Whole home audio - wired or wireless?


I’m trying to decide if wired speakers in the ceiling is still a worthwhile project, or should I just use Bluesound wireless speakers. In-ceiling is nice because it tends to provide unobtrusive distributed sound. Wireless still needs a power source and requires mounting or shelving, though it’s also more flexible for moving things around. Anyone else recently face this decision? If wired, what amp/controller system are you using? 

mattsca

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. 

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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.