The Best Hi-Fi Music Centers for Home by Our

In the field of play­back qual­i­ty, a sig­nif­i­cant step for­ward has also been made: addi­tion­al speak­ers have been added to the tra­di­tion­al speak­ers, repro­duc­ing exclu­sive­ly high-range fre­quen­cies, as well as sub­woofers that play bass lines.

Recent­ly, the so-called Hi-Fi cen­ters have become quite wide­spread, which are dis­tin­guished by a very high lev­el of play­back qual­i­ty, regard­less of the source — be it a flash dri­ve, an exter­nal hard dri­ve or a vinyl record. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, not all music lovers know how to choose the right Hi-Fi music play­ers. It is for them that we wrote our today’s arti­cle. Let’s just before start­ing to ana­lyze the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the cen­ters includ­ed in the review, let’s fig­ure out on the basis of what para­me­ters one should choose such prod­ucts.

Content

What factors influence the purchase of a Hi-Fi music center?

First of all, it should be not­ed that such devices are char­ac­ter­ized by small over­all dimen­sions. A sim­i­lar cen­ter con­sists of a head ele­ment and two columns. The most mod­ern prod­ucts are equipped with a remote con­trol and wires for con­nect­ing ele­ments. On sale you can find prod­ucts that can be con­nect­ed to var­i­ous kinds of gad­gets via Blue­tooth or Wi-Fi chan­nels, and set­ting up devices is not very dif­fi­cult.

Front Hi-Fi music cen­ters can be floor-stand­ing or wall-mount­ed. The for­mer are best suit­ed for fair­ly spa­cious rooms, the lat­ter are designed for rooms with lim­it­ed free space. A fair­ly func­tion­al device can act as a sound source or receiv­er, which includes sev­er­al play­ers, almost always equipped with a radio receiv­er.

It is very impor­tant to prop­er­ly warm up this prod­uct before using it direct­ly. Thanks to this oper­a­tion, it will be pos­si­ble to per­fect­ly bal­ance the ele­ments of the music cen­ter, so in the future they will sound as har­mo­nious as pos­si­ble. The dif­fusers of the emit­ters dur­ing this process are stretched and become elas­tic. For this, expe­ri­enced music lovers rec­om­mend using music that can ful­ly cov­er the entire fre­quen­cy range. Of the exist­ing gen­res, sym­phon­ic rock ful­ly cor­re­sponds to this, but you can turn on a radio sta­tion that plays music belong­ing to a wide vari­ety of gen­res.

There is anoth­er impor­tant trick: when the music cen­ter is warm­ing up, the speak­ers includ­ed in it should be placed to each oth­er so that they are close, but not touch­ing, they are cov­ered from above with any mate­r­i­al that makes it dif­fi­cult for sound to pass through.

When choos­ing mod­els for com­pil­ing our rank­ing of the best Hi-Fi stere­os of 2019, we were guid­ed by all the points above, but took into account sev­er­al more fac­tors. In par­tic­u­lar, we took into account the val­ue for mon­ey of the mod­el, and also relied heav­i­ly on user reviews. We tried to include main­ly bud­get mod­els in the review, so that each of our read­ers can choose for them­selves prod­ucts that will ful­ly meet their music lover’s needs. Now it is a high time to start the direct analy­sis of oper­a­tional char­ac­ter­is­tics of musi­cal cen­ters.

The best models of Hi-Fi centers

10. Denon Ceol N9 Black

In the cen­tral unit of this gad­get there is a very wide func­tion­al­i­ty, in addi­tion, the mod­el is equipped with two entry-lev­el Hi-Fi speak­ers, how­ev­er, in a lim­it­ed room, the sound is in no way infe­ri­or to pro­fes­sion­al prod­ucts. The bright­ness of the liq­uid crys­tal dis­play is quite high — all infor­ma­tion is clear­ly vis­i­ble at a dis­tance of about five meters, and it can be adjust­ed from the remote con­trol. The cen­tral unit has two dig­i­tal and one ana­log out­puts, there are spring clips, in addi­tion to them, there is a Wi-Fi mod­ule, a con­nec­tor for con­nect­ing an Eth­er­net cable, and sev­er­al USB sock­ets. The lat­ter can be used not only to con­nect exter­nal sources, but also to charge var­i­ous devices. Con­nect­ing to Wi-Fi is very easy — just use the remote con­trol to enter the desired pass­word. After the con­nec­tion is estab­lished, you can update the device firmware if the device requires it.

Like most music cen­ters, this equip­ment has a wave radio, but you can also lis­ten to Inter­net radio — the library of sup­port­ed sta­tions is very large. To con­trol the cen­ter from a smart­phone, there is a spe­cial appli­ca­tion where the func­tion­al­i­ty of the remote con­trol is sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand­ed. It works on all plat­forms of mobile devices. The body of the speak­ers is made of chip­board coat­ed with glossy poly­mer­ic mate­ri­als. They should be han­dled very care­ful­ly as they are eas­i­ly scratched. The speak­ers are under non-remov­able grills, and the fab­ric prac­ti­cal­ly does not absorb dust.

Advantages:

• Decent appear­ance;
• Many radio sta­tions;
• The pres­ence of a large num­ber of con­nec­tors and mod­ules for wired and wire­less con­nec­tion;
• Decent sound qual­i­ty of music, regard­less of the source.

Flaws:

• Non-remov­able grills are dif­fi­cult to clean.

9. LG CM2760

The device has a fair­ly com­pact size, the appear­ance is very attrac­tive. There are two speak­ers, each of which includes three speak­ers at once — for low, medi­um and high fre­quen­cies. This moment allows them to be far enough apart from each oth­er with­out loss of sound qual­i­ty. The front side of the speak­ers and the cen­tral unit is cov­ered with a lay­er of plas­tic with a glossy fin­ish. It looks very styl­ish and attrac­tive, but will col­lect dust and fin­ger­prints on itself, so you will often have to clean it from such con­t­a­m­i­nants. Func­tion­al­i­ty for use at home is very good — with this device you can play discs of var­i­ous for­mats, work with USB media, both with clas­sic flash dri­ves and with exter­nal hard dri­ves, the capac­i­ty of which can reach 2 TB. It does not mat­ter at all what for­mat they are in — FAT32 or NTFS.

This music cen­ter eas­i­ly con­nects to any phones via Blue­tooth, there is a spe­cial appli­ca­tion for smart­phones Music Flow Blue­tooth, with which you can eas­i­ly con­trol all the main func­tions of the unit. The cen­ter works with­out any prob­lems with high-def­i­n­i­tion audio files in .flac for­mat. A remote con­trol is pro­vid­ed, which has small over­all dimen­sions and at the same time has excel­lent ergonom­ics. The acoustics are quite loud, the entire fre­quen­cy range is heard well. Radio eas­i­ly finds all chan­nels, and the broad­cast can be record­ed on exter­nal media.

Advantages:

• Spa­cious and rich sound;
• Con­ve­nient con­trol pan­el;
• Attrac­tive appear­ance;
• Excel­lent build qual­i­ty.

Flaws:

• Reg­u­lar­ly have to be wiped from dust accu­mu­lat­ing on glossy sur­faces.

8. Pioneer X‑HM76‑B

It has a rather strict, albeit con­cise appear­ance. Togeth­er with the cen­tral unit, a pair of two-way speak­ers made in a clas­sic style is sup­plied here, in addi­tion, there is a receiv­er that plays CDs. On the front side, you can find a fair­ly large LCD full-col­or dis­play, the diag­o­nal of which is 3.5 inch­es. Almost all con­trols are locat­ed on the top of the case, only the rotary vol­ume con­trol is locat­ed in front. The music cen­ter comes with a full-size remote con­trol. As with some of the prod­ucts includ­ed in our review, an appli­ca­tion has been devel­oped specif­i­cal­ly for this mod­el that allows you to fine-tune prod­ucts. The device has a class B ampli­fi­er, which is capa­ble of deliv­er­ing pow­er of the order of 50 watts.

Each of the speak­ers includ­ed with the prod­uct has a soft dome tweet­er with a diam­e­ter of 25 mm, as well as a full-range woofer. The kit comes with every­thing you need to get a sta­ble radio sig­nal. In par­tic­u­lar, the music cen­ter is equipped with two anten­nas for oper­a­tion in the AM or FM band. In addi­tion, there is a mono out­put, and a fair­ly bright clock equipped with an alarm func­tion and a one-time timer is also pro­vid­ed. If you update the firmware of the mod­el, you can get com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with the lat­est stan­dard from this man­u­fac­tur­er, with which you can orga­nize a mul­ti-room radio.

Advantages:

• Very wide func­tion­al­i­ty;
• Inter­est­ing appear­ance;
• The pres­ence of a liq­uid crys­tal dis­play of a rather large size;
• Con­ve­nient and ful­ly mul­ti­lin­gual mobile appli­ca­tion.

Flaws:

• Some­times there is a lack of low fre­quen­cies.

7. Yamaha PianoCraft MCR-N670 Black

One of the most mod­ern designs that allows you to work not only with phys­i­cal music media such as disks, flash dri­ves, but also with stream­ing audio stored in cloud stor­age. In addi­tion, it is pos­si­ble to lis­ten to Inter­net radio. The con­ver­sion of the received sig­nal is based on a spe­cial SABER 32 chip, which has a high speed of oper­a­tion, so the out­put delay is min­i­mal here — this has a pos­i­tive effect on the sound qual­i­ty. This proces­sor pro­vides con­ver­sion para­me­ters at the lev­el of 5.6 MHz. This music cen­ter is designed to func­tion ful­ly offline. It comes with every­thing you need to play a vari­ety of music.

There is a CD play­er, the speak­er sys­tem is equipped with a fair­ly pow­er­ful ampli­fi­er. If nec­es­sary, you can con­nect addi­tion­al speak­ers, although, as it seems to us, in the domes­tic envi­ron­ment, two speak­ers, the pow­er of each of which is 70 watts, will be quite enough. All cables through which the con­nec­tion is made are sup­plied in the kit. It should be not­ed that on the body of the cen­tral ele­ment there is a con­nec­tor for con­nect­ing an Eth­er­net cable, thanks to which the con­nec­tion to the Inter­net will be more sta­ble. In gen­er­al, the music cen­ter itself is dec­o­rat­ed in a tra­di­tion­al way, all sides are rec­tan­gu­lar, even. The mod­el is avail­able in black or sil­ver.

Advantages:

• Excel­lent clear sound;
• Strict and styl­ish appear­ance;
• There is every­thing you need to con­nect to the Inter­net;
• Pret­ty func­tion­al prod­uct.

Flaws:

• Very cost­ly.

6Sony SHAKE-X30D

The acoustic sys­tem is char­ac­ter­ized, first of all, by the excel­lent pow­er of the Sound Pres­sure Horn bass line. In many ways, due to the orig­i­nal design, sig­nif­i­cant acoustic pres­sure will be inject­ed. This allows you to get more pow­er with min­i­mal ener­gy con­sump­tion — to achieve a sim­i­lar effect on oth­er devices sim­ply will not work. The soft­ware is based on the orig­i­nal LDAC codec, which pro­vides high qual­i­ty play­back of music trans­mit­ted via a wire­less Blue­tooth or Wi-Fi chan­nel. It takes about three times more data, respec­tive­ly, the sound goes to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent lev­el. The speak­ers have LED light­ing that will turn on to the beat of the music. With its help, you can turn even an ordi­nary evening into a real dis­co, cre­ate a club atmos­phere.

The orig­i­nal solu­tion was the pres­ence of an input for an elec­tric gui­tar, and the sound will be quite deep and strong. There are jacks for con­nect­ing two micro­phones at once. This will allow you to arrange a real con­cert on request, espe­cial­ly since you have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sing a duet. The music cen­ter has pro­fes­sion­al DJ effects, with which you can get the real spir­it of a night­club.

Advantages:

• Excel­lent sound, no dis­tor­tion was noticed;
• Orig­i­nal back­light based on LEDs;
• Excel­lent build qual­i­ty;
• The pres­ence of a num­ber of addi­tion­al fea­tures.

Flaws:

• The diag­o­nal of the dis­play is not too large — infor­ma­tion is vis­i­ble only up close.

5. Panasonic SC-MAX770

A full-for­mat music cen­ter that includes a con­trol unit and two acoustic sys­tems, each of which has a mass of 40 kg, and the total weight of the prod­uct reach­es almost 100 kg. Each speak­er has 4 speak­ers: a 38 cm super­woofer is designed to work with low fre­quen­cies, two more speak­ers with a diam­e­ter of 20 and 10 cm are respon­si­ble for repro­duc­ing the mid­dle range, high fre­quen­cies are played by a 6 cm speak­er, addi­tion­al­ly equipped with a bul­let-shaped dif­fuser. The speak­er cab­i­net is made of high-qual­i­ty chip­board, so that the return dur­ing low-fre­quen­cy play­back is even high­er, the man­u­fac­tur­er installed two more phase invert­ers here.

The sound out­put pow­er here is very high — 3300 watts. The sound ampli­fi­er is very effi­cient, dig­i­tal, and is divid­ed into sev­er­al cir­cuits, each of which is respon­si­ble for its own fre­quen­cy range. In this regard, the main unit is con­nect­ed to the acoustics using spe­cial con­nec­tors — no spring or screw type clamps are pro­vid­ed in this prod­uct. The con­trol unit has a dri­ve for work­ing with music discs, sev­er­al USB con­nec­tors, and 2 GB of inter­nal mem­o­ry is also pro­vid­ed. Regard­less of the for­mat of the music files on the disk, the cen­ter can rewrite them to a USB flash dri­ve or to its mem­o­ry in .mp3 for­mat.

Advantages:

• Very easy to man­age;
• Huge selec­tion of sound set­tings;
• Inter­est­ing appear­ance;
• Good work­man­ship;
• High pow­er.

Flaws:

• Heavy and bulky con­struc­tion.

4. Yamaha ISX-80 Black

It is char­ac­ter­ized by a fair­ly com­pact over­all dimen­sions, so it is quite suit­able even for a small room. The cen­tral mod­ule oper­ates on the basis of the Blue­tooth chan­nel, with the help of which a local net­work is formed, which includes all the details of the audio com­plex that can sup­port the Mus­ic­CAST sys­tem. In addi­tion to the Blue­tooth mod­ule, there is also a Wi-Fi unit that allows you to direct­ly access stream­ing audio ser­vices. The max­i­mum dis­tance from which the unit can receive and process the received sig­nal is 10 meters. As in most music cen­ters includ­ed in our review, this device has a radio receiv­er, built-in acoustics, rep­re­sent­ed by speak­ers with a diam­e­ter of 8 cm for low fre­quen­cies and 3 cm for high fre­quen­cies.

The pow­er is not very high — in total, all the speak­ers at max­i­mum vol­ume are capa­ble of deliv­er­ing about 20 watts. This allows you to save a decent amount of ener­gy and at the same time pro­vide your­self with a decent lev­el of sound. The dimen­sions of the device, as already men­tioned, are not too large — they are 302x302x65 mm with a mass of 3.5 kg. Prod­ucts are avail­able in sev­er­al col­ors — black, pur­ple or white.

Advantages:

• Small over­all dimen­sions;
• Attrac­tive appear­ance;
• Pret­ty decent vol­ume lev­el;
• Able to organ­i­cal­ly fit into any inte­ri­or space;
• There is every­thing you need to ensure com­fort­able sound;
• You can for­get about the wires under your feet.

Flaws:

• Not too suit­able for large rooms;
• The remote con­trol sup­plied with the device is not very con­ve­nient to use.

3. Pioneer P2‑K

In third place in our rank­ing of the best Hi-Fi music cen­ters is a com­pact and very orig­i­nal mod­el, which includes two speak­er sys­tems and two inde­pen­dent units: a sound source and a receiv­er. An opti­cal disc play­er is not pro­vid­ed here; instead, a file net­work play­er is installed, which is capa­ble of work­ing with stream­ing sound, includ­ing high-res­o­lu­tion. It is worth not­ing a very beau­ti­ful appear­ance of the prod­uct. In par­tic­u­lar, its front pan­els are made of spe­cial high qual­i­ty anodized alu­minum. They look very sol­id. A third of the front pan­el is occu­pied by a 3.5‑inch LCD. It will dis­play infor­ma­tion about the video being played, the cov­er of the album from which it was tak­en, and infor­ma­tion about the artist.

On the dis­play, you can find a list of files and fold­ers, but it is quite short, so nav­i­ga­tion is not very con­ve­nient — for this it is eas­i­er to use a smart­phone or tablet with a spe­cial appli­ca­tion installed. There are also sev­er­al con­trol but­tons and a USB con­nec­tor. All oth­er sock­ets can be found on the back of the device. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, this music cen­ter is equipped with sev­er­al wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion units — Wi-Fi, Blue­tooth, RCA. The data trans­fer rate is very high here, so even very heavy files will be played with­out any delays. The total pow­er of the speak­er sys­tem is 48 W — quite enough for home con­di­tions. The remote can con­trol both the receiv­er and the play­er itself. The sound is detailed, the entire fre­quen­cy range is heard very clear­ly.

Advantages:

• Quite decent sound qual­i­ty;
• Small over­all dimen­sions;
• Orig­i­nal tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion;
• Looks nice.

Flaws:

• It is quite dif­fi­cult to under­stand the func­tion­al­i­ty of the con­trol pan­el.

2. Yamaha MCR-N570 black

This music cen­ter is capa­ble of sup­port­ing net­work music ser­vices, in addi­tion, it is equipped with an opti­cal disc dri­ve. How­ev­er, it has a huge num­ber of new fea­tures — stream­ing audio stored in the DNLA cloud stor­age, the abil­i­ty to play Inter­net radio sta­tions, work with music locat­ed on exter­nal media, and there is also an Air­Play con­nec­tion. There is only one cen­tral con­trol unit here — an opti­cal dri­ve is built into it, and a pow­er ampli­fi­er is also locat­ed here. The shelf-type speak­er sys­tem has small over­all dimen­sions, which allows it to be installed in com­pact rooms, pro­vid­ing excel­lent sound qual­i­ty there. The music cen­ter is a com­plete­ly self-con­tained Hi-Fi sys­tem. All cables required to con­nect the ele­ments are includ­ed in the kit.

The sound is very decent — the sys­tem can work with both instru­men­tal and pop­u­lar music, songs of var­i­ous gen­res. Despite the fact that the native wires do not look very reli­able, they trans­mit the sig­nal with high qual­i­ty, noth­ing is lost. The only thing that users regret is a bit weak bass line.

Advantages:

• Decent sound qual­i­ty, and you can adjust the high and low fre­quen­cies;
• There are all mod­ern mod­ules for wire­less con­nec­tion with var­i­ous devices;
• Excel­lent prod­uct build qual­i­ty.

Flaws:

• The fil­ter of Inter­net radio sta­tions is made only by their names, so find­ing the right one can be a lit­tle prob­lem­at­ic;
• High price.

1. Pioneer X‑EM16‑B

One of the most com­pact sys­tems among all the mod­els includ­ed in our review of the best Hi-Fi music cen­ters — its dimen­sions are 180x121x221 mm with a total mass of speak­ers and the main unit of about 3.5 kg. The device is equipped with two iden­ti­cal columns, which are made of lam­i­nat­ed chip­board pan­els, coat­ed with spe­cial com­pounds that reli­ably pro­tect the front sur­face from the occur­rence of var­i­ous kinds of defects such as chips or scratch­es. Made in strict black col­or, so it will fit well into almost any inte­ri­or. Unlike speak­ers, the cen­tral unit has a met­al case. All ele­ments have a mat­te fin­ish that will reli­ably pro­tect against accu­mu­lat­ed dust and pre­vent fin­ger­prints. The con­trol pan­el is small, but quite func­tion­al.

Under­stand­ing the con­nec­tion and con­trol of the sys­tem is quite easy — no latch­es are pro­vid­ed here, only clas­sic plugs and sock­ets, and each sock­et is signed. You can’t attach speak­ers to the wall. The total out­put pow­er of the speak­er sys­tem is 10 W — quite enough for a room that is not too large. You can strength­en the bass line (by default it is quite weak) using the cor­re­spond­ing but­ton on the remote con­trol. The mod­el works with media such as opti­cal discs or flash dri­ves, it can work with .mp3, .cd and some oth­er for­mats. On the front pan­el there is a small LCD dis­play, which dis­plays infor­ma­tion regard­ing the track or radio sta­tion. Next to it, you can find a chrome han­dle for adjust­ing the vol­ume.

Advantages:

• Very high build qual­i­ty;
• Pleas­ant and quite pow­er­ful sound for rooms;
• Con­ve­nient con­trol pan­el;
• There is a full set of nec­es­sary func­tions.

Flaws:

• Works with a lim­it­ed num­ber of play­back for­mats.

In conclusion, a useful video

Our rat­ing of the best Hi-Fi music cen­ters has come to an end. Final­ly, I would like to express the hope that you were able to choose the best prod­ucts for your­self that will delight lis­ten­ers with high-qual­i­ty sound for many years. If you still have some ques­tions, then feel free to ask them in the com­ments to this arti­cle. We will prompt­ly respond to your com­ments and pro­vide all the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion.