Are you looking for a good speaker for your home, for example for the living room? In this article we explain what to look out for when choosing a speaker that can fill your entire living space with your favourite music. A lot also depends on your personal preferences. For instance, do you place great value on top-quality sound? Or do you find it more important that the speaker is very easy to control?
When you buy a speaker, you naturally want it to sound good. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the quality of the speaker. One way to assess quality is to look at the type of speaker. You can assume that hi-fi speakers deliver very high sound quality. Hi-fi stands for “high fidelity”, which literally means “high reliability”. Hi-fi is therefore a kind of quality mark for speakers with excellent sound quality.
Do you find it important to control your speaker easily via your smartphone or tablet? Then you’ll need a Wi-Fi speaker. These are smart speakers, which means you can control them effortlessly with an app or with your voice. Installing Wi-Fi speakers is also straightforward. All you need to do is charge them or plug them into a socket and connect them to your own Wi-Fi network. No hassle with wires or cables. You can simply start playing music on wireless speakers from your smartphone or tablet.
Another factor that affects your choice of speaker is the size of the room where you place it. The larger the room, the more sound you need to fill the space. That’s why it’s a smart idea to link multiple speakers together if you have a large living room. This is possible with multi-room speakers. These are speakers that work together. For example, you can play your favourite tracks on several speakers throughout the house. With multiple multi-room speakers you can fill every room, without any extra effort when it comes to control. You manage the speakers very easily via a single app on your smartphone or tablet.
In principle, the larger the speaker, the more sound it can produce. But this also means it takes up more space. That’s why it’s important to look at the power of the speaker as well. Speaker power is the amount of electrical energy the speaker converts into sound. This power is expressed in watts. The higher the wattage, the louder the speaker can play. So, when choosing the size of your speaker, consider the space you want to fill. Sometimes a slightly larger speaker with more power is enough; in other cases, it’s smarter to fill the room with several multi-room speakers.
A final factor that influences your speaker choice is the option to add extra devices. Some speakers work within an ecosystem. This means you can pair the speaker with other devices from the same brand or system. For example, you can connect a speaker to a soundbar, subwoofer or home cinema set. You often need a single brand or system for this. You might, for instance, create an ecosystem of different Sonos devices. If you want to add another device, you’ll need to check carefully whether it’s compatible with your speaker.
