Best Wireless Speakers for Your Office

 Whether you’re working from home or traveling into an office, there’s a lot to be said for adding music to your workday. Research studies suggest that listening to music can brighten your mood while boosting your productivity and creativity. If that sounds good—or you simply want to listen to Meryl Streep’s cover of "The Winner Takes It All" while you type—a good desktop speaker can be a solid investment.

The most important requirement for a work speaker is that it sound good. A grating, annoying midrange—the tones where you hear most vocals and many instruments—might not be a dealbreaker in a portable speaker you take to the beach, but if you’re listening for hours at a stretch every day, any sonic flaws will stand out.

On the other hand, while home speakers might have to fill a large family room, most offices are more modest in size—so you don’t necessarily need a desktop speaker that can crank out a lot of volume. Instead, you want a model that sounds appealing when played quietly and from close range.

And lastly, the box itself matters, too. If the speaker will be sitting on your desk, there’s an advantage to a speaker that’s small—desk real estate can be precious. And because you’ll be staring at it all day, every day, your speaker should be attractive, or at least unobtrusive.

And these days, you have a lot of good choices.

“Many of today’s best wireless and smart speakers work well in an office or home office environment because they offer impressive sound in a small and simple package,” says Nish Suvarnakar, Consumer Reports’ analyst for the home audio market.

All of the following stylish, good-sounding speakers do well in Consumer Reports’ labs, where we test for ease of use, versatility and, most of all, sound quality. And all of our test samples are bought at full retail—no freebies for us.