The Bedroom Speaker Conundrum

I would like to have speakers in my bedroom. Currently, my receiver has two bookshelf speakers that are loud enough for the whole common area of our apartment, but it would be nice to listen to quieter music while I’m reading in bed.

This post is to outline the two main solutions I’ve come up with.

Number 1 - Speaker Wire & Passives

It seems fairly simplistic to run speaker wire from the receiver into our bedroom, but since we’re renting the flat, it would actually be fairly complicated to run the wire in a non-intrusive, visually appealing way.

The other major hangup being I’d need to physically get up to change the speaker volume, nor could I have both speakers playing at different volumes.

It’d sound excellent, though.

Number 2 - Symfonisk & Sonos

IKEA has a great pair of WiFi bookshelf speakers which would be very convenient and (reasonably) inexpensive to wire up beside the bed.

At a glance, it seems to be a perfect solution - as long as I’m okay with getting sucked into the Sonos product ecosystem.

These speakers would work great as long as I only wish to play music from my phone, but completely eliminates the ability to wire up my receiver without paying for a costly Sonos Port.

Sonos has a bad history of price-fixing and early deprecation of products, but unfortunately, no other provider on the market seems to offer products with similar capabilities. They’ve successfully monopolized multi-room sound systems.

I’m not sure I want to get tied up in all that, but it seems inevitable.

Update 2022

I went with Symfonisk by IKEA. It was not the right decision. Sonos is a garbage product. If you can live without multiroom audio, avoid them if you can.