Dear Wirecutter: What’s a Good Wireless Surround-Sound System with HDMI?

Q: My roommates and I have been having ongoing discussions about home theatre setups. The problem that we've been discussing seems almost trivial: Given an apartment-style home (where we cannot run wires through the walls), we would like a setup with enough HDMI inputs to hook up all the things we want to watch in our home theatre system with a great set of speakers, and we cannot abide any kind of wiring across a living room to drive the rear speakers.

I myself am a happy owner of a Vizio 5.1 soundbar system—with the soundbar, the wireless subwoofer, and the two satellite speakers. Unfortunately, the input options in my setup are nonexistent. Would it be possible to set up a home theatre system wherein the front speakers (center, left, right) are wired directly to a receiver, and the rear speakers (subwoofer, rear-left, rear-right) connect to the receiver wirelessly?

Denon HEOS Receiver

Wireless receiver

The Denon HEOS Receiver is the first receiver of its kind, with the ability to use a combination of wired and wireless speakers for a true 5.1-channel system.

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A: Before March 2017, the answer to this question would have been a simple “no,” but now we’ve seen the first product that offers this ability. The Denon HEOS Receiver is a 5.1-channel receiver that can output 50 watts per channel for all five speakers, which is more than enough for most people. It can use the Denon HEOS 1 wireless speakers for surround sound and can pair with their wireless subwoofer, too. Denon uses its own direct 5 GHz network to reduce lag and interference and to play full-resolution Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks. You can even pair the Denon receiver with additional HEOS speakers that you can place around your apartment and play audio directly from streaming services such as Spotify, Amazon, and Pandora, in addition to streaming via Bluetooth from your phone.

The Denon HEOS Receiver has only four HDMI inputs (and it sounds like you may have a number of devices to connect), though they are all HDMI 2.0a, so they’ll work with Ultra HD sources. It also sells for $1,000, so it's more expensive than our standard receiver pick, which is also from Denon. And you’d have to buy speakers on top of that, which start at $130 a pair. You could add an HDMI switch for more inputs if you need them, but right now HDMI switches don’t usually support HDR Ultra HD sources. We're hoping more companies start to sell options like these, but for now the Denon offering is the only one we’ve come across.

Another option, one that's potentially more affordable, would be to get a new TV that has enough HDMI ports and pair that with a soundbar that has wireless surround speakers, like the Vizio setup you already have. Soundbars typically have only one HDMI input—if any at all—but if you set yours up correctly, any sound passed through the TV should come out of the bar, regardless of which input it’s on. For example, our budget-friendly 4K TV pick has four HDMI inputs; pairing it with one of our budget soundbar picks would set you back only about $800. And if you hook it up using the Toslink/optical output, all four HDMI ports will be available for plugging stuff in.

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