Readers’ Choice 2022: Your Favorite Headphone and Speaker Brands

pcmag.com:

Everyone enjoys crisp, clear sound, whether it's for listening to music, audiobooks, or simply hearing your coworkers on a conference call. In our latest survey, our readers rate their satisfaction with a wide variety of audio devices and the manufacturers behind those products.

For a personal listening experience, take a look at our headphone results. Respondents are evenly split between using on-ear models and those that go inside your ears, but the vast majority (79%) have gone wireless. A slight majority of those who took our survey (55%) are also opting for true active noise cancellation to block out surrounding sound.

Next, we look at wireless speakers, which connect to your phones, tablets, and PCs via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or both. Bluetooth is useful for when you want to take your speaker with you, while Wi-Fi’s higher speeds can deliver better sound quality and let you use multiple speakers together throughout your home or office. Some models support Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, so if you want your speaker to deliver smarts as well as sound, our results help you pick both the best speaker brand and the best assistant.

Finally, we round out the category with good old wired PC speakers. If you use a laptop or all-in-one PC, the built-in speakers might be serviceable, but you could probably use an upgrade. And if you have a desktop PC with a separate monitor, you might need discretespeakers. Even so, if your PC came with them, they're likely not top-quality.

If you're looking to upgrade your audio, these are the brands our readers trust the most.

Bose has earned our Readers’ Choice Awards, for two years in a row, across all types of headphones, as well as noise-cancelling headphones, plus four straight years