The Age-Old Question: Do You Need High-Quality Speakers to Listen to Records? We Answer Below.

Maybe you’ve been collecting vinyl for decades. Or perhaps you’re just getting started filling a crate or shelf of albums. No matter your experience with vinyl, your music deserves to be heard with crystal-clear sound quality. There are many cheap turntables on the market, but if you’re looking for the best solution, it’s wise to avoid the all-in-one suitcase players. Your best bet is to use a receiver connected to high-end speakers by reputable brands like James Loudspeaker, Triad, or Sonos. From there, you can even expand to whole-home audio that brings your tunes to every room of your home. Let’s go through the basics of high-end audio and vinyl. As an AV design and installation company servicing Irvine, CA, and Orange County, we’ll help you find the best solution below.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           SEE ALSO: 3 Aspects of Home Audio You Don’t Want to Overlook  

Why Quality Speakers Are Essential for Vinyl

There’s something ritualistic about taking a record out the sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and setting the needle for the first song to start. But vinyl brings even more than novelty to music. Vinyl records offer a wide range of sound, enhanced recording fidelity, and an audible warmth that MP3s and CDs don’t quite deliver. Audiophiles appreciate the crackles and hisses in the medium and might find that their records provide a greater range of sound frequencies. You need quality speakers to hear this difference, and if you’re investing in a record collection, it’s worth it to scale up your speaker selection.  

High-End Speakers vs. Low-End

When you first hear records on high-end speakers, it will be like you’ve never experienced recorded music before. ‘High-end’ is a subjective term, but we usually classify it was speakers with quality materials and balanced sound frequencies. The best speakers should deliver low, deep bass notes just as well as mid-range frequencies for clear voices. Can you hear all the instruments? Are the treble notes smooth or irritating? We ask these questions when testing our speakers in our Irvine showroom. Low-quality speakers deliver off-balanced sound. Maybe you can only hear voices while hardly hearing the bass or piano melodies.  

Speaker Brands You Can Trust 

Sonos manufactures arguably some of the best wireless speakers available. You’ll still need to plug the speakers into an outlet, but by ‘wireless,’ we mean you won’t need to connect the speakers to a receiver. Instead, Sonos speakers connect over their own mesh network. Wireless setups are convenient, but we still believe that wired speakers are more reliable and can spread across greater distances. Brands like James Loudspeaker and Triad use durable materials in their speakers with more powerful drivers than lower-end devices. Their bookshelf or floor-standing speakers will connect to your record player via an amplifier or receiver.