Best surround sound systems in 2025 for all budgets

The best surround sound systems will completely level up your home audio experience, whether that’s watching movies or listening to your favourite tunes. Surround sound is serious about providing the most epic quality sound you can get, that other speakers just can’t rival.

But where to start? There are so many things to consider when shopping for the best surround sound systems, many of which come with complex features and accessories that can be difficult to navigate if you don’t know what you’re looking for. It's not just about sounding good either.

We've kept things simple in this guide, refining things down to three top options that cover most bases without getting tied up in a million details. If you want a more in-depth system, you can also check out our guide to the best AV receivers, so that you’ve got everything you need to install epic sound in your home.

If this all sounds a bit too techy though, or you simply don’t have the space for a large Hi-Fi system, then you may prefer to look at our list of the best soundbars that offer great quality sound in a compact product. Perhaps it’s time to upgrade your entire entertainment system, in which case you may also want to look at the best TVs and best 4K Blu-ray players, to complete your set-up.

The best surround sound systems in 2025

How to buy the best surround sound system for you

Most surround sound systems on the market come in the form of speaker packages, which means you have all the speakers you need to get your surround sound system up and running – as long as you remember to add an AV receiver and cabling (if needed).

But if you’re thinking of building your own 5.1-channel setup, you’ll need left, right and centre speakers at the front, two speakers at the rear and a subwoofer. You can always add side and overhead speakers later, but a basic multi-channel system is a good place to start.

If you have a favourite pair of stereo speakers, and simply want to expand your system to include centre and rear channels, try and use devices of the same manufacturer the reason for this is that speakers in the same range will share similar designs, which in turn should mean they should have the same sound profile. This results in better tonal balance, allowing audio effects to be steered from speaker to speaker without sounding noticeably different.

Some of the systems you'll find are based around floor-standing speakers, while others use smaller satellite speakers for all five channels. Regardless of what you’re using, when running any room correction make sure you set all the speakers to ’small’. This allows the dedicated subwoofer to handle the lower frequencies, and you can choose the appropriate crossover for each speaker. This is the point where the AV receiver’s processing transfers the lower frequencies from the speakers to the subwoofer, ensuring a smoother bass response.

Speaking of subwoofers, you don’t necessarily need to use one from the same manufacturer as your speakers because a sub only handles the lower frequencies below 150 Hz. Since these frequencies aren’t directional, you don’t have to worry about tonal balance and can thus consider manufacturers that specialise in subwoofers, such as SVS and REL. When positioning the sub you may be limited by the room layout but, in general, one of the front corners should work best.

Dedicated surround speakers come in a variety of flavours: monopole, bipole, or tripole. This may sound confusing, but in reality these different types of surround speaker are actually fairly simple. A monopole is basically a regular speaker with a direct-firing driver – all the surround speakers in this guide use a monopole design. A bipole speaker uses forward and rear firing drivers to create a more diffuse surround sound field, while a tripole combines forward, rear and direct firing drivers to create both diffusion and precision for object-based audio.

A number of the systems in this guide support object-based audio formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, and an ideal Dolby Atmos system will include upward-firing drivers, because a key part of these formats is adding height. If you’re thinking of building an immersive audio surround system you can either use overhead speakers or, if you don’t fancy cutting holes in your ceiling, upward-firing add-on modules. Once again, try to match these modules with the other speakers in your system, and since this type of design bounces sounds off the ceiling, the lower, flatter and more acoustically reflective it is, the better the results.