Liam’s favourite outdoor speakers
AV & Hi-Fi - May, 2020
As we enter lockdown phase 2 here in the UK, gardens the length and breadth of the country are about to be chock full of six-person BBQ parties! You best have a decent sound system out there….
Sonos Move £399
A long overdue addition to the Sonos range finally came just in time for Winter last year when they announced their battery powered speaker the Sonos Move. Bit pricey for what it is, but at the end of the day it’s a quick and easy way of extending your Sonos system outdoors. Take the speaker wherever you go in the garden, if it can still pickup the Wi-Fi it will give you the full Sonos experience including use of the built in Alexa and Google assistant. If it can’t pickup a decent wireless signal, you can still Bluetooth directly in to it using your phone. Or you can call us up to fit you an external wireless antenna and do the job properly!
Triad Outdoor OD25 from £600 a pair
This is the first of what I would call a proper solution. An outside zone of a pair of outdoor speakers attached to your main multiroom audio system. I’m a fan of the performance / price ratio of the Triad Outdoor speakers but traditional outdoor speakers are not the prettiest of things. Aesthetically these are going to be more forgivable mounted up inside an eave, or somewhere they can be grown over slightly to make for a more discrete installation. Or take advantage of our customisation service and have the cabinets painted in any RAL colour
Klipsch Pro Rock range from £840 a pair
Klipsch speakers are just raw animals. And their Pro Rock speakers are no exception. Taking the more commercial design of horn loading their tweeters, the Pro Rock range can go very loud, with very little distortion, without needing a megapower amplifier strapped into them. These are speakers made to piss off the neighbours. They are also to my eye the most rockiest looking of the rock speakers available
Origin Acoustics AS41 4.1 speaker system from £1,199
Now this is a bloody great value speaker system which is always run as an offer throughout the summer. The basic package is made up of four 2-way satellite speakers, and one underground subwoofer. Yes, a subwoofer. That you bury in the ground. This kind of layout has a number of advantages. The satellite speakers are a kind of rugged dark bronze finish and come supplied on a long spike. It is so easy to spike these into some foliage at the boundary, or a planter on your deck for example, and just about never notice that they are there. The inground subwoofer when installed only shows above ground a small mushroom like chimney. You can easily spread the satellites around the garden all pointing inwards and create a well balanced, high quality sound without having to ramp up the volume and have a lopside loud end and quiet end of the garden. Those of you still turning up your kitchen speakers to full volume just to have some background music in the garden will know what I mean
Origin Acoustics Bollard Speaker £1999 each
Origin again, you might be able to tell I have a preference for these guys when it comes to architectural speakers! They are a company right at the top of their game, spearheaded by three of the founding fathers of custom installation speakers. So, the bollard speaker. Designers are absolutely loving these. Reassuringly big and heavy, made of a high quality aluminum available in three different colours, these speakers are provided as either a 180 or 360 degree dispersion and are half buried in the ground with the buried section being a 6.5” subwoofer! Just one will amaze with it’s performance but start adding more and those extras give you a consistent, deep bass at nice low volumes across the whole landscape. These things are so good looking you just hide them in plain site. An absolutely brilliant outdoor speaker solution
Sonance Landscape Powered 8.1 SLS System £7,750
Now this is the pinnacle of outdoor speaker systems. A complete system for a very large outdoor space. Eight 4” satellite speakers, a 12” sub, and a 750w amp with custom DSP curves specifically designed for these speakers. Sonance will do a full design package for us to plot ideal placement and choice of models. This system sounds absolutely awesome, is pretty much invisible, and can be scaled up to any size. This is the one you use to blow away a garden chock full of people, or in the current climate – six.