Best Speakers for Small Apartments That Still Bring Big Sound

Restricted space can make it difficult to set up a good sound system. These speakers prove otherwise If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission. Building a home audio system means working within your constraints, and sometimes that means picking up the best speakers that can literally fit in your space. If you’re living in a small apartment, there’s no use in creating a massive speaker system that you can’t crank up for fear of getting a noise complaint from your neighbors. The good news is that many top-notch speakers won’t take up too much room and still sound excellent. At a Glance: The Best Speakers for Small Apartments Most speakers (save for floor-standing ones) are relatively compact and apartment-friendly, but there is a spectrum. We’ve focused on powered speakers, which have an amplifier built into them, so you don’t have to worry about picking up a stereo or AV receiver. Most of our smallest recommendations can run off a battery, which allows you to take them everywhere. A single battery-powered speaker won’t replace a whole home theater system, but it’s a great choice if you want to hyperoptimize your space. The largest speakers we’re recommending, Sonos’ Beam Ultra soundbar and Bowers & Wilkins’ Zeppelin, need to be plugged into an outlet to work, but sound appreciably better than the smallest models in this guide. Types of Speakers for Small Apartments Our speaker recommendations fall into a few subcategories: bookshelf, battery-powered, and smart. There’s no wrong choice, but it’s helpful to understand the characteristics of each one before you make your decision. Bookshelf: A pair of bookshelf speakers will take up the most space, but compact models are still very small-apartment-friendly. This style of speaker has multiple inputs, so you can connect all of your audio sources (a computer, CD player, turntable, etc.) to it at once, which saves you space. Having a pair of speakers also allows you to get significantly better stereo separation (and wider soundstage) than a portable speaker. Battery-powered: If you’re extremely tight on space, a hyper-portable battery-powered speaker may be all you need. You can comfortably move a single speaker from room to room, stash it in a drawer when you’re not using it, and take it with you out of the home. Wi-Fi connected: Some small apartment-friendly speakers allow you to connect them to your home’s Wi-Fi network, which has advantages over pairing them to your devices over Bluetooth. Once a speaker is on Wi-Fi, any smartphone, tablet, or computer can send audio to it without having to create a separate Bluetooth link with it. Wi-Fi speakers also have longer range than Bluetooth models, though that’s less of an issue if you’re living in a smaller apartment. Soundbars: We’re considering soundbars as speakers here because our recommendation supports wireless technologies that allow you to stream audio directly from your devices when you’re not using your TV. A compact soundbar is an all-in-one home theater system that can double as an audio system. Our recommendation also has an input that allows you to hook a wired source (besides your TV) to it. How We Chose the Best Speakers for Small Apartments We tested the best speakers for small apartments on a single floor of a 1,500-square-foot townhouse, which is roughly equivalent to the size of a one- or two-bedroom apartment. We assessed the speakers based on their audio quality, size, smart-home compatibility, and how many ways they could be used. We listened to high-resolution audio from Apple Music and 256kbps AAC files from a local library. If applicable, we hooked speakers up to a computer or television and used them while watching videos and playing video games. The Best Speakers for Small Apartments After testing compact speakers, we found these to be the best speakers for small apartments. Best overall JBL Cove M1 JBL’s Cove M1 has everything you could ask for in a compact wireless speaker. Most importantly, it sounds great for a smaller-sized mono speaker at any volume level, in part due to JBL’s AI Sound Boost feature, which makes subtle tweaks as you’re listening to music to keep the quality bar consistent as you jump from genre to genre. You can connect to it via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and both modes sound and work great. If you have a compatible JBL soundbar, you can use a pair of Cove M1s as rear speakers to create a richer wireless surround sound system. Best for audiophiles Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Pro The Zeppelin Pro is great if you don’t want to sacrifice an iota of audio quality just because your place is smaller. It’s larger than any of our other recommendations, but B&W used the space to design a robust five-driver audio system that sounds better than any speaker in its class. The Zeppelin Pro’s unique design allows it to create a really wide stereo soundstage since its drivers are spaced far further apart than the ones on a typical speaker. The Zeppelin Pro is an investment you can make as an apartment-bound audiophile who wants a single-piece Hi-Fi system. Best soundbar Sonos Beam Ultra The Sonos Beam Ultra was designed to bring the full home theater experience to folks with limited space, and it can double as an excellent speaker. Its nine-driver audio system allows you to listen to Dolby Atmos-encoded audio with surprisingly robust surround sound. Sonos’ Trueplay allows the soundbar to optimize the way it sounds in your room, so you don’t have to tune it manually. You can stream audio to the Beam Ultra via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, or connect a wired audio source to its USB-C port using Sonos’ Line-In Adapter. Those features turn the Beam Ultra into an all-in-one audio apartment-friendly speaker. Best for bass Hisense WeBoom Hisense managed to shrink down all the best features of a full-sized party speaker into one that fits on a bookcase or the corner of a bedroom. The speaker sounds well-balanced out of the box, but it has a bass boost button that will pump up the low end considerably without going overboard. It felt similar to adding a subwoofer to a home theater system, and we couldn’t hear any severe overmodulation when listening to music. The built-in LEDs, which can be disabled, also added the right amount of ambiance, which helps the WeBoom be an appropriate speaker to bust out when you host a party. Best design WiiM Sound WiiM’s Sound speaker received high marks when Rolling Stone reviewed it late last year, and it remains impressive, especially given its size. In our tests, the speaker was able to deliver clear, room-filling sound without losing any definition when listening to music with complex arrangements. That comes down to its triple-driver audio system and WiiM’s AI RoomFit feature, which continually optimizes its sound in real time (sound familiar?). The WiiM Sound edges out other speakers in the design department because of its small screen, which can display the time, album artwork, and other helpful information based on what you’ve selected in the WiiM Sound app. Best bookshelf speakers Fluance Ri71 Fluance’s Ri71 is the ideal set of speakers if you want to put together a multifunctional Hi-Fi system in a small apartment. The speakers have enough inputs to be connected to a TV, turntable, and one portable source (smartphone, tablet, laptop) at once. They’ll take up more space than most of our recommendations, but offer the best stereo separation, out-of-the-box multifunctionality, and really impressive sound. They’re among the best compact powered bookshelf speakers we’ve tested, beating an entry-level stereo receiver and analog speaker combo in audio quality. We were particularly impressed with the clarity of acoustic instruments and vocals. Best budget speaker Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 4 Ultimate Ears Wonderboom is an excellent choice if you want a simple, solid-sounding ultra-portable speaker you can use in the kitchen, bathroom, or bedroom. It produces a surprising amount of sound, and shoots it out in multiple directions, so it’s perfectly capable of blanketing an entire studio apartment with music. Its outdoor boost mode (activated by pushing a button at the bottom of the speaker) didn’t make much of a difference in how it sounded, but the Wonderboom impressed us otherwise. Its giant volume control buttons look distinctive and also make the speaker easy to operate even in the dark, which is a nice touch.