Having the very best sound in your dorm room is going to make the school year a whole lot more enjoyable. Rock out with your friends, stream music from your favourite station, or just mellow out with your best tunes. Wireless is the best way to go for many reasons and here are the top 3 wireless speakers to rock out the dorm.
Why Wireless
The dorm room is the perfect place for wireless, for a bunch of reasons. First of all when I refer to wireless I don’t mean just BlueTooth, but more importantly WiFi. Most dorms these days have WiFi, and even if they don’t adding a simple wireless router will do the trick. WiFi is better than BlueTooth because it has more bandwidth, enables a faster connection, has more range, more flexibility, and better security.
Dorm rooms are relatively small so you really don’t want extra wires hanging about. In addition, the portability of wireless gives you flexibility to take it with you if you decide to party somewhere else. The sound from wireless systems can be very powerful and has the expandability to add even more wireless speakers either in your dorm or afterward when you finally move into a bigger space. The other great thing about wireless WiFi speaker systems is that you can stream directly from the Internet whenever you want to without having to go through your devices, and they provide a huge array of streaming options from across the globe.
Top 3 Choices
In choosing my top 3, the first criteria I used was the sound quality of the speakers. After all, in order to rock out the dorm it needs to sound great! The other criteria I used were simple – I wanted to ensure they had a few essential features for the dorm room. Features like WiFi, auxiliary access for other devices, app control, etc.
Although all three units sound great in my opinion, everyone has their own personal preference on what type of sound they like, so I would recommend listening to them to see what best suits your taste.
The Denon HEOS series is brand new line of wireless speakers, and the HEOS 7 is the top one in the series. The sound of the HEOS 7 is extremely smooth and powerful. It sounds very crisp and clean with just enough bass not to be over-bearing. The quality of the Denon HEOS 7 is obvious as soon as you pick it up. It is heavier than it looks due to the substantial electronics inside – a subwoofer, two full-range drivers, two tweeters, two passive radiators, and multiple class D amplifiers. It looks elegant with a teardrop design, black cloth, and silver band across the top. Sounds great, looks great, and feels great!
Although this speaker will sound awesome in any dorm room on its own, it also works as part of a multi-room system that is fully expandable once you move out of the dorm. It comes with an excellent free app that allows you to remotely control the speaker and provide all the content you would ever need. The streaming search capability of the HEOS app is second to none. You can filter by a huge number of ways (i.e. genre, location, language, etc.) and the number of Internet streaming sources you will find on the app is exceptional! For more info on the HEOS series, check out my recent post.
Bose engineering has always managed to deliver excellent sound in pretty small speakers, and the Bose Soundtouch 30 is no exception. The Soundtouch 30 is part of a full line of wireless speakers from Bose, and is the top speaker in the series. Not as elegant looking as the Denon HEOS, but it still looks great and is very well made. The Bose SoundTouch has a crisp clear sound combined with a bit more bass than the other speakers, so if you like more bass the SoundTouch 30 has it.
The SoundTouch 30 is also part of a multi-room wireless system making it ultimately expandable to more rooms when you need it. It comes with a very good app that is well designed and plays a myriad of content, but the unique thing about it is that is has 6 pre-sets that you can use for any station or content source. The pre-sets then can be accessed directly on the unit itself by simply pushing the corresponding button on the unit. I love this feature as you don’t need to open the app to play any of the pre-sets.
For more detail on the Bose SoundTouch System, have a look at my previous post. This unit will definitely rock out your dorm room.
For another fantastic sounding wireless speaker, the Polk Woodbourne has very clean, pure, and powerful sound. Polk prides itself in its sound engineering and they have done a wonderful job with this wireless speaker. It delivers a full 180 watts of power and comes with two mid-woofers and two tweeters. Each speaker has its own built-in amplifier, which eliminates any crossover and reduces any distortion. The bottom line is they sound great and can really pound out the tunes.
The Polk Woodbourne has a very retro design that looks awesome and upon a closer look you will see it is very well made. It has both Bluetooth and Airplay (which is WiFi based) wireless connectivity, in addition to the several wired ports on the back (USB, optical, Ethernet, and auxiliary). Unlike the other two speakers above, the Woodbourne is not part of a mult-room expandable system. The Woodbourne also doesn’t have an app that allows you to control and stream music directly from the Internet. Instead, what you need to do is stream content to your device (tablet, Smartphone, or computer) and then connect to the Woodbourne using Airplay or Bluetooth. I am betting that Polk will be launching an app soon that will make it more convenient to stream, but in the mean time it works well, and looks and sounds excellent. My will give you more detail on it.
All three of my top choices cost about the same, but if you are budget-pinched a bit both the Denon HEOS and Bose Soundtouch series have slightly smaller more economical units (Denon HEOS 5 and Soundtouch 20) that also sound great. And once you graduate and start making some more scratch and have more space to live in you can always expand into the full version and take advantage of their multi-room capabilities.
You cannot go wrong with any of these three choices as they are well made and all have powerful and clear sound – just what you need in the dorm. Have a look and listen and choose the one that suits your taste – and enjoy!
