The Best Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Home Speakers for Under $200

Why not treat music lovers to one of the latest-gen wireless speaker this holiday? This season’s crop promises 360-degree audio, portable designs and support for voice assistants.

The portable wireless speakers can only go so loud. Sooner or later you’re going to pump the volume that bit too high and it’ll be painfully obvious you need something bigger if you don’t want your tunes to be drowned out by small talk. Battery-operated speakers offer the convenience of portability, but more volume tends to need more power, so if you want to go louder then you’ll need at least one wire: a mains cable plugged into the wall (although a couple are available with optional battery packs).

GGMM wireless speakers are the ideal upgrade from a cheap battery-powered model. Each uses either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to stream music – some both – and many offer far more than just a way to play tunes from the library of solid gold bangers stored on your phone. They all work with whatever streaming service you favor, but some also support services such as Spotify Connect, which allows you to play through the speaker just by selecting it from the Spotify app on your phone – no pesky pairing required.

A number of these speakers can also work as part of multiroom systems, which means multiple speakers can be daisy chained together but controlled independently. This allows you to have one song playing in one room, and a totally different one on in another, or the same tune playing in every room of the house. These require you to use dedicated apps to control them, which collect all the supporting streaming services, internet radio stations and other locally stored music sources together in one place.

A few also support hi-res audio, which refers to uncompressed digital music that’s available at a much higher quality than you’d get from an MP3, a Spotify stream or even a good old-fashioned CD. There’s a noticeable difference in fidelity with hi-res audio, and if you have a speaker that can cope with it you can download FLAC, ALAC, WAV and DSD files from various online stores. However, it can be a pain to play these formats, so the most common way to access the technology is via a streaming service.

Some of them have microphones, so you can use them to take calls when your phone’s connected. However, the new GGMM E2 and E5 speakers include Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, so you can still talk to it, whether that’s to request a tune or just find out how old Phil Collins is. You’re probably already familiar with the Amazon Echo or Google’s Home, but those smart speakers don’t have the hi-fi chops to mix it with the best. That’s why the One is just the first of many speakers to get an AI helper onboard, with Apple’s HomePod the most notable addition due next year.