The pros and cons of wireless speakers
THE era of hi-fi towers is long gone. Wireless loudspeakers now combine in one box what previously required several individual components.
With wireless loudspeakers you can play music from your home network, your phone or a hard drive as well as stream it from the Internet.
Product testers at Germany’s stiftung Warentest consumer watchdog are among the latest to have given a thumbs up to wireless speakers’ sound performance, following a test of 13 of the top speakers sold in Europe and elsewhere.
The drawback of many, however, is that when set up individually, stereo sound is often missing. small and cheap models in particular can often only handle mono playback.
“There are also individual speakers with stereo playback, but the spatial representation is then very limited due to the compact dimensions,” says hi-fi expert Christoph de Leuw.
That means that you have to sit very close to the speaker to get any sense of the surround sound.
But you can still achieve proper stereo sound if you buy two speakers and position them correctly. This of course doubles the price, however.
An app is always the central control element of wireless speakers, replacing the remote control and analogue switches and knobs on a traditional system.
“This app can also be used to set whether only one box is controlled or several,” says hi-fi product tester Herbert Bisges.
More wireless technology options arise when the boxes are “multi-room-capable”. Then several loudspeakers can be placed in different rooms and instructed to play different audio in each one.
“For example, the app can be used to set a concert to run in the study while a radio play can be heard in the kitchen,” Bisges says.
But not every wireless speaker is also a multi-room speaker, says audio technology specialist Ralph Werner.
“With a Bluetooth speaker, for example, there is only a direct relationship between the playback device and the loudspeaker,” he says. You need to use a Wifi connection to control several speakers using a single app.
some wireless speakers can also be activated using voice control. “However, voice control only works with certain music offers such as spotify. Users of Deezer or Tidal, for example, don’t have it,” de Leuw says.
Basically, there are two different kinds of wireless speaker, Bisges says: “Models like the Amazon Echo come from the smart speaker corner, here the focus is less on the sound than on the voice control. There are also providers such as KEF or Denon who come from the hi-fi sector and primarily focus on the sound experience.”
The price range of wireless speakers is large, going from around Us$100 (RM415) to a few thousand. If you opt for a speaker with voice control, you also need to consider the issue of data privacy. In its test, stiftung Warentest downgraded voice control models because of deficiencies in their data protection declarations, even though the sound quality was good or very good.