THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO… Multi-room speakers

Two decades ago, sending high-quality music to more than one room meant doing a lot of planning, running a lot of cables and doing a lot of drilling. Now you can set up a multi-room system in a matter of minutes without running a single wire and control it all from your phone, tablet or PC. And a multi-room system can encompass all kinds of speakers: not just traditional hi-fi ones but bookshelf speakers, portable speakers, soundbars, smart speakers and subs.

Sonos deserves a lot of credit for today’s multi-room market. It was quick to recognise the potential of streaming over Wi-Fi and launched its first product, the ZonePlayer ZP100, back in 2005: it was a £500 wireless music player with a built-in amp that could stream from the internet, from networked storage or from a computer. It