the competition—in some cases, a lot more.
Sonos’s speaker offerings come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and prices. Currently you can choose from five tabletop speakers priced from $200 to $550. The company also sells four portable speakers and two subwoofers, as well as three smart soundbars—all of which can pair with two Sonos tabletop speakers to form a surround system. IKEA sells Sonos-compatible speakers, too.
All Sonos-branded speakers have built-in AirPlay 2 support, some newer models support Bluetooth, and many of them add voice control via Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or both.
The Sonos ecosystem has two main drawbacks. First, it is a closed ecosystem, so you must use Sonos-branded devices if you want all of the pieces of your multiroom system to work together seamlessly. Second, the system’s voice-control capabilities are not as advanced as what you can get from Amazon’s or Google’s own smart speakers.
This small, affordable speaker sounds good for the money and supports a number of streaming services. But the Nest Audio platform is less robust and intuitive than Sonos’s system.
Use promo code NEST40 (charcoal)
Use promo code GOOGLE40 (chalk)
If you’re looking to build a more affordable multiroom wireless music system that still sounds great, Google’s Nest Audio platform is a good alternative to Sonos. The lineup currently offers only one speaker that’s really focused on audio performance: the Google Nest Audio speaker. That speaker sounds quite good for $100, even if it’s not as detailed as Sonos’s entry-level speakers and doesn’t offer stereo sound from a single speaker the way pricier alternatives do. But you could pair two of them for stereo sound for the same price as you’d pay for Sonos’s cheapest speaker.
Google has made a number of improvements to its multiroom-audio platform over the years. It still has limitations compared with our other picks, but we now find it easier to use than our former also-great pick, Amazon’s Alexa platform—regardless of whether you use voice commands or the Google Home app. And it works seamlessly with the myriad devices that have Chromecast built in, including streaming media players, smart TVs and projectors, and some third-party wireless speakers.
This larger, room-filling speaker sounds fantastic, but the real appeal lies in its luxurious design and the excellent BluOS control app. However, the Bluesound ecosystem is more limited, and its devices are higher-priced.
If you enjoy interacting with your speakers directly, as opposed to using an app or your voice to control playback, you’ll love the more luxurious, high-end allure of Bluesound’s Pulse M speaker, the latest addition to the Bluesound family of wireless speakers and streaming audio players. Its proximity-activated, capacitive-touch controls up the swank factor significantly, and the speaker’s sound quality is competitive with the best of what Sonos has to offer.
The Bluesound streaming platform also gives Sonos a serious run for its money in easy setup and bests Sonos in intuitive navigation and day-to-day ease of use. Our one gripe is that it currently doesn’t allow you to search for songs across different music services the way Sonos does.
Overall, our biggest complaint is that we wish Bluesound offered more speakers that look and feel as upscale as the Pulse M.
This speaker produces a full, well-balanced sound and fits nicely in any room. It also supports Bluetooth, AirPlay, and Alexa voice control.
This speaker can play spatial audio from Apple and Amazon, and it delivers a more spacious sound even with regular stereo music. But audio purists may prefer one of Sonos’s more traditional speaker designs.
This small, affordable speaker sounds good for the money and supports a number of streaming services. But the Nest Audio platform is less robust and intuitive than Sonos’s system.
Use promo code NEST40 (charcoal)
Use promo code GOOGLE40 (chalk)
This larger, room-filling speaker sounds fantastic, but the real appeal lies in its luxurious design and the excellent BluOS control app. However, the Bluesound ecosystem is more limited, and its devices are higher-priced.
I have been reviewing headphones, speakers, AV receivers, home-automation systems, home theater gear, and high-end audio gear for nearly two decades. I’m currently senior editor at SoundStage Solo. In the past I’ve written for Big Picture Big Sound, Electronic House, Home Theater magazine, Home Theater Review, and Residential Systems, just to name a few.
Multiroom wireless speaker systems are for people who want to be able to play music and podcasts throughout their home and easily control them from their phone, tablet, or computer—or even with their voice.
If you care only about playing music in one room, a single Wi-Fi–based smart speaker or Bluetooth speaker will suffice. Bluetooth speakers make it easier for anyone to stream audio from their phone or computer, but few of them let you group multiple speakers together—and even when they do, they usually limit you to playing from the same source through all the connected speakers.
Bluetooth speakers are also restricted to using a phone or computer as the streaming source; in contrast, multiroom wireless audio systems can access music sources directly, so they don’t use your phone and drain its battery life.
Since we first published this guide in 2013, we have considered (and reconsidered) more than a dozen different multiroom wireless speaker systems and called in many of them for testing (see the Competition section for more details).
We focus on the following criteria for what’s important in a multiroom speaker system:
Bonus features that are nice but not essential include:
Considering that the experience of interacting with a multiroom music system is almost as crucial as the sound quality, much of my testing involved simply living with the systems, using them on a daily basis as I moved around the house and adding and removing zones when I could.
Where applicable, I tested each ecosystem’s voice-control capabilities using a handful of tracks that I know give digital voice assistants trouble, namely “Sad Songs and Waltzes” and the live version of “Whiskey River” by Willie Nelson, “Everything Stays” from the third Adventure Time soundtrack, and anything by Thao Nguyen.
Objectively comparing sound quality was a little tougher, as level-matching the different speakers was difficult. But I got them as close as I could, after which I had my wife stream identical tracks to different speakers and different systems while I either sat or walked around the room. Even with the levels matched, some speakers—such as the Sonos Era 300 and the Bluesound Pulse M—were easily identifiable by their dispersion characteristics, leaving me with no choice but to compare them entirely subjectively.
This speaker produces a full, well-balanced sound and fits nicely in any room. It also supports Bluetooth, AirPlay, and Alexa voice control.
This speaker can play spatial audio from Apple and Amazon, and it delivers a more spacious sound even with regular stereo music. But audio purists may prefer one of Sonos’s more traditional speaker designs.
The Sonos system supports the most services and has a wide selection of excellent-sounding speakers, comprehensive search features, and a well-organized app that runs on almost all major mobile platforms. The platform benefits from hardware and software upgrades quite regularly.
The Sonos speaker lineup is extensive. Sonos offers tabletop speakers that start at the low end with the small Sonos One ($220) and Sonos One SL (the same speaker without voice control; $200) and go up to the large Sonos Five ($550). The company recently introduced the Era 100 ($250), as well as the Atmos-enabled Era 300 ($450). The lineup also includes three soundbars, the Arc, Beam, and Ray.
Although each speaker can work on its own, you can also combine two into a stereo pair or even build a 5.1-channel home theater system using a soundbar along with two other speakers for surrounds and a matching subwoofer, namely either the Sub or the Sub Mini.
IKEA offers Sonos speakers, too: the IKEA Symfonisk WiFi Bookshelf Speaker, Symfonisk Speaker Lamp Base With WiFi, and Symfonisk Floor Lamp With WiFi Speaker, as well as the Symfonisk Picture Frame With WiFi Speaker.
If you already own passive speakers that you’d like to use with your Sonos system, you can connect them to the Sonos Amp. If you want to add your record collection to the Sonos ecosystem, you can connect the Sonos Port, which features a single analog input that can work with your turntable, as well as analog and digital outputs that you can connect to your receiver. There’s also the $20 Sonos Line-in Adapter, which allows you to connect an external source directly to newer Sonos speakers such as the Era 100 and Era 300.
For portable listening, the Sonos Move and the newer Sonos Move 2 add a battery and Bluetooth. The Sonos Roam (or the non-voice-controlled Sonos Roam SL) is a more compact and affordable model that supports Qi wireless charging and has IP67 waterproof certification. For more details, read our impressions of the Roam.
The tabletop speakers deliver excellent sound quality. The new Era 100 benefits from better bass than the older Sonos One, and it adds a second tweeter in an angled array, which gives the speaker a more open, spacious sound but also makes higher frequencies a tad more diffuse and less direct.
For better sound or bigger rooms, the larger Sonos Five can play a lot louder and delivers much more bass than the smaller speakers do. The new Era 300 model costs about $100 less than the Five. It also plays louder than the smaller tabletop models and offers better bass performance, though it’s not as strong in that respect as the Sonos Five.
What distinguishes the Era 300 is that it’s an Atmos-capable speaker that combines two woofers and four tweeters around the top, front, and sides, and it can play spatial audio from Amazon Music and Apple Music. Both speakers sound excellent, but traditionalists may prefer the more direct, stereo-like presentation of the Five, while fans of spatial audio and those who tend to listen to music while they’re up and about may like the Era 300 better.
As for the Sonos soundbars, you can read more about their performance in our guide to the best soundbars. We also cover Sonos’s portable speakers in our guide to the best portable Bluetooth speakers.
Sonos supports more music services than the competition. Having access to your favorite music is the most important feature of a multiroom wireless speaker system, and the Sonos system continues to lead the way in that regard. It currently offers support for more than 130 streaming services, though not all of them are available worldwide. Many other systems support only a half dozen or fewer.
The major ones are here, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, and YouTube Music, as are social music services such as Bandcamp, Mixcloud, and SoundCloud.
You can also play back your local music library and subscribe to podcasts. Sonos features its own Radio app, which combines the core functionality of iHeart and TuneIn and offers access to more than 60,000 stations from around the globe. No matter how or where you get your music, the odds are good that Sonos supports it.
The Sonos app is intuitive to use and runs on iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. From the app you can control all of your speakers or zones, group them in any combination, adjust the volume of each individual speaker (even if they’re grouped), search for music across all of your subscribed services, create playlists, and more. It also makes setting up and configuring a system easy no matter how technically inclined you are.
With access to so many music services, it’s important to be able to find what you want to listen to. The Sonos app lets you search across every service you subscribe to, so you can easily find the music you desire.
Because some people prefer to use native streaming-service apps, such as those for Apple Music and Spotify, Sonos makes its speakers compatible with some of those, as well: Using Apple Music or the Spotify app, you can send music directly to a Sonos speaker just as you would with an AirPlay or Spotify Connect speaker.
The platform supports a variety of voice-control options. Some Sonos speakers have built-in support for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or both. And any Alexa device in your system (such as a standard Echo or an Echo Dot) can initiate a music stream to any other Sonos or Alexa device in your system, whether to an individual speaker or to a group.
In spring 2022, Sonos added its own voice-control feature, which—unlike Amazon’s and Google’s digital voice assistants—is tailored to music playback and multiroom-audio control. One major advantage of Sonos Voice Control is that it doesn’t record your voice and upload it to the cloud for processing. In addition, since Sonos isn’t trying to sell you audiobooks or remind you to reorder your shampoo, your music is interrupted by intrusions much less frequently.
For now, Sonos’s own voice-control compatibility is limited. It works only with Sonos Radio, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, and Pandora. In our tests, the voice-recognition system showed a bias toward traditional Western-sounding names, often struggling to understand requests for artists whose names didn’t conform. For example, after we tried multiple voice requests to play anything by Thao Nguyen, the closest Sonos Voice Control got was some songs by The Well.
A potential concern for Google aficionados is that turning on Sonos Voice Control disables Google Assistant on the speakers that support it. Oddly, however, you can run Sonos Voice Control and Amazon Alexa in parallel, though doing so results in some occasional weirdness and confusion: If you start playing a track or a radio channel with Sonos Voice Control, Alexa doesn’t recognize that and thus has no clue what you mean if you then ask it to pause or skip tracks. So you have to remember which virtual personality you spoke with last.
Other limitations affect the way Amazon Alexa is implemented on Sonos. The most frustrating quirk is the fact that you cannot adjust the volume of Amazon’s digital voice assistant relative to the volume of the speaker itself—and it desperately needs that functionality, since Alexa is way too loud by comparison.
The company has previously made it difficult to add external, non-AirPlay-enabled audio players to the system. That’s because most of the older Sonos speakers lack Bluetooth and line-audio inputs, and the optional Sonos Port is ridiculously expensive. The company has addressed that complaint with its newest speakers: The Era 100 and Era 300 have built-in Bluetooth support and work with a $20 line-in adapter; you can feed external audio in through one of those speakers and then send it to the whole system. That’s a nice development, but it doesn’t help people who own older Sonos speakers exclusively.
The Sonos app can be glitchy at times. We’ve experienced this problem ourselves and heard readers’ complaints about speaker-connectivity issues and the need to occasionally reboot the app or individual speakers. We’ve had similar problems with most other platforms we’ve tested, though our upgrade pick has proven to be more stable.
This small, affordable speaker sounds good for the money and supports a number of streaming services. But the Nest Audio platform is less robust and intuitive than Sonos’s system.
Use promo code NEST40 (charcoal)
Use promo code GOOGLE40 (chalk)
If a Sonos system costs more than you’re willing to spend, you might find that Google’s Nest Audio platform is more than good enough for your needs—especially if you plan to control playback primarily with your voice.
The $100 Nest Audio speaker is the only audio-focused speaker in the line for now. The tiny Google Nest Mini is good for smart-home control, but not a great audio performer. The Nest Audio speaker is small enough to fit in any room, it’s available in a variety of colors, and it sounds quite good for the money. Its bass is a little better than you might expect for a speaker of its size and price, although its sound isn’t as detailed as what you can get from Sonos’s entry-level speakers. Its midrange isn’t as neutral, so voices don’t sound quite as natural.
Regardless of the speaker color option you choose—be it chalk, charcoal, sage, sand, or sky—the Nest Audio is an unassuming little cloth-wrapped cabinet that won’t draw much attention to itself, no matter where you place it. Underneath the cloth grille are touch controls for play/pause and volume up/down, but we found them to be mostly useless, largely due to the fact that we couldn’t see the dividing lines between the controls.
Chromecast support opens up the list of compatible devices to lots of devices you may already own. Even though Google’s own speaker options are limited, you have many ways to build a multiroom-audio setup. For instance, we used the Nest Audio speaker along with an Nvidia Shield streaming media player in one room and a Vizio TV connected to an AV receiver in another.
The Google Home app makes it easy enough to add and remove speakers and zones, though Sonos is more intuitive and robust in this respect—especially after a recent update from Google disabled the ability to add a speaker to more than one custom group at a time. This restriction might be frustrating if, say, you have a Nest Audio speaker in the living room that you’d like to add to both a “downstairs” group as well as a “party zone” group. Now, you have to remove the speaker from one group to put it in another, which is less than ideal if you’re building out a large system with many customized groupings. For that, you should consider our other picks. But for a more basic multiroom setup, the Nest system is easy to use and works well.
Google’s voice control turned out to be the best among all our picks. It almost always found the song we were seeking. For example, it was the only voice assistant that would play the original version of Willie Nelson’s “Sad Songs and Waltzes” instead of the far inferior cover by Cody Johnson, which, to be fair, is a duet with Willie, perhaps the reason for the confusion that Alexa and Siri exhibited. Sonos Voice Control simply failed to retrieve any version of the song.
We also like the physical switch on the back of the speaker that allows you to disable the built-in microphone entirely.
Natively, the platform lacks built-in support for a lot of popular music services. Technically, only Apple Music, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, and YouTube Music are integrated. You can cast services such as Qobuz directly to the Nest Audio speaker, but you can’t then send that audio around your home.
Still, assuming that you subscribe to any of the above services, we’ve concluded that the Nest Audio’s limitations are far outweighed by its simplicity of operation, its solid audio performance, and the fact that it isn’t constantly trying to sell you something the way similarly priced Amazon Alexa speakers do.
If only Google would resurrect the Chromecast Audio dongle, which allowed you to add Chromecast streaming capabilities to any existing sound system, our recommendation would be all the more enthusiastic.
This larger, room-filling speaker sounds fantastic, but the real appeal lies in its luxurious design and the excellent BluOS control app. However, the Bluesound ecosystem is more limited, and its devices are higher-priced.
If you’re looking to step up to a more luxurious speaker or an even more intuitive and navigable control app, we recommend the Bluesound platform and the Bluesound Pulse M speaker.
The Pulse M’s design and performance are excellent. The speaker sports a design very similar to that of the Sonos Move but with subtler curves and a more luxurious look and feel. What really makes the design more special is the proximity-sensing, capacitive-touch controls, which light up as your hand approaches and provide volume and playback control.
It’s the sort of thing I normally tire of after the novelty wears off, but after spending months with the Pulse M, I still get a thrill from physically interacting with it. And listening to it: Overall, the sound is quite comparable to that of the pricier Sonos Five, just with a bit less bass, a little more neutrality in the midrange, and a wider, more room-filling soundstage.
Bluesound sells a number of other tabletop speakers and soundbars, but in our opinion none of them compare to the Pulse M in their design. If you like the look and feel of the Pulse M, you could build an entire whole-home system based on this speaker.
Bluesound’s platform is built into other high-end audio gear. You can also build a multiroom audio system using compatible hi-fi components from sibling companies NAD and PSB. And Bluesound sells streaming audio players like the Node and streaming amplifiers such as the Powernode and Powernode Edge.
There’s no doubt that this platform is designed to appeal to hardcore audiophiles, considering its integration into pricey, high-end audio components and its early support for high-resolution music. That’s why we’ve hesitated to include it as a pick in the past. But with the arrival of the excellent Pulse M, which is similar in price to Sonos’s top-of-the-line speakers, the company has made itself more competitive in the mainstream multiroom-audio arena.
The BluOS app supports a good number of streaming services, although not as many as Sonos does. We found the app to be much more intuitive to navigate and operate, and even the initial setup is easier, surprisingly. But the ecosystem currently lacks Sonos’s global search functionality.
In our tests, the Pulse M speaker and BluOS have both proven to be more stable and reliable than Sonos’s offerings. Whereas we occasionally have to reboot Sonos speakers or force-quit the Sonos app, we haven’t had to do either with the Bluesound setup, even after five months of near-constant use.
Another potential upside for the privacy conscious is that the Pulse M lacks a built-in microphone. You can still use separate digital personal assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant to control and play music to the speaker, but you need to bring your own smart speaker to the party to make that setup work.
As we were wrapping up work on our latest update of this guide, Lenbrook, Bluesound’s parent company, announced that the version 4.0 update of the BluOS platform would be coming in October, promising improved navigation, new customization options, more centralized access to music services and devices, and better search capabilities. We’re always a bit nervous when companies tinker with a platform that works as well as Bluesound’s does, but considering that all updates to the app thus far have been major improvements, we’re cautiously optimistic.
Amazon’s Alexa platform and Echo speakers are a former pick, but we no longer recommend them for a whole-house audio system due to the continued, incremental encrapification of the platform. Voice search for specific songs is getting worse, multiroom functionality isn’t getting any better, and then there’s the constant in-your-face upselling of Amazon-owned services. Recent improvements (such as being able to mute Alexa’s “by the way…” suggestions) are appreciated but seem too little, too late. The Amazon Echo (4th Gen) remains a good smart speaker on its own, but the platform as a whole isn’t our favorite.
As a relatively open ecosystem built into a lot of AV receivers, TVs, media players, and speakers, Apple’s AirPlay 2 has a lot going for it as a multiroom audio platform. You can easily mix and match speakers from a number of different manufacturers, along with the Apple HomePod and Apple HomePod mini speakers. The downsides: Relying on AirPlay 2 for all of your multiroom music mostly anchors you to iOS as a mobile platform, and as good as the HomePod is as a standalone smart speaker and personal digital assistant, its sound quality isn’t commensurate with its price.
Denon’s HEOS system offers a number of speakers in a variety of sizes, and Denon has built HEOS support into all of its new receivers, as well. But at this point no other companies—aside from Marantz, which is part of Denon’s parent company—have adopted HEOS. And the platform supports only a limited number of streaming services.
DTS Play-Fi is an open standard that is supported by a number of electronics companies. It supports 5.1-channel surround sound on wireless speakers, and it covers a wide selection of devices. Unfortunately, its network connectivity is dodgy at best, and setup can be a nightmare.
The Naim Mu-so system looks and sounds superb, and it allows you to control everything from a single app, but the company’s least expensive model still costs much more than most people are likely to pay. It might be a fantastic-sounding speaker, but it starts at a price that is too high.
Yamaha MusicCast is currently available only in Yamaha devices, including soundbars, speakers, and receivers. The platform supports AirPlay and Bluetooth on all its devices but supports only a limited number of streaming services directly.
This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Grant Clauser.
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