All in one systems

‘Wireless’ as it relates to audio equipment can mean many different things. Which means it can be tricky to differentiate between an inexpensive battery-powered Bluetooth speaker, a pair of stereo speakers with built-in amplification, and a single, relatively expensive, unit that’s had almost as much attention paid to its industrial design as it has to the sound it makes, if they all count as ‘wireless speakers’.

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So the sound-advice.online ‘all-in-one’ category refers to a specific type of wireless audio system. 

It’s mains-powered, first of all - there’s nothing portable or battery-powered about an all-in-one audio system. It’s one box - because you can’t very well have an all-in-one system that’s in more than one enclosure. It’s generally quite sizable and generally fairly expensive, and both of these things are their own cause and effect - in order to produce a system with the potential to fill a room with sound it needs numerous speaker drivers, a lot of amplification, and as well as being able to stream wirelessly it needs the ability to support sources of sound that are physically connected to it. That demands a fairly large device, and this sort of engineering prowess seldom comes cheap. 

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Of course, when you’re talking about high-performing and relatively high-cost equipment, there’s more to producing an outstanding product than simply ensuring it sounds great. All-in-one systems as we are defining them tend to also function as sculpture, as furniture, or at the very least as conversation-pieces when it comes to the way they look and feel. Which means this category features some of the most striking equipment in all of audio-land.   

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