The Best Speakers for a Turntable

A turntable needs three things between it and your ears: a phono stage, an amplifier, and speakers. You can buy those as three boxes, two, or — in exactly one case on this page — one.

That is the actual decision here, and it is worth more thought than the speakers themselves.

The three routes, and what each costs

One box: powered speakers with a phono stage inside. The Kanto YU6 publishes an “RCA with phono switch” input and a built-in phono preamp — a turntable plugs straight in, with nothing between. Klipsch The Fives II has one too. Nothing else on this page does, and this is the whole reason the YU6 wins.

Two boxes: powered speakers plus a phono stage. The Edifier and Audioengine pairs contain amplifiers but no phono stage. Audioengine is admirably blunt about it: “All turntables require a phono preamp stage before connecting to Audioengine speakers.” If your turntable has a built-in stage — most of the decks in our beginner roundup do — then this is still effectively one purchase.

Three boxes: passive speakers, an amplifier, a phono stage. More expensive and more to go wrong, and the only route where every component can be upgraded independently. The ELAC B6.2 is here to represent it.

Why powered speakers are not simply better

They are cheaper and simpler for exactly one reason: the amplifier is fixed. You cannot upgrade it, you cannot replace it if it fails, and when you outgrow the speakers you replace the amplifier too whether it deserved it or not.

If you already own an amplifier, powered speakers mean buying a second one and leaving the first switched off. That is not a saving.

The Klipsch honesty problem

Klipsch publishes no amplifier wattage at allfor The Fives II. Not a low number — no number. Their spec sheet substitutes “Max Output: 103 dB (1 m, stereo pair)” where the power figure would be.

That is worth pausing on. Every other powered speaker here publishes its output: 100 W total RMS for the Kanto YU6, 50 W RMS per channel for the Audioengine A5+ (measured, they note, per 16 C.F.R. § 432.3), 21 W + 21 W for the Edifiers. The Fives II is the most expensive product on this page by a distance and it is the only one where you cannot compare that spec to anything, because it does not exist. We are not saying the amplifier is weak. We are saying you have been given no way to find out, and at this price that is a fair thing to notice.

Where the sensitivity arithmetic stops applying

On our passive speaker page we spend a lot of time converting sensitivity figures to a true 1 W basis. None of that applies here, and it is worth saying why rather than leaving a suspicious gap in the spec tables.

Sensitivity and impedance are amplifier-matching specs. On a powered speaker the amplifier is already inside and already matched by the designer, so those numbers have no buyer-facing meaning — which is why Kanto, Audioengine and Edifier all decline to publish them. That is correct behaviour, not an omission.

One caution: Edifier doespublish an “input sensitivity” in millivolts. That is a line-level input specification and has nothing whatever to do with loudspeaker sensitivity in dB. Do not compare it to the 87 dB on an ELAC spec sheet; they are unrelated quantities that share a word.

What we would actually do

If you are starting from nothing and want it finished: the Kanto YU6, plus any deck from our under-$500 roundup. Its built-in phono stage makes the deck’s own stage redundant, which means you can buy the Fluance RT82 — which ships without one and puts the saving into an Ortofon cartridge instead.

If you already own an amplifier: ignore this entire page and read the passive roundup instead.