Between a high-performance audiophile system and the casual plop-it-down-and-listen setup, there seems to be a pretty wide gap.
Which makes me wonder why there isn't something in the middle.
Imagine a single wireless all-in-one floor-standing speaker. You unbox it, set it up along a living room wall, connect to your WiFi, and voila! A great, full-range musical performance fills your room.
Instead, we seem saddled by Home Pods and glorified boom boxes that pretend to reproduce music as it was intended to be played.
Don't get me wrong. I love a great two-channel audio system as much as the next. It just seems to me there's a huge chasm between what we can plunk down and play versus setting up a many-box rig with wires and speakers.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Maybe someday someone will fill that gap.