One of the scariest considerations for new vinyl listeners is that the best turntables are only the first of many expensive purchases you’re probably going to have to make. Unless you buy a deck with a built-in speaker, you’re going to have to shell out for a pretty costly and space-hogging hi-fi set-up, involving amps and speakers, to hear your tunes.
These are two problems which audio company Victrola has set its sights on fixing, with a new speaker, released at CES 2026. This is the Victrola Soundstage, a soundbase which is due to go on sale in summer 2026 for $349.99 (roughly £260, AU$500, regional availability TBC).
A soundbase is a speaker which you can place under your record player, and they’re generally used by people who don’t feel the need to buy a multi-piece hi-fi setup just to hear their vinyl, whether it’s for space-saving, financial or technical reasons. Soundbases also remove the need to pick up an amplifier.
On the Victrola up high
If you’re buying for that first reason, then pick up a tape measure. The Soundstage measures 42.95 x 38.37 x 8.95cm, and as the image at the top of the article shows, it’s roughly the same size as a turntable. Perfect for elevating your vinyl player – or, ahem, putting the Victrola up hiiiigh (sorry).
As you can imagine, offering a single speaker instead of a complex set-up can potentially impact the audio quality, but Victrola has two technologies which go some way to offsetting this.
One of these is what it calls the Symmetric Drive Woofer, a downward-firing dual-diaphragm woofer which it says delivers well-tuned and hefty bass while avoiding any vibrations. As you can imagine, shaky bass on a turntable will have you scratching tracks faster than a DJ.
The other tech Victrola has added is a Balanced Mode Radiator, which is designed to disperse music evenly around a wide area while retaining the original sound profile of your music. This will hopefully counteract the lack of stereo speaker spacing and the breadth of sound it creates, something virtually impossible to achieve when you’ve only got one speaker.
The Soundstage was designed specifically to work alongside the Victrola Wave and Victrola Automatic, but the company says that it’ll be compatible with plenty of other turntables too. It’ll connect via Bluetooth, 3.5mm AUX, RCA or USB-C and, in a first for a soundbase, Auracast – and as that list suggests you’ll also be able to use the Soundstage with other inputs as a wireless speaker. A soundbase is for life, not just for vinyl.
Alongside announcing the Soundstage, Victrola also revealed a new color model for the Wave record player and Tempo bookshelf speakers. You can now get them in a walnut hue, which the Soundstage also comes in if you don’t want its black option.
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