The 2 Best Multiroom Wireless Speaker Systems of 2023

After completing new testing, we have new picks coming: Sonos will remain our top pick, but we're adding Google's Nest Audio speaker as a budget pick and BlueSound's Pulse M as an upgrade pick.

A wireless multiroom speaker system is 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. It supports the widest variety of streaming services, the speakers sound great, and it’s easier to set up and use than most multiroom systems. The competition is catching up, but Sonos still offers the most complete and reliable package overall.

This speaker produces a full, well-balanced sound and fits nicely in any room. It has built-in Alexa voice control, but the implementation is not as intuitive as on a native Alexa system.

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 is the flagship speaker in Sonos’s tabletop lineup, and it easily fills large spaces with full-range, detailed sound comparable to that of nice bookshelf speakers. But it carries a premium price.

If sound quality, easy setup, and intuitive operation are your top priorities in a multiroom wireless speaker system, Sonos is our recommendation. Sonos has made these systems for longer than anyone, and its experience shows at every level. The mobile and desktop apps are among the most polished available and offer unified search across every service you subscribe to, including Apple Music.

Sonos’s speaker offerings come at various prices. Currently you can choose between five tabletop speakers, priced from $200 to $550. The company also sells three portable speakers and two subwoofers, which you can pair with any existing Sonos speaker to add some oomph. And you can even add Sonos to your TV using any of the company’s three smart soundbars—Arc, Beam, and Ray—all of which can pair with two other Sonos speakers to form a surround system.

Note that the Sonos ecosystem has two main drawbacks. First, it is a closed system, so you have to use Sonos-branded products. Second, though many Sonos speakers have both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support built in, the system’s voice-control capabilities are not as advanced as what you can get from those platforms’ own smart speakers.

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This small, spherical speaker sounds better than previous Echo designs, and its native Alexa support allows for more advanced voice control.

If you want to add spatial-audio capabilities and higher volume to your multiroom wireless music system, this speaker is the most affordable way to do so.

If you’re looking for a more affordable multiroom wireless music system that still sounds great, or if advanced voice control is especially important to you, Amazon’s Echo family of smart speakers is a good alternative to Sonos. Although none of the Echo speakers sound as good as anything in the Sonos lineup, the latest generation of Amazon speakers represents a big improvement over earlier Echo devices. Using voice commands to operate a synchronized multiroom music system requires a little more in the way of setup—and isn’t quite as intuitive as Sonos’s app control—but the Echo system’s configuration and operation don’t require an unreasonable amount of effort. The standard Amazon Echo (4th Generation) and the larger Echo Studio are both great picks, and the latter offers Dolby Atmos spatial audio support.

You could also add the more affordable Echo Dot to the mix if you have Bluetooth speakers in and around the house that you want to add to your multiroom music system. On its own, the Echo Dot’s sound quality is pretty solid for a $50 speaker, but due to its small size and lack of bass, you would probably want to use it only for the most casual music listening or for podcasts and audiobooks.

This speaker produces a full, well-balanced sound and fits nicely in any room. It has built-in Alexa voice control, but the implementation is not as intuitive as on a native Alexa system.

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 is the flagship speaker in Sonos’s tabletop lineup, and it easily fills large spaces with full-range, detailed sound comparable to that of nice bookshelf speakers. But it carries a premium price.

This small, spherical speaker sounds better than previous Echo designs, and its native Alexa support allows for more advanced voice control.

If you want to add spatial-audio capabilities and higher volume to your multiroom wireless music system, this speaker is the most affordable way to do so.

Dennis Burger has been reviewing headphones, speakers, AV receivers, home-automation systems, home theater gear, and high-end audio gear for nearly two decades. He is now senior editor at SoundStage and a regular contributor at Cineluxe. In the past he has written for Big Picture Big Sound, Digital TV & Sound, Electronic House, Home Smart Home, Home Theater magazine, Home Theater Review, and Residential Systems, just to name a few.

Adrienne Maxwell, the supervising editor of Wirecutter’s audio and video coverage, contributed testing notes to the most recent version of this guide.

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. These systems, connected via Wi-Fi, let you play different tracks on each speaker or group them together to play the same track throughout a home. They support both local media libraries and online streaming services, allowing you to access music from almost any source, and they make it easy to expand your system by simply adding another speaker or zone.

If you care only about playing music in a single room and don’t need built-in voice-control capabilities, other options work well for less money. Bluetooth speakers can easily stream audio from your 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, which isn’t the case with Wi-Fi 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 and don’t use your phone’s battery life.

Since we first published this guide in 2013, we have considered 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:

Some other features aren’t essential for a whole-home audio listening system:

We test each system in different houses and apartments, with both local music libraries and streaming music services such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify. We put the speakers all around the house to make sure range isn’t an issue. In the case of soundbars and subwoofers, we watch movies and TV, as well.

This speaker produces a full, well-balanced sound and fits nicely in any room. It has built-in Alexa voice control, but the implementation is not as intuitive as on a native Alexa system.

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 is the flagship speaker in Sonos’s tabletop lineup, and it easily fills large spaces with full-range, detailed sound comparable to that of nice bookshelf speakers. But it carries a premium price.

The Sonos system is the best multiroom wireless speaker system because it supports the most services and has a wide selection of great-sounding speakers, comprehensive search features, and a well-organized app that runs on almost all major mobile platforms. Sonos keeps its platform current by updating its speakers, adding more services, and introducing new features. The Sonos user experience, while not completely glitch-free, is the most intuitive of any of the multiroom wireless speaker systems currently available.

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). In March 2023, the company introduced the Era 100 ($250), which will replace the Sonos One, and the Atmos-enabled Era 300 ($450). The lineup extends to the Arc, Beam, and Ray soundbars for use with a TV. You can use a single speaker, 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 Sub Mini. You even have the ability to add dual Sub units to home theater setups. Many of the speakers support Apple AirPlay 2 and Amazon Alexa voice control, and some add support for Google Assistant, too.

If you already have passive speakers that require an amp and you’d like them to work with your Sonos system, you can use the Sonos Amp. The Amp also has a stereo analog input if you want to connect a turntable, a CD player, or some other audio source device, as well as an optical digital audio input and an HDMI ARC port to connect a TV. Before you go that route, though, it’s important to consider your specific needs. If you’re just looking for a stereo setup, you can get a pair of the impressive Sonos One or Era 100 speakers for a lot less; the most serious audiophiles might consider upgrading to a pair of Sonos Five or Era 300 units. If, on the other hand, you’re just looking to bring your record collection into the Sonos ecosystem, you’re probably better served by 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 new, $20 Sonos Line-in Adapter, which lets you connect an external source directly to an Era 100 or Era 300 speaker.

For portable listening, the Sonos Move adds a battery and Bluetooth, so you can take it with you and use it outside of the range of your Wi-Fi network. It is one of the larger Sonos speakers, with a carrying handle on the back, and it sits in a small charging base. It can play louder with more clarity than the much smaller Sonos One, but it isn’t as detailed and offers less stereo separation than the Sonos Five. A better portable option is the Sonos Roam (or the non-voice-controlled Sonos Roam SL), 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.

IKEA offers Sonos speakers, too. The IKEA Symfonisk WiFi Bookshelf Speaker is the cheapest Sonos tabletop speaker yet, coming in around $120. IKEA also sells three lifestyle-oriented speakers: the Symfonisk Speaker Lamp Base and Symfonisk Floor Lamp (yes, they are speakers built into lamps), as well as the Symfonisk on-wall speaker, which looks like a piece of framed art.

Sonos also offers a series of architectural speakers designed to be combined with the company’s updated Sonos Amp. Sonos created these in conjunction with Sonance, a company with a long history in architectural speakers, and the lineup includes in-ceiling, in-wall, and outdoor models.

Using the microphone of an iOS device, Sonos’s Trueplay software offers room correction for your Sonos speakers at no extra cost. This is handy, since most people tend to place multiroom wireless speakers where they’re convenient, not where they sound best. A speaker tucked into the corner of a kitchen counter, for example, is likely to sound extra boomy in the bass because of its proximity to the walls. Trueplay uses test tones to measure how the room influences the speaker and then corrects for that. After using Trueplay, we found that it always improved the sound of our Sonos speakers, helping to produce less boomy bass and a clearer midrange.

The Sonos One and Sonos One SL are great sonic entry points to a Sonos system: They cost less than most high-end Bluetooth speakers, yet their audio performance measures as accurately as that of speakers costing several times as much. The new Era 100 model technically replaces the One, though the One will remain on sale while supplies last. The Era 100 has a slightly larger cabinet and woofer, both of which help it to produce more bass than the One is capable of—thankfully, it’s a controlled bass that doesn’t sound boomy or mushy and doesn’t throw the sonic balance out of whack. On top of that, the Era 100 adds a second tweeter in an angled array that gives the speaker a more open, spacious sound but also makes higher-frequency details sound a tad more diffuse and less direct than they do through the One.

For better sound or bigger rooms, the higher-end Sonos Five can play a lot louder, creates a large soundstage on its own, 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: Whereas the Five sounds more like a speaker paired with a good, compact subwoofer, the Era 300 sounds like an all-in-one speaker with good bass.

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. The Era 300’s sound is notably more spacious than that of the Five: Vocals and higher-frequency instruments seem to hang above and around the speaker as opposed to coming toward you, but not in a way that sounds weird or artificially processed. Both speakers sound excellent—it’s really about preference. 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 cover Sonos’s portable speakers in our guide to the best portable Bluetooth speakers.

The Sonos app has an intuitive layout and runs on iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. From the app you can control all of the speakers or zones, group them in any combination, adjust the volume of each individual speaker (even if they’re grouped), find music, create playlists, mark your favorites, and more. It also makes setting up and configuring a system easy no matter how technically inclined you are.

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. Currently, it offers support for over 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, YouTube Music, Pandora, Spotify, and iHeartRadio, as are social music services such as Bandcamp, Mixcloud, and SoundCloud. You’ll also find more niche services such as 7digital, Concert Vault, Murfie, Qobuz, and Tidal. You can play back your local music library (with some limitations for iOS users) and subscribe to podcasts, too. Sonos also 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.

With access to so many music services, being able to find what you want to listen to is also important. Sonos gives you direct access to all supported streaming services through a single app for your computer or smartphone; many other systems, in contrast, require you to use the individual app for each service. Sonos’s unified service approach lets you search across every service you subscribe to, which makes it easy to find the music you desire.

Because some people prefer to use native streaming service apps, such as those for Spotify and Apple Music, Sonos is starting to make its speakers compatible with those, as well: Using the Spotify app or Apple Music, you can send music directly to a Sonos speaker just as you would with a Spotify Connect speaker or the Apple HomePod, respectively. Sonos has said that this compatibility will be available for more services in the future but has not provided a timeline or named specific services.

Some Sonos speakers have built-in support for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or both, so you can ask them to play music or to turn off a smart light, just as you can with any Amazon Echo or Google Home speaker. Any Alexa device on your system (such as a standard Echo or an Echo Dot) can initiate a music stream to any other Sonos or Alexa device on your system—whether to an individual speaker or to a group. This function is powerful and useful once you get the hang of it, but it has limitations. If voice control is your main consideration, you may be better off with an Amazon Echo system for now, for reasons we’ll discuss in further detail below.

In spring 2022, Sonos introduced its own voice control feature, which—unlike Amazon’s and Google’s digital voice assistants—is purely tailored to music playback and multiroom audio control. With this feature, Sonos seems to be attempting to appeal to people who might have reservations about using Alexa or Google Assistant.

The first major advantage of Sonos Voice Control is that it doesn’t record your voice and upload it to the cloud for processing. That reportedly gives the service a leg up in terms of privacy, and it removes some concerns about false-positive wake-word recognition. It also gives Sonos’s system a responsiveness advantage, theoretically, since all voice commands are processed locally by your Sonos speakers themselves; in our preliminary testing, however, we still found a perceptible lag between when we uttered a request and when the resulting action happened.

The second selling point is that Sonos Voice Control is designed for music and multiroom audio control only, not for operating your lights or playing Jeopardy J!6 or counting down the days until Halloween. 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, and interacting with Sonos Voice Control can feel more conversational. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the system sports the voice of actor Giancarlo Esposito, whom many people will recognize from his work on Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Mandalorian.

The system responds quite well to naturalistic speech and doesn’t require you to memorize rigid syntax in order to make it work. In our experience, even after a mere few minutes with the system, it didn’t even occur to us to look up specific voice commands to send the music we were listening to on the Sonos One in the living room to the Sonos Five in the front bath. Our tester simply said, “Hey Sonos, play this song in the bathroom, too.” We were almost surprised that it worked that easily.

For now, Sonos Voice Control works with Sonos Radio, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, and Pandora. Sonos says that support for more services is on the way, but there’s no indication as to when services like Qobuz, Spotify, and Tidal will be controllable via voice commands.

One of the biggest complaints about Sonos’s ecosystem is that the company has previously made it difficult to add external, non-AirPlay-enabled audio players, since most of the 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 limited number of music streaming services compatible with Sonos Voice Control is a downside, but how much of a downside it is largely depends on whether it supports your preferred music service.

Complicating things is the fact that Sonos Voice Control sometimes doesn’t understand what you’re asking for no matter how clearly you speak. Ask for Joanna Newsom’s Ys (which rhymes with “lease”), and the system responds that it can’t find Joanna Newsom’s Peace. And the voice-recognition system has a bias toward traditional Western-sounding names, often struggling to understand requests for artists whose names don’t conform. After we tried multiple voice requests to play something—anything—by Thao Nguyen, the closest Sonos Voice Control got was some songs by The Well.

Another potential concern for Google aficionados is that turning on Sonos Voice Control disables Google Assistant. 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 last spoke with.

Other significant limitations affect the way Amazon Alexa is implemented on Sonos devices (including on the One, Arc, Beam, and Move). This is a moving target, as Sonos is regularly updating the functionality, but at this writing the most frustrating quirk remains 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.

Sonos speakers with Alexa support built in also have some other voice-control shortcomings in comparison with proper Echo devices. For example, Sonos doesn’t support Alexa Routines (customizable features that can execute multiple actions on one voice command) that include audio actions. We wouldn’t normally focus on such smart-home functionality in a guide about wireless music systems, but since this deficiency specifically relates to audio playback, it’s relevant.

Consider one of the Routines that guide writer Dennis Burger and his wife use most frequently: As they go to bed, they say “Good night” to the Echo Studio in their bedroom. This command turns off most of the lights in the house, adjusts the temperature on their Ecobee thermostat, and then starts playing the album Thunderstorm (Sounds of Nature) to lull them to sleep. Since playing a song or album is an audio action, the Sonos One cannot perform that Routine. That’s one reason we recommend using a dedicated Echo device for more advanced voice control, at least until Sonos Voice Control matures a bit.

Many of Sonos’s strengths come from the fact that it is a closed system, but this is also a weakness. Hardware from any other company doesn’t work with it, and if Sonos were to cease to exist as a company, you might find yourself with a bunch of very expensive bricks. We don’t expect Sonos to vanish anytime soon, but we do consider such a possibility to be a drawback for many of the other proprietary systems we didn’t pick, because if their manufacturers were to give up on them, you might be left with a system that’s either nonfunctional or no longer updated.

This small, spherical speaker sounds better than previous Echo designs, and its native Alexa support allows for more advanced voice control.

If you want to add spatial-audio capabilities and higher volume to your multiroom wireless music system, this speaker is the most affordable way to do so.

If a Sonos system costs a little more than you’re willing to spend, or if you value advanced voice-control functionality more than pitch-perfect sound fidelity, we also really like Amazon’s Echo ecosystem as an alternative. The Echo family isn’t as diverse as Sonos’s offerings, but it does include a couple of good-sounding speakers, namely the Amazon Echo (4th Generation) and the Amazon Echo Studio, both of which also support Bluetooth. Although Amazon’s multiroom music platform isn’t as robust and intuitive as Sonos’s, it continues to improve, and you can use more precise, nuanced voice control with it.

At a typical price of $100, the fourth-gen standard Echo costs less than Sonos’s cheapest speaker (the One SL), and while it doesn’t sound as good—the bass isn’t as dynamic, high frequencies aren’t quite as sparkling, and the upper bass/lower midrange is somewhat boomy and uneven by comparison—it still sounds quite good for the price. It offers a noticeable improvement in sound quality over the third-gen model.

Instead of the cylindrical shape that many people have come to associate with Amazon’s smart speakers, the latest Echo has a spherical design; Amazon has also upgraded it to include two 0.8-inch (20 mm) tweeters instead of one. In addition, its 3-inch (76.2 mm) woofer is now placed at the top of the speaker instead of the bottom. The upside of the dual tweeters is that the new Echo delivers a reasonably effective stereo effect. The downside is that the Echo is now a more directional device than the previous iterations. What this means is that if you install your speaker in the center of a room (say, on a coffee table) or between two rooms (such as on a counter between a semi-open kitchen and family room), the sound quality of the speaker, as well as the stereo effect, shifts depending on where you’re standing or sitting.

For $200—about the same price as the Sonos One—you might instead opt for the Echo Studio, which features a front-firing 1-inch tweeter, two side-firing and one upward-firing 2-inch midrange drivers, and a 5.25-inch down-firing woofer. The result is much beefier bass than you can get from the standard Echo, but even the much larger Echo Studio doesn’t quite beat the Sonos One in terms of balanced, neutral sound, nor can it match the sheer output of the Sonos Five. It does offer Dolby Atmos capabilities to add a more immersive height effect to the sound.

The Echo Studio also has a feature similar to Sonos’s Trueplay called Automatic Room Adaptation, which according to Amazon “analyzes the acoustics of the room and continuously adjusts audio filters during music playback to optimize sound output regardless of placement.” Unlike Trueplay, this feature doesn’t require you to use your mobile device to measure the sound of a series of test tones; instead, the Echo Studio listens to itself while it plays music and makes tweaks to the sound over time. The speaker goes through a setup process for room calibration upon initial setup, but there’s no easy way to rerun that calibration should you move your speaker from one room to another, short of resetting the device and launching setup again. But since the process is constantly running as long as the device’s mics aren’t muted, that shouldn’t be necessary. Just let the Echo Studio play, and it will adapt itself to the new room over time.

The Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Studio are all compatible with the Echo Sub if you need more bass. But the subwoofer’s functionality is somewhat limited, and reviews have been mixed, so we can’t really recommend it.

One potential advantage that the Amazon Echo lineup has over older Sonos speakers is two-way Bluetooth support. You can connect your phone or tablet to your Echo or Echo Studio and send audio directly to the speaker, or you can pair an Echo device with a bigger Bluetooth speaker for improved sonic performance. The Echo and Echo Studio can also pair wirelessly with Amazon’s Fire TV streaming media players, and a combination of the Echo Studio and Fire TV gives you Atmos audio-playback capabilities for movies as well as music.

When Amazon added multiroom music streaming to the Echo lineup in 2017, it was in a severely limited capacity. Back then, if any of your Echo devices was connected to a Bluetooth speaker, that connection would drop when you initiated multiroom playback. And none of the Echo speakers available at the time sounded good enough on their own to justify their use as a main music system. But in the years since, the audio fidelity of Echo speakers has improved, and the multiroom functionality has gotten steadily better. Bluetooth connectivity is now supported, so if you have an Echo Dot paired with, say, a Monoprice Soundstage3 in your home office, that duo can sync up with the rest of your Echo devices just fine.

Alexa doesn’t support nearly as many music services as Sonos (in the US, it’s mainly limited to the best-known apps such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Deezer, iHeart, Pandora, SiriusXM, Spotify, Tidal, TuneIn, and Vevo), although any music service it does support is voice-controllable—something that Sonos can’t claim. What’s more, creating groups of Echo speakers isn’t quite as intuitive via the Alexa app as grouping is with Sonos. But it’s not too difficult.

The only major frustration of using Alexa as your primary multiroom music platform is that adding or removing individual speakers during playback isn’t supported. So, for example, if you’re listening to a podcast or audiobook in the bedroom and want to add your living room and kitchen speakers to the stream in real time, that’s currently not possible.

If you have your Echo speakers configured to control your smart-home devices, you can also create Routines that include music and home-automation tasks such as lighting levels and thermostat settings. You can launch these Routines with a short verbal command using any label you like, such as “Alexa, good night” or “Alexa, bath time.” One of the shortcomings of the Alexa support built into some Sonos speakers is that they do not initiate any Routines that include an audio action, so this capability is a big bonus of Echo devices.

In other respects, Alexa and the Sonos system get along quite well. Within the Alexa app, you can create speaker groups of Sonos speakers, though you cannot include Sonos speakers and Echo speakers together in the same group. However, you can select a Sonos speaker as the preferred speaker for any Echo device. For instance, if you want voice commands, alerts, timers, and reminders to come out of the Echo Dot by the kitchen sink, but you want any music that the Echo Dot would usually play to come out of the Sonos Five sitting atop the refrigerator, it’s simple to configure.

As such, the “best of both worlds” multiroom music system is a combination of Amazon Echo and Sonos devices—the former in rooms where voice-assistant functionality is more important (or where you don’t want Alexa yelling at you) and the latter in rooms where audio quality is the top priority. But this arrangement complicates day-to-day use a bit, so if you value simplicity, your best bet is to pick one or the other system for all of your multiroom music streaming needs.

We’re doing more in-depth testing of the new Sonos Era 100 and Era 300. We’re also taking a fresh look at Bluesound as a potential upgrade pick, since the company recently launched a compelling new speaker and has made numerous incremental updates to its BluOS operating system in recent years.

Given that Apple AirPlay 2 is a relatively open ecosystem, it has a lot going for it. You can easily mix and match speakers from a number of different manufacturers, including Sonos, Amazon, Bowers & Wilkins, and Naim, along with (of course) Apple’s own HomePod and HomePod mini speakers. Many mass-market AV receivers and even many TVs feature AirPlay 2 connectivity, as well. Add in Siri voice control, and the overall flexibility of the platform is hard to deny. The downside is that relying on AirPlay 2 for all of your multiroom music mostly anchors you to iOS as a mobile platform, so if you ever sour on Apple and decide to switch to Android or some other mobile operating system, you’ll mostly be left with a collection of disconnected speakers or sound systems. Also, grouping and controlling AirPlay 2 speakers via either the iOS control screen or the Home app isn’t as intuitive as it is with Sonos or Amazon.

We previously had the Chromecast Audio platform as a pick for anyone who wanted an inexpensive multiroom wireless option because you could get in the door with just the $35 audio dongle. However, Google has discontinued that dongle, so now you must buy other devices (speakers, soundbars, smart speakers, and the like) with Chromecast support built in. Overall, we prefer Sonos as a complete system: With Chromecast, you can’t do 5.1 surround sound, it lacks a room-correction feature like Trueplay, it doesn’t support Alexa (which is not surprising), and grouping rooms is more complex since you have to start playback from an app and then switch to the Google Home app and merge it there. In addition, whereas Sonos lets you control every source from a single app or in many cases allows you to use the appropriate individual app, Chromecast still works only through individual apps. There’s a lot that we like about the Google Nest Audio smart speaker, including its improved sound quality, its pairing capabilities, and, for the purposes of this guide, its enhancements in terms of voice-based multiroom audio control. In that respect, it’s about even with the Echo system. Creating speaker groups in the app is simple, and sending music to groups requires easy-to-remember commands (“Play Ramones in Whole House”), but you can’t switch music to different groups once you’ve started or play different music from the same service on different speakers, as you can with Sonos. Among smart speakers, we prefer Amazon’s ecosystem and its diversity of offerings. That said, if you’re already invested in Google Assistant, there’s nothing about the Nest Audio that would make us recommend avoiding it. We just like Echo speakers a little better overall.

The Marshall multiroom system is based on the company’s line of Bluetooth speakers, which we really like, but the whole-home system functions more like individual Bluetooth speakers than a fully integrated system. You stream to the speakers via AirPlay, Bluetooth, or Chromecast, not through an integrated app that unites all the services in one place, and you need to load the Marshall setup app to send audio to multiple rooms or to join speakers into a group. We like the retro styling of Marshall’s speakers, but its system lacks the complete integration that other whole-home audio systems offer.

DTS Play-Fi is an open standard that is supported by a number of vendors, including Anthem, Onkyo, Paradigm, and Pioneer. It supports 5.1-channel surround sound on wireless speakers, and it covers a wide selection of devices. Unfortunately, it offers support for only around a dozen music services and doesn’t support Apple Music or YouTube Music, nor is it capable of gapless playback.

Denon’s HEOS system offers a number of different 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 only supports a limited number of streaming services.

Yamaha MusicCast is currently only in Yamaha devices, including soundbars, speakers, and receivers. It supports AirPlay and Bluetooth on all its devices, but the platform only supports a limited number of streaming services directly.

The Naim Mu-so system looks and sounds great, and it lets you control everything from a single app, but the company’s least expensive model is still 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.

WiSA is an alliance that is licensing its technology to different speaker manufacturers. Because that technology operates in a different wireless band than conventional 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi occupy, it’s less prone to interference. It’s mostly aimed at companies that are building wireless surround-sound systems, where it can support lossless 24-bit/96 kHz audio with 7.1 channels, but it is starting to add multiple zones for multiroom wireless speakers, too. Unfortunately, it’s not a complete-system approach and thus not a true competitor in this arena.

This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Grant Clauser.

Dennis Burger

Adrienne Maxwell

Adrienne Maxwell is the supervising editor of Wirecutter's audio/video team, covering everything from headphones to TVs. She has been a writer, editor, and reviewer in the consumer electronics industry for 20 years, and previously served as the executive editor of Home Theater Magazine and the managing editor of HomeTheaterReview.com.

by Grant Clauser

Getting your music from the cloud has never been easier. These are the speakers to do it.

by Grant Clauser

Everyone loves music, so we researched and tested the best headphones, speakers, and audio gear to give as gifts.

by Grant Clauser

Good sound doesn't have to cost a lot. We found the best audio gear for around $100 or less.

by Brent Butterworth

The OSD Audio AP650 is the best all-around choice in a passive outdoor speaker because it sounds great and has a rugged, sealed design with a versatile mount.