If you’re looking to round out your record collection, make sure to read our roundup of the best places to buy vinyl records online before diving into our collection of the best ways to round out your listening experience with the best speakers for record players. The vintage woodgrain finish helps the speakers blend in with most home setups, and the front speaker grill comes off if you prefer. With sound quality much higher than you’d expect for the price, these Edifier R1280T speakers are a great way to get impressive sound from your vinyl without spending a lot of cash. You don’t have to spend a fortune to get a decent set of floor-standing speakers, and the Polk Audio T50 is an excellent example of that. These four-driver units—one tweeter, one mid, and two bass radiators—look good and sound even better, offering exceptional value for the money. There’s plenty of bass response and a crisp overall sound that many more expensive speakers struggle to match. Available in a black woodgrain finish, the speaker grill is removable for a more classic look. Many listeners will be perfectly happy with a couple of T50s by themselves, but if not, they also form the ideal basis of a larger audio setup. Polk makes a paired subwoofer, center speaker, and bookshelf units that can be added as needed. At under ten inches high and six inches wide, it’s not hard to find somewhere to fit them on a bookcase, shelf, or desk. Despite each speaker’s small size, the four-inch woofer and one-inch tweeter put out a sustained 50W per channel, more than enough to fill a small to medium-sized room. Equally able to act as left, right, or center speakers in a larger speaker setup, the R-14M’s offer remarkably good audio quality for their size and price. As with nearly all small speakers, though, you’ll want to consider adding a subwoofer if you enjoy powerful bass. As you’d expect, they perform best with mid and higher frequencies, with a crisp, punchy sound that’s ideal for house parties. But the bass performance is still impressive for such a tiny set of drivers, delivering a highly-enjoyable overall listening experience. At just six inches high and weighing three pounds, these speakers are small enough to take and use anywhere. The flexible inputs (⅛", RCA, and USB) make the A2+ useful in a variety of situations beyond just hooking up a turntable. You can connect a phone or other audio player, for instance, or use the inbuilt DAC via USB from a laptop for improved sound quality. Available in black, white, and bright red, these speakers are the ideal addition to any portable turntable. As you might expect, good speakers are only part of the equation for getting the best sound out of your setup. You’ll need a powerful amp and quality turntable to really make the most of what the UB5’s have to offer, and likely need to experiment a little with room placement as well. But with the right setup, these could easily end up being the best bookshelf speakers you’ve ever bought. Designed primarily for small to mid-sized rooms, the R-26F (like all of Klipsch’s speakers) uses distinctive horn-loaded tweeters to deliver crisp, powerful highs. That doesn’t mean the midrange and bass suffer, however—these are well-balanced speakers that help bring out hidden depths in your favorite vinyl, while still being flexible enough to use in your home theater. These speakers look as attractive as they sound, especially with the front grill removed to showcase the dual copper woofers that sit behind. Most people won’t need more bass than what the R-26F puts out, but if you do, Klipsch makes a matching subwoofer in the Reference range as well. Will the distance of my speakers from the receiver affect my sound quality? Yes, while it’s not always possible, for the best audio quality, you’ll want to keep the length of cable tethering your speakers to your receiver as short as possible. Although your sound quality won’t suffer very much unless they’re 25 feet or more from your receiver. For any wired speakers, you should use a 14-gauge cable, and potentially using a 12-gauge cable for any speakers extending past 25 feet from the receiver. How many subwoofers do I need?This all depends on the size of your room, more subwoofers give you a better bass quality and offer you more flexible placement when looking for the best spot for optimal sound quality. However, having more than a single subwoofer in a small listening area may be overkill.
