By Dennis Burger
I start every day pretty much the same: listening to a wakeup playlist or album cranked to 11 while I’m in the shower. Once I’m done there, I poke a few buttons on my phone and add the music stream to a speaker in the kitchen so that I can enjoy a seamless flow of tunes while moving back and forth between rooms. Eventually, I move the music to my office stereo system to settle in for the workday. The music follows me wherever I go with the bare minimum of effort—that’s the beauty of great multiroom audio.
A multiroom wireless speaker system is the simplest, most straightforward way to play music and podcasts throughout your home with seamless flexibility. Just place the powered speakers in the desired rooms, connect them via a wireless network, and control them via an app on your phone, tablet, or computer—or even using your voice.
The hardest thing about multiroom audio is choosing the system itself. This category has evolved so much, and grown so competitive, over the past decade that there are myriad ways to accomplish the same tasks—and there’s no one, “best” way for everyone.
In the past, we offered recommendations for the best brand-name wireless audio ecosystems, but that approach is no longer in keeping with the times. What’s best for you depends entirely on what features you value most, how you want to interact with the speakers, and what audio components you already use and love in your daily life.
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Who needs a multiroom wireless speaker system?
If you care only about playing music in one room at a time, a single Wi-Fi–based speaker or Bluetooth speaker will suffice. Bluetooth speakers, in particular, make it easy for anyone in the house to stream audio from their phone or computer, since you don’t have to join a (hopefully password-protected) Wi-Fi network to do it.
What sets multiroom wireless speakers apart is that they’re designed to work together as a cohesive system, allowing you to broadcast your music around the home to more than one location simultaneously.
Ideally, a multiroom wireless speaker system makes it easy to add and remove rooms—also referred to as zones—to the playback seamlessly, without interruptions to your listening. It gives you the flexibility to fill as many rooms as you’d like with the same audio content, while also allowing for individual control of each speaker when someone wants to retreat to their own room and listen to their own audio entertainment.
In contrast, few Bluetooth speakers 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. At least for now. That might evolve as Auracast technology becomes more pervasive. But we’re not there just yet.
Bluetooth speakers are also restricted to using a smartphone, tablet, or computer as the streaming source, whereas a good multiroom wireless audio system can access music sources directly so it doesn’t require constant connection to your phone.
Unlike with single Bluetooth and Wi-Fi speakers, when you’re choosing which multiroom audio speakers to buy, the first question really isn’t “What’s the best performing speaker?” The much more pertinent question is, “What kind of system do I want to build?” Do you want to purchase a closed system in which everything is designed to work together, or assemble a more open system that’s flexible but possibly more complicated?
Since every decision thereafter hinges upon that first choice, we’re going to walk you through a guided “Pick Your Own Path” narrative.
Open vs. closed multiroom systems: What’s the difference?
A closed system is a multiroom audio setup whose speakers all come from the same manufacturer (or parent company, at least) and rely on said manufacturer’s app for setup and advanced control. Examples include Sonos, BluOS, Heos, and MusicCast.
An open system, by contrast, is one built from various speakers and audio devices that all understand how to operate together thanks to a shared protocol, such as Apple AirPlay, Amazon Alexa, Google Cast (Chromecast), or DTS Play-Fi, without all coming from the same company. You might have an Apple speaker in the kitchen, a Sonos speaker in the study, a Denon AV receiver in the living room, and KEF wireless stereo speakers in the library—all delivering perfectly synchronized wireless audio straight from your iPhone, using AirPlay.
Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages related to initial setup, daily use, and upgrade flexibility—of your music system as well as your phone—all of which we discuss in more depth below.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTPath #1: Assembling a closed system
The primary advantage of a closed system is that you don’t have to put a lot of thought into it once you’ve decided on which brand to buy. Many brands that offer closed audio systems sell a variety of speakers at different price levels, as well as adapter products that let you add your existing audio gear to the system.
Setup occurs via the company’s own control app, and you then use that app to launch streaming services, access your personal music library, and add/remove speakers and zones during playback.
A good closed system is easy to set up. Everything takes place in one app, and you get access to certain lifestyle-oriented features—like sleep or wake timers, accessibility features that make searching for and queuing music easier, and integration of multiple music streaming services into one interface, which might be handy if you subscribe to or have free accounts for more than one.
Closed systems also generally make it much easier to add your own source devices to the party, which might be appealing if you’d like to broadcast music from a turntable, CD player, or hard drive to multiple rooms throughout the home. You have to buy the company’s adapter devices to do it, though, and sometimes they’re pricey.
Closed systems are generally a better option for a home with multiple users. These systems often make it easier for different people to take charge of the music in different zones at the same time.
They also make sense if you live in a house divided when it comes to smartphone and/or computer preference. Most of these systems rely on control apps that are typically available for both major mobile operating systems, as well as PC and Mac.
You’re at the mercy of a single manufacturer, which could go out of business or just make poor decisions. This is the biggest downside to going the closed route. If the company decides to radically overhaul the platform, it can dramatically alter or even break the system for some users, either temporarily or permanently.
Sonos, the pioneer of multiroom wireless audio systems, has done this several times during its existence. Most notably, in 2020 it introduced an entirely new operating system and rebranded existing devices as “S1.” This meant that older and newer Sonos speakers would now be using different apps and not function together as a single system.
Earlier this year, the company redesigned its control app to work with its new headphones, and in doing so broke a substantial amount of functionality, including alarms and sleep timers, accessibility features, local music library support, and the ability to edit song queues and playlists. Needless to say, customers were not pleased. The company has been fixing the problems and pledges to do better.
Risks aside, if simplicity and compatibility are your top goals, it’s hard to beat a closed system. Here are our thoughts on some of the big players in this category.
BluOS: A simple system that sounds great but costs more
Top pick
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 want a luxurious wireless speaker system or you particularly prioritize the navigability and intuitiveness of the company’s control app, we love the BluOS platform and specifically the Bluesound Pulse M speaker.
It isn’t the perfect system for everyone, in that there aren’t as many speakers to select from and most of the compatible products are pricey. But the BluOS app is one of the most intuitive we’ve tested, it supports all of the streaming services we think most people will likely subscribe to, and the company continues to make refinements that improve the user experience.
The Pulse M speaker really is a pleasure to use. The highlight 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 we normally tire of once the novelty has worn off, but after spending well over a year with the Pulse M, we still get a thrill from physically interacting with it.
Overall, the sound of the Pulse M is quite nice, with good neutrality in the midrange and a wide, room-filling soundstage. The optional Front Row audio-processing mode adds a bit of punch and energy that you may or may not prefer, depending on how close you are to the speaker and the types of surfaces in your room.
Bluesound’s speaker line is pricier and more limited. The company sells three other tabletop speakers ranging in price from $350 to $900, but in our opinion none of them compare with the Pulse M as far as design. If you like the look and feel of the Pulse M, though, you could build an entire whole-home system based on this speaker.
You can also build a multiroom audio system using compatible hi-fi components from sibling companies NAD and PSB, though these are pricier brands geared more toward the audiophile community. Bluesound also sells soundbars, subwoofers, streaming audio players like the Node, and streaming amplifiers such as the Powernode and Powernode Edge that let you integrate your own speakers into the system.
The BluOS app is stable and intuitive. When Lenbrook, the parent company behind BluOS, makes upgrades, they’re always incremental and, in our experience, have always been for the better. The system has never been crippled by a massive overhaul that removed functionality and locked some users out of future upgrades.
But most days, you might find that you don’t need to use the app at all, since the Pulse M also supports AirPlay, Bluetooth, and voice control from Alexa and Siri.
Sonos: Great speakers at a variety of prices, but the company’s control app is iffy
Top pick
This Sonos speaker produces a full, well-balanced sound and fits nicely in any room. It also supports Bluetooth, AirPlay, and Alexa voice control.
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Despite everything we said above about Sonos’s track record, the company still makes excellent-sounding wireless speakers and soundbars. Sonos’s app supports the most streaming services (126 at last count), the company has a wide selection of speakers, and it’s quite easy to combine two speakers into a stereo pair or even build a 5.1-channel home theater system.
Sonos offers a lot of speakers at different price levels. Prices for tabletop speakers start at $180 for the portable Sonos Roam 2 and go up to $550 for the large Sonos Five. We particularly like the great-sounding Era 100 ($250) and Atmos-enabled Era 300 ($450).
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.
The sticking point with Sonos is not the quality of its hardware but the reliability of its software. Namely, the control app. On the plus side, the app has always made it easy to set up speakers, group them into zones, add or remove a speaker during playback, and launch music from all the integrated streaming services.
On the downside, connectivity between the speakers and app is less reliable than it is on the BluOS platform, and the new app is still a glitchy mess, despite the fact that Sonos is rolling out fixes that purport to undo some of the damage done in the big May 2024 update (see above). Sonos’s own voice-control capabilities are also lacking compared with those of Alexa and Google.
But because all of Sonos’s speakers support AirPlay, and some support Bluetooth and Alexa, you aren’t completely reliant on using the Sonos control app once you’ve set up your speakers. You can use other platforms for daily interaction, and there’s also a third-party app called Phonos that some Sonos users speak highly of.
Heos: If you already own audio gear from Denon or Marantz
Top pick
This great-sounding, easy-to-use, 7.1-channel receiver also integrates the Heos multiroom audio platform.
Denon’s Heos multiroom system is integrated into speakers and audio products from Denon and its sister company, Marantz. If you’ve already built a home theater or hi-fi system around a Denon or Marantz receiver, such as the AVR-X1800H we recommend in our AV receiver guide, you already have the beginnings of a Heos system in place. You can build off that with Denon’s own tabletop speakers, ranging from the Home 150 NV ($220) up to the Home 350 ($700), as well as a soundbar, subwoofer, and stereo amp.
In the past, we’ve dismissed Heos due to its limited speaker lineup and the meager number of supported streaming services. Both concerns remain—especially the fact that the Heos app natively integrates only Amazon Music, Deezer, iHeartRadio, MOOD:Mix, Pandora, SiriusXM, SoundCloud, Spotify, Tidal, and TuneIn. In other words: no Apple Music (unsurprising, although you can connect via AirPlay), no Qobuz (slightly more surprisingly, but ditto), and no nugs.net (a bummer if you’re into jam bands and live music like I am).
The Heos app has improved over time. In a pretty substantial update last year, Denon overhauled the Heos app and added some much-needed quality-of-life improvements, including a handy now-playing box, universal search capabilities, and more personalization options.
We wish there was more variety in terms of available wireless speakers, but we do like that the Denon Home speakers support AirPlay, as well as both Alexa and Siri voice control. While Heos is not perfect, Denon and Marantz fans will be happy to hear that it’s much better than it used to be.
Nest Audio: If you want to spend as little as possible—and control the system mainly with your voice
Top pick
This small, affordable smart speaker sounds good for the money and supports a number of streaming services.
If any of the systems above cost 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. Nest Audio straddles the line between closed and open systems because you can set it up and use it a lot like the other closed systems above, via the Google Home app for either iOS or Android, but the inclusion of Google Cast technology opens up the system to work with a lot more products.
The Nest Audio is a smart speaker with Google Assistant. This speaker can respond to voice prompts, answer questions, offer directions, and control some smart-home devices like lights and Nest thermostats. Obviously, it’s not compatible with Alexa, nor does it support AirPlay or Bluetooth.
The $100 Nest Audio speaker is the only audio-focused speaker in Google’s line for now. (The tiny Google Nest Mini is good for smart-home control, but it’s 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, either, so voices don’t sound quite as natural.
Even though Google’s own speaker options are limited, Google’s Cast technology is built into a ton of devices—including TVs, streaming media players, and soundbars—so you have many ways to build a multiroom audio setup. (Look for products with Chromecast built in.) For instance, in our tests 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 isn’t our favorite for multiroom audio. It doesn’t make it as easy or as intuitive to add and remove speakers and zones as Sonos and BluOS do (we discuss this more below in the Android section). But if voice control is a priority for you, Google’s implementation is the best among all the closed systems we’ve tested. It almost always found the song we were seeking.
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. 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 solid audio performance and the fact that it isn’t constantly trying to sell you something the way similarly priced Amazon Alexa smart speakers do.
Path #2: Assembling an open system that lets you mix and match brands
For people who access most of their music using a phone or tablet—and that’s a lot of us these days—it may make more sense to build an open system around the wireless protocol already incorporated into your mobile device—such as AirPlay or Google Cast.
This approach allows for much greater flexibility in product selection and doesn’t tie you exclusively to one hardware manufacturer. It also means you have one less app to worry about, since you’ll likely use the primary music or podcast app on your phone or tablet to control the experience.
But you have to put more thought into the components you purchase because they need to be compatible with whatever wireless protocol you’re using to broadcast your music and synchronize it between devices.
What does this look like in practice? How do you stream to those speakers? How do you add and remove zones of audio and control their volumes individually? That depends on which smartphone or tablet you use as your music source.
The biggest potential downside to the open approach is that you won’t be able to ditch iOS for Android—or vice versa—as easily down the road. At least not without giving up a lot of the multiroom audio functionality you’ve built. If that concerns you, there are other methods for building an open system, and we’ll talk about that, too.
For iOS users
Top pick
This speaker sounds good and responds well to voice commands, but it’s only suited for iOS users, and it costs a lot for the performance it delivers.
If you do most of your music listening via iPhone or iPad, using AirPlay for multiroom audio is pretty much a no-brainer. (The same is true if you store all your music on a Mac.) As such, you should shop for wireless speakers and other audio products that support the AirPlay 2 communication protocol.
There are a lot of AirPlay-compatible devices. In fact, of all the speakers we recommend above for closed systems, only the Nest Audio speaker lacks AirPlay support. AirPlay is also integrated into most network-capable AV receivers, as well as lots of TVs, soundbars, and media streamers.
So, as mentioned previously, you could have a different brand of speaker, soundbar, stereo system, or AV receiver in every room and still enjoy a seamless and wholly customizable listening experience throughout the home.
AirPlay has evolved into a great multiroom audio platform. While AirPlay was originally a one-to-one protocol—similar to Bluetooth, except that it relied on Wi-Fi—since the advent of AirPlay 2 in 2018, the system has continued to improve in terms of multiroom functionality, to the point where we find it to be the easiest to use, the most seamless, and the most reliable of all the multiroom protocols we’ve tested.
Say you’re listening to a song in Qobuz or Apple Music, or perhaps the latest episode of The Wirecutter Show or Audio Unleashed in the Podcast app, and you decide you’d like to broadcast it to one or more AirPlay-compatible speakers or devices around the home. You’ll see an AirPlay logo somewhere near the bottom of the app that allows you to bring up a list of such devices, and engaging them is as simple as checking the radio button beside the device(s) of interest. Or, conversely, you could swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen to open the iOS Control Center and select or add zones there.
Via either route, if you only select one speaker or device, your iPhone will control its volume directly. Add a second, though, and you’ll start to see individual volume sliders for each speaker. It’s simple, elegant, and intuitive, and there’s very little to figure out. You don’t have to remember which screen or tab that functionality is buried under in a separate app. It simply works.
When it comes to picking the best speakers for your AirPlay system, it largely depends on your needs and budget. Despite the fact that we’ve soured on Sonos as an ecosystem, the company still makes great speakers that all support AirPlay. You’d only have to dip into the Sonos app for initial setup and perhaps occasional maintenance.
The Era 100 or 300, for example, would be great additions to any AirPlay system in rooms where speakers don’t normally sound very good—like, for example, a bathroom or kitchen. The company’s Trueplay tuning functionality, its proprietary form of room correction, can tame a harsh-sounding space in just a few minutes by having you wave your phone around in the air while it listens to test tones.
For a living room, something like the Bluesound Pulse M might be a good fit due to its design, its elegant touch-sensitive controls, and its inherently more-refined sound. You’ll still need to dip into the BluOS app to toggle certain features you may want, but other than that, the Pulse M functions just like any other AirPlay-compatible device.
For rooms where you want Siri voice control without having to talk to your iPhone or Apple Watch, we really like the HomePod, even if it’s expensive for the quality of sound it delivers.
Using AirPlay as your multiroom wireless system also opens up the possibility of adding speakers from luxury brands that don’t have multiroom ecosystems of their own, such as KEF, Bang & Olufsen, Bowers & Wilkins, and more.
And as of the release of iOS 18, AirPlay now features support for Dolby Atmos spatial audio. At the time of this writing, the only compatible device we can confirm is the HomePod, but the company teases the addition of other compatible third-party devices at some undetermined point. We don’t know for sure that the Sonos Era 300 will be one of those compatible devices, but we’d be surprised if it isn’t.
You’re pretty much married to the iOS ecosystem. While you aren’t locked to a single company, you are locked to Apple’s protocol. If you decide to switch to an Android phone or tablet, it will hugely affect your system’s capabilities and user-friendliness.
You’ll also miss out on a feature of some closed multiroom wireless music systems: the ability to easily stream audio from physical source devices around the home. That could be a consideration if you want to share the output of your turntable to multiple zones at once. There are workarounds, such as the AirChord 2 app, but that requires third-party dongles to work and we haven’t tested it yet, so proceed with caution.
For Android users
Like AirPlay, Google’s Cast communication protocol is integrated into a lot of products from different manufacturers—including TVs, projectors, soundbars, and tabletop speakers. (Look for products with Chromecast built in.) It’s not in as many high-performance speakers and audio receivers as AirPlay is, but Android users could build a system around our favorite affordable multiroom wireless speaker, the Nest Audio, as well as lots of other components.
While Google Cast works well for one-to-one wireless transmission, it’s not as seamless and intuitive for multiroom audio as AirPlay is. We think Android users will be best served by using the Google Home app only for the initial setup of speakers and the creation of speaker groups or zones. Then they should just employ the Cast technology directly through their favorite music streaming apps.
That could mean using Spotify Connect or Tidal Connect. Both protocols allow you to stream music from the Spotify or Tidal app directly to a device, effectively making your mobile device a remote control. And although neither supports multiroom functionality directly, we found that both apps recognized speaker groups that we set up through Google Home. That’s also true of the Cast buttons within Qobuz and even the Apple Music app on Android devices.
This approach was more intuitive, less fiddly, and simpler overall. It’s still less refined and less customizable than AirPlay, since you have to rely on preset speaker groups created in Google Home. You might, for example, create a Party group that includes speakers in areas where you regularly entertain, a Morning group for speakers in rooms you occupy during your morning routine, etc. But you can’t change which speakers are playing in the group without stopping playback completely and choosing a new group. Having some form of voice control in the mix—using, perhaps, the Nest Audio speakers—makes it much easier to navigate.
What’s more, you won’t be able to run concurrent streams in different zones from the same streaming service, which is something that a closed system like Sonos will allow you to do.
For people who don’t want their multiroom system tied to their phone’s OS
Top pick
This stereo integrated amplifier has Wi-Fi support and uses Linkplay to build a multiroom audio system, but you have to connect passive speakers to the amp.
What if you don’t want to lock yourself into either iOS or Android, but you don’t want a closed multiroom music system, either? There are ways to build an open but platform-agnostic multiroom system, but it often means exchanging powered tabletop speakers for something that more closely resembles a true stereo system—with some type of audio component connected to a pair of passive or powered speakers.
One popular alternative that we’ve tested comes in the form of an operating system called Linkplay. This system comes from the company that also owns the WiiM brand of electronics. Linkplay isn’t exclusive to WiiM, though. It’s also found in audio components from Arylic, OSD Audio, Andover, and many others. They pretty much all use their own reskinned version of the Linkplay app for iOS or Android, so they can communicate with each other via your network.
Many of these products are music streamers or amplifiers with streaming capabilities built in. Most of them will communicate with one another to form an open multiroom audio system. What else you need to buy will depend on the product, of course. With the WiiM Amp—which we recommend in our guide to affordable stereo amplifiers—you’ll need a pair of passive speakers, perhaps one of our favorite bookshelf speakers.
We also recommend the WiiM Pro Plus in our guide to music streamers, and for that you’d need to add your own amp and speakers or a pair of powered speakers.
This approach is good if you already have speakers or stereo systems that you want to integrate into a multiroom system. Not only does this path end up being a more flexible solution, but many of these Linkplay products also have Google Cast and/or AirPlay built in, adding some nice redundancy. Also, many of these products fall on the more affordable end of the price spectrum.
It’s just a question of whether you want to fuss with setting up stereo speakers because—for now at least—Linkplay-compatible tabletop speakers aren’t very common. However, WiiM recently partnered with speaker manufacturer Audio Pro to introduce the A10 MKII WiiM Edition and C10 MKII WiiM Edition speakers (which we plan to test), so that could be a simpler entry point to a Linkplay system.
This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Grant Clauser.
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Further reading
Great Sound on a Small Budget
by Grant Clauser
Good sound doesn't have to cost a lot. We found the best audio gear for around $100 or less.
The Best Outdoor Speakers
by Brent Butterworth
A good set of weather-resistant outdoor speakers can bring year-around delight to a backyard or patio.
Apple’s HomePod Is a Good Smart Speaker. But the Mini Is Better for Most People.
by Nena Farrell and Brent Butterworth
Apple’s second-gen HomePod sounds good and works well, but its high price and Apple-exclusive constraints give it more-limited appeal than other smart speakers.
The Best Computer Speakers
by Brent Butterworth
The Pioneer DJ DM-50D-BT is the best-sounding pair of computer speakers we’ve heard in the $200 price range.
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