Whole home audio - wired or wireless?

Hello @mattsca ,

I have had many iterations of whole house audio and can tell what worked best for me.  In my office (business) I have distributed sound in most rooms with in ceiling speakers.  They are all wired to a central location and any basic map with speaker selector box works fine.  This is the lowest grade of music and I view it as background.  It checks the box for unobtrusive, but requires wiring and amplifier.

In my home I had Bluesound stuff in 4 or 5 places.  A Powernode with floor standing speakers in the dining room and the bedroom, Wireless speakers for garage and bathroom,  and Nodes for two better audio systems.  They work fine, but the speakers in the bedroom and dining room were overkill.  Plus the wireless Bluesound speakers don't sound so great to me, and I wanted to upgrade sound in the two audio systems.

With better DACs and streamers in my audio systems, I abandoned Bluesound.  I still was overcomplicated, trying (through Roon) to have four endpoints in the house.  It worked, but my wireless speaker options for the bedroom and bathroom that were Roon endpoints often had network issues.  AND, running multiple Roon endpoints at the same time degrades the sound.

I love Roon, when it is optimized and limited to one system at a time.  I use it in my two main systems still.

But my bedroom and bathroom and soundbar are now all Sonos Era 300 and ARC.  I used to poo poo Sonos sound, but these new products are amazing.  One small plug in speaker (ERA 300) sounds great for a bedroom, bathroom, garage etc.  They stream from Qobuz or Tidal or Spotify, are rock solid on the network.  EZ to group them on the app and look good also.  The Arc replaced a passive soundbar with surround amplifier and 5 sets of speaker wires and sounds better and streams music if you want.  The new Sonos speakers are way better than most  ceiling speakers, easier to place, solid on wifi, and it takes a lot of money to buy better wireless speakers.

I had a wired system many years ago with nice $1000 in ceiling speakers. Not surprisingly that is an awful place to put speakers unless you live horizontally a lot. I never put in a wired whole house audio again and used Sonos for a while.  Sonis which was a pretty big upgrade in terms of functionality and sound. But today there are tons of active speakers to choose from $30 to thousands. That’s what I do now where I want sound. I also learned I need good sound in many fewer rooms that is typical for whole house audio. A simple and cheap Bluetooth speaker fits many uses.

Be sure you like whatever interface your stuff uses. For just whole house audio type stuff that is IMO more important than the speaker fidelity. 

If you are considering Sonos be sure to read up the last few years of major mess ups and recent company layoffs. I moved away from them about 6 years ago when it was clear their software upgrades and expertise pretty underwhelming compared to other choices. They were great for a while on those fronts however. The whole S1 S2 fiasco was when I bailed but that was dwarfed but their mis-steps in the last 12 mos. Their software is very user friendly. 

I use BlueSound devices and really like the setup.  My outdoor speakers are wired but driven by Nodes.  Living area is a pair of Puse 2i’s set up as stereo and the remainder are Pulse M’s in various rooms as well as the garages. 

I’m not likely to be drawn back to Sonos.  Seems like I had a similar experience to @jbs - constantly frustrated by glitches, lost/unfound devices, robo responses from Sonos "help," etc.  If I do pure wireless, it’ll be Bluesound.

I could have been a bit clearer about my intentions.  I have a dedicated hi-fi listening room and my MBR has a nice two-channel system as well.  Whole house audio for us would be mainly for background music during entertaining. 

@fastfreight thank you for the heads up about too many endpoints for Roon.  It kinda makes me think I want a hybrid system - same as I have in my other home.  I have an HTD MCA66, which powers six pair of in ceiling speakers, with a Bluesound Node as the primary input source.  I then have three other Nodes on traditional stereo setups and a pair of Pulse Flexes.  For entertaining, I just move between the HTD app (to control the six wired speaker zones) and the Bluesound or Roon app (to select the streaming content, and add other zones). 

So, for my purposes, Sonance 8" ceiling speakers (or possibly Klipsch) would do the job nicely.  I’m just kinda hoping I can avoid a guy (or myself) crawling into the attic and cutting holes in the drywall.

I have a Naim system in my home. I have a ND5 XS in my listening room linked to my preamp.  I have Muso QB 2s in each bedroom and a Muso 2 in my great room. All is WiFi enabled and Naim app has native Qobuz among other streaming sources. Similar to Sonos and Bluesound I can play music in one room, all rooms or anything in between. The Naim speakers sound great (better than Sonos in my humble opinion and I've listened to Sonos a lot). They are also beautiful speakers only bested in appearance (again my opinion) by the Sonus Faber Omnia.

The setup has been reliable as well with only connection issues when a speaker(s) has a firmware update. 

It is certainly a more expensive setup than Sonos or Bluesound, but the appearance and sound is worth it to me. 

One final comment on Sonos.  Glitches and drop outs WERE issues.  The older Connect modules etc had issues.  The new ERA 300 are way better, both in sound and connectivity.  Easy to try:  buy a Sonos Era 300 from Crutchfield.  Easy free returns if not satisfied.  That is what I did, and was impressed.  Don't get me wrong - they are not high end.  For that look to Dutch and Dutch etc.  But they are wonderful for second areas where you just want  music, and don't want frustration.