Wireless Multiroom Speaker Reviews

The CD is dying. iPod sales are declining. More and more, people are getting their music from … well, everywhere: MP3s stored on a hard drive, Internet radio and music services like MOG, Pandora and the recently hyped Spotify.

Altec Lansing is a name I hadn’t heard in a while. I vaguely recall some cheap computer speakers I had, perhaps back in the 66 Mhz days (486DX2-66 FTW!). But I shall not prejudge, especially when the new inAir 5000 Wi-Fi speaker is an attractive piece of kit. Also because that’s not what I’m paid for. Ok, “paid” but you get the idea.

Review Mode: Engage.

A few weeks ago I wrote about building a WiFi audio system without resorting to the use of a glorified iPod dock, with all of its inherent disadvantages.

The Aperion Audio Zonas offer a different way to do the same thing, or offer the flexibility of wireless speakers for surround channels, sound reinforcement, sound in another room, or anything else you can think of.

When we checked out Cambridge Audio's original Minx 5.1 setup just about two years back we plain loved the little things, which we felt represented about the best miniature speaker system to date, the bargain price notwithstanding. Cambridge hasn't rested on their laurels, and in the intervening years they've taken the Minx concept and have built a whole line of cool little (and not so little) lifestyle products - read small, portable, wireless systems - around it.

As a guy who spends a lot of his life on biztrips and bike tours, I find Apple’s AirPlay wireless audio technology to be almost useless. Give me Bluetooth, baby! Bluetooth lets me haul my Soundmatters FoxLv2 to exotic locales (Houston, Indianapolis, etc.), zap it with music or Internet radio from my Motorola Droid Pro or my iPod touch, and enjoy the same listening options on the road that I have at home—minus my vinyl collection and turntable, of course.

But the new Libratone Zipp makes AirPlay almost as convenient as Bluetooth.

When B&W launched the Zeppelin back in 2007, it created a whole new category: the high-end lifestyle audio system. The Zeppelin cost a whopping $599, but it sounded much better than the other iPod docks of its time, it looked like no other audio product in history, and it sold like crazy.

Wireless is, uh, in the air these days. Audio, video, telecom, and most everything else up to and including war-making are all proceeding nicely without any lengths of braided copper trailing behind. But too much of the time, this is more about wireless-ness than about what happens when the signal gets wherever “there” is. (Unless, that is, you have the misfortune to be riding in a car in the mountains of northern Pakistan…)

Not this time. And the rather unexpected reason is a new family of wireless speakers dubbed Xeo from Dynaudio, the Danish loudspeaker (and transducer) maker that is as widely respected in the hushed confines of pro audio as in the rough-and-tumble of high-end hi-fi.