What makes a good whole home audio system?
The ideal system for playing music across your entire home should be easy to integrate and implement, flexible, reliable, scalable and easy to operate.
It all breaks down to one main goal: Providing access to all the music you want to listen to, anywhere you want to listen to it. That music can be on your computer, on a network storage device or in the cloud somewhere. No matter where it is, the better the access that is provided, the better the streaming system is. If there are major sources of music that can’t be accessed—a NAS, a phone, a certain online service—that is a problem, and a common one with systems that are limited to Airplay or Bluetooth. Because of this, users often find themselves tied to multiple devices for their music instead of being free to listen to it anywhere.
A good whole home audio system should be able to play music in any room, from any source, regardless of the distance. A great system will work in any situation you come up with. If the system works well in the basement but not on the upper floor, it isn’t a successful product. If it has specialized units that can also be used outside, or are portable with an integrated battery, then it’s better.
A whole house music system also has to be reliable. What about single speakers powered by Airplay or Bluetooth or on your home’s Wi-Fi? They’re not as reliable. Bluetooth speakers are semi-reliable because your music source is in the same room as the speaker, but they don’t work well as a whole house solution for that same reason: You have to keep the source close to the speaker. Airplay has better range than Bluetooth, typically, because it is powered by Wi-Fi. But if your home network is congested, your audio will drop.
It also needs to be flexible: If you want to start with a single room and add on more rooms later, you should be able to do that. If you want to integrate it into an existing stereo system, that should be possible as well. It is nice if it can tie into a TV, either with a specialized soundbar or with a soundbar-style setup. Having to maintain different systems for whole house audio and TV or movie audio causes redundancy, extra systems and wasted money. It also makes everything complex while we are trying to simplify.
It needs to be simple to operate. If you have a family of four and each member has their own music library, their own listening preferences and their own playlists, you need to be able to work with all of that. There should be a seamless, integrated system that ties everyone together instead of a group of four separated walled gardens that don’t talk to each other. An ideal system can integrate all of these without forcing you to spend hours updating and collating your libraries together.
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