If you’re building a home hi-fi system block by block, the speakers are often the final piece of the puzzle. Just because they tend to come late in the purchasing-decision pecking-order, though, doesn’t make them an afterthought. In fact, your choice of best speakers for home use could be the most impactful decision you make for your hi-fi.
Think of your hi-fi’s speakers as the voice box of the whole system. Small characteristic differences between speakers can make a veritable shedload of difference to the essential qualities of the sounds you send them – and you deserve no less than ‘quality’, whatever that means to you. Gut-punching, wall-vibrating low end for your Swans records? Rich, reedy mids for your daily playthrough of Judas Priest’s British Steel? Or simply enough sturdiness to carry through to the farthest room in the house? Choose wisely, and that which you seek will surely be yours.
Speakers come in all manner of guises, from small desktop-friendly computer speakers to demure passive bookshelf speakers to floor-standing fare. Below, you’ll find my breakdown of the many and varied best on the market.
But if you’d like a little more guidance on what you should be looking out for, head on down to the FAQ section below!
Best overall
Bowers & Wilkins have a reputation for building beautiful speakers, and the 606 S3 are no exception. Just as with the Anniversary Edition S2s that sat at the top of this list in years gone by, these speaker are guaranteed to elicit some form of comment from visitors, audiophiles or nay.
And again - play said visitor some music, and they’ll be even more impressed. The 606 S3 benefit from a re-tooled ‘Decoupled Double Dome Titanium tweeter’, an artfully-repositioned 6.5” woofer for a more cohesive sound, and a deeper cab for better bass.
The improvements are small but make a big difference to a set of bookshelf speakers that already held a great deal of esteem in my opinion.
These are mid-sized units, but still easy enough to find space for – and will work well in all but the smallest of rooms, provided you can leave room between them and the walls (for that dimpled bass reflex port to do its thing).
The Bowers & Wilkins 606 S3 are certainly something of a financial outlay, but well worth it for some signature smoothness from this highly regarded audio firm.
Best floorstanding
Wharfedales have often been my speakers-of-choice in hi-fi setups gone past, and remain a brand for which I have no shortage of fondness. Even if I were to box up that fondness and hide it in the attic, these impressive floorstanders would still win my heart.
Wharfedale’s Diamond 12.3 speakers are floorstanding speakers that float far above the quality of entry-level competitors, but with a price that trails dangerously close to that same entry level.
They sound hugely responsive even in the larger spaces for which they’re designed, and sound surprisingly good off-axis too.
So many other floorstanding speakers could sit in this very spot on my round-up, but I’ve chosen these Wharfedales as the best floorstanding speakers for an essential reason: accessibility.
The sound is incomparable for the price; unless you’re rocking a pretty incredible setup, your returns diminish significantly after these incredibly affordable, incredible sounding speakers.
Elac’s hardly a household name, but the company’s Debut B5.2 is simply the best budget speaker you can buy. It looks a bit drab and is only available in black (nothing wrong with that) but this is a solidly built speaker that can be placed really close to a wall without the sound suffering.
And the sound is superb. Others are richer and warmer, but the Elacs marry a neutral tonal balance that doesn’t colour the character of your music to hugely impressive detail and punch.
If you want to hear your favourite tracks just as intended and have a fairly limited budget, there’s no better speaker out there.
This may look like an ordinary (albeit drop dead gorgeous) pair of standmount speakers, but the KEF LSX is really an all-in-one hi-fi system, complete with support for streaming.
Send music from your phone using Bluetooth or AirPlay 2, play tracks using Spotify Connect or the higher quality Tidal streaming service, connect an old-fashioned source such as a CD player or even use it as the sound system for your TV – the KEF LSX can do it all.
There’s no wire between the speakers (although they do both need to be connected to power) and they look lovely in all five of the available finishes (yes, black is one of them). They also sound superb, with loads of detail and punch. These aren’t hi-fi speakers, they’re a whole hi-fi disguised as speakers, and brilliant in their own right.
These utterly lovely speakers are the biggest and most expensive of Wharfedale’s new Evo range. And, while undeniably expensive in real terms, they boast high tech features usually reserved for speakers costing a whole load more.
The Air Motion Transformer Tweeter is the most unusual, poshest element, and that’s just one of the four drivers on the face of this fantastically big but also surprisingly elegant floorstander.
The downside is that you need lots of space for the Evo 4.4s to sound as they should, the upside is that they sound amazing. Huge, as expected, but they also balance smooth richness with punchy excitement in the way that very few speakers manage. An awesome choice if you’ve got the space and budget.
KEF rarely puts a foot wrong and the R3s are the company’s best speakers in ages, offering a chunk of the performance of the £5000 Reference 1s at a fraction of the price.
These are quite slim and compact speakers, but they still need a bit of space to breathe and are best not plonked on a bookshelf. Treat them right and the sound is amazingly well balanced and detailed, with a real subtlety and delicacy that reveals all of the detail and nuance in the best-recorded tracks in your collection.
They’re beautiful to look at, too, even with the carefully acoustically tuned grille that comes in the box and protects the drivers.
The Scandi-style looks might not be to everyone’s taste (Ruark is actually British) but the MR1 Mk2 is a brilliant option if you’re looking for great speakers to connect to a computer or to send tunes to using Bluetooth.
This isn’t quite a full streaming system in the vein of the KEF LSX speakers above, but neither is it a standard pair of hi-fi speakers, because here the amplification is built-in. In short, if your laptop or phone is your primary music source, this Ruark speaker set could be right up your street.
Most desktop speakers are brash and in your face, but this Ruark pair has subtlety, balance and genuine musicality. A flawless option for those with the specific set of requirements.
Spendor might lack the broad recognition of a brand such as B&W, but it’s got an exceptional reputation in hi-fi circles. A relatively small company, Spendor has been designing and manufacturing speakers on the South coast of England for over 50 years, and still takes six days to build each one.
It’s an old fashioned approach that results in old-fashioned-looking speakers, but that’s a big part of Spendor’s charm. Build quality, meanwhile, is faultless.
Spendor’s sonic approach is all about delivering a clear, transparent sound that lets your music sing, and its typified by the brilliantly detailed and natural sound of the A7s. No other speaker here and very few speakers costing less than five grand will reveal the truth of a track more effectively than these.
As an added bonus, they’re pretty compact by floorstander standards and work well even when positioned pretty close to a wall.
Best speakers for home use: Buying advice
Are you looking for traditional, passive speakers, or something more hi-tech, with Bluetooth or even built-in streaming? If you’ve already got a hi-fi system, passive speakers will be the way to go, but if you’re in the market for speakers to partner a computer, for instance, an amplified, desktop pair makes more sense.
There are now models that are more or less complete systems in their own right – instead of buying a streamer, amplifier and speakers, you can just buy just a pair of speakers that will do the whole lot – and will also even play nice with other devices such as your TV, should you want them to.
If going down the traditional hi-fi speaker route, the next big decision is whether to go with a standmounters or floorstanders. You’ll sometimes see standmounters referred to as ‘bookshelf’ speakers, but it’s better to think of them as standmounters as they will perform vastly better when placed on dedicated stands rather than crammed on a shelf.
Once you’ve factored in stands, standmounters tend to take up just as much space as floorstanders (and can be just as expensive), but they’re often a little less fussy about positioning, working better closer to a wall, for instance. The smaller cabinets often allow for a more agile sound, too.
But many prefer the look of a floorstanding speaker, as well as the extra weight and depth that the extra cabinet volume often lends to the sound.
Floorstanders are often more powerful and capable of going louder, too, and invariably feature extra drivers over their standmount equivalents – although this can make them tonally a little less consistent. You find that floorstanders also often need a bit more space around them in order to avoid the bass getting boomy.
Once you’ve settled on your new speakers, don’t skimp on the cabling – it really makes a difference here. Budget to spend at least £5 per metre on speaker cable (the Chord Company C-Screen is the best choice at this price). Banana plugs will cost extra and make it quicker and easier to connect and disconnect components, but they don’t improve sound so by all means save a few quid and use bare wire for your connections if you want.
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