The Best High End Outdoor Speakers for Viewing Pleasure

How to Improve Your Viewing Pleasure with Outdoor Speakers

Ok, so you’re all set up with your TV outside, using The TV Shield. You could stop there and everything is good: your backyard is your new favorite place to be. This works great for those times that you’re kicking back on the deck, beer in hand, on your own, watching the game. Or maybe you're in the hot tub, enjoying a film with a loved one.

However, unless you have ears to rival the local bat population, you might soon discover that you’re maxing out the volume. Why’s that?

Watching TV Indoors vs. Watching TV Outdoors

When you watch TV indoors, even without a fancy surround sound audio system, you’re kind of in an enclosed box which works great for the acoustics. You’ve got four walls shutting out, or muffling, background noise. Those same four walls bounce the sound into the center and everyone can hear.

Take that same TV outside and at best you’ve got one wall of the house doing the same job. Add in birdsong, wind rustling the leaves, the chatter of neighbors and kids playing, a car driving past, and your regular audio has suddenly got a far bigger challenge on its hands. Try to use that same struggling system for TV viewing with a crowd (the big game perhaps or a kids ‘drive-in’ party), or even to stream your tunes for a party, and you’ve got a really big problem.

The Sound Story Solution

However, it’s not insurmountable, and it doesn’t involve driving your neighbors mad with a heavy hand on the volume control. You simply need to get some outdoor speakers organized.

Firstly, a word of caution: walk in to any electronics store and you’re faced with a rack of inexpensive portable Bluetooth audio gear. However, they are going to prove problematic outside for a host of reasons – not least remembering to take them in constantly – and the output isn’t so great in the big outdoors.

Instead, you would do better to hook up specific outdoor speakers, such as these, with an amp, such as this one to your outdoor TV. These are weather-proof speakers which can be mounted directly onto your TV Shield, or placed appropriately to give the best outdoor audio, which can be controlled in the same way you would with your indoor TV.

Where to Put Outdoor Speakers

As we say, you can mount them to the TV or to the wall adjacent. However, you might find you need to do a little detective work to determine the best placement of the speakers in your backyard. You’ll need to strike the balance between placing them so the sound travels well (remembering you’ve got a bigger space than indoors), but not so well that you have your neighbor hissing when they can hear your team’s match over their own.

In our experience, this can be achieved most easily if you have the TV mounted on the house wall of a patio area. The speakers can be placed behind on the uprights of the awning. This projects the sound within the viewing area rather than towards your neighbors, and has the added benefit of creating a surround sound effect. Alternatively, you can place them in the eaves, or even have them blending in at ground level if you choose these rock speakers.

If your yard is particularly large, or you’re hosting an event whereby you need a large number of people to hear the TV, then you’ll do best to combine various options creating a circle effect around the guest area. Taking the circle approach to your outdoor speakers also enables you to demark different spaces within the outdoor area - meaning people can sit and chat without interrupting the TV viewing, or the TV viewing interrupting them.

Outdoor Speakers

You only need to leave your non-waterproof portable speakers outside once to learn the hard way that that was an expensive choice. Instead, get some affordable outdoor speakers and improve your viewing pleasure.