What are landscape speakers?
Landscape speakers are purpose-built outdoor loudspeakers designed to be installed permanently in your garden. Unlike portable Bluetooth speakers, they're wired back to an amplifier or AV rack inside your home, which means you get full Hi-Fi sound quality with none of the battery anxiety, range limitations or weathering that portable speakers suffer from.
The best landscape speakers are engineered to disappear into their surroundings. Some mount flush into garden walls or structures, others sit in borders and are designed to look like rocks or planters, and some fire upward through gravel or bark from a low stake position. The idea is that your garden sounds great without anything in it looking obviously like an audio product.
Origin Acoustics: what sets them apart?
We work with Origin Acoustics for our garden audio installations. They're a California-based manufacturer with a strong reputation in the custom installation industry — their landscape range is built specifically for permanent outdoor use, with drivers and cabinet materials chosen for long-term resilience against UV, moisture and temperature swings.
What's particularly impressive is how natural their speakers sound. A lot of outdoor audio products optimise purely for volume and weatherproofing, which typically comes at the cost of audio quality. Origin Acoustics have managed to achieve both — the Landscape Series genuinely sounds like a proper Hi-Fi system, not background garden music.
We have Origin Acoustics speakers installed in our Maidenhead showroom garden, so if you're curious about how they actually sound in a real outdoor setting, you're welcome to come and hear them for yourself.
How are they installed?
A landscape audio installation is more involved than people often expect — but the complexity is all hidden. The general process looks like this:
- Survey and design. We visit your garden and work out the best speaker positions for even coverage, taking into account the size of the space, the areas where you actually spend time, and what the garden looks like. Good positioning makes a huge difference to sound quality.
- Cable runs. Speaker cable needs to be routed from each speaker position back to a central location — usually an AV rack or plant room inside the house. This typically goes underground in conduit, entering the building through a wall or under a door threshold. If your garden is already landscaped, this can usually be done with minimal disruption; if you're mid-renovation, it's worth doing the cable runs early.
- Amplification and source. The speakers are passive — they need an amplifier to drive them. Depending on your setup, this might be a dedicated outdoor zone amplifier, a multi-room audio system like Sonos, or integration into a full smart home platform like Savant or KNX. We specify the right equipment for your situation rather than defaulting to one-size-fits-all.
- Control. You can play music via your phone, a wall-mounted keypad, a tablet, or as part of a wider smart home scene (for example, a "garden party" scene that sets the outdoor lighting and starts a playlist simultaneously).
Good to know: landscape speaker cable needs to be rated for direct burial or run in conduit underground. Standard speaker cable will corrode and fail within a couple of years in damp soil. We always specify the right cable for the environment — it's one of those details that makes the difference between a system that lasts 20 years and one that causes problems.
What about weatherproofing?
Weatherproofing is rated using IP (Ingress Protection) codes — a two-digit number where the first digit refers to dust protection and the second to water. For outdoor audio in the UK, you typically want IP55 as a minimum (dust-protected, resistant to low-pressure water jets from any direction), with IP66 or IP67 preferable for exposed positions or areas that receive direct rainfall.
Origin Acoustics landscape speakers are rated for permanent outdoor use and have been tested through hot and cold cycles, UV exposure and sustained moisture. In our experience, a well-specified landscape speaker properly installed should last 15–20 years without issue. The grilles, driver surrounds and cabinet materials are all chosen with longevity in mind.
It's worth noting that the amplifier and source equipment should not be outdoors — these live inside the house in a protected environment, which is partly why wired landscape systems outlast wireless outdoor speakers so significantly.
Can it integrate with my smart home?
Yes — and this is where things get genuinely useful. If you have, or are planning, a smart home system, your garden audio can be brought into the same control ecosystem. That might mean:
- Volume and source control from the same app you use to control your indoor AV
- Scenes — pressing one button to start garden lighting, open the gate and play music
- Scheduling — music that automatically stops at a set time in the evening
- Voice control via Amazon Alexa or Apple HomeKit, if your system supports it
For simpler setups without a full smart home, a Sonos amplifier gives you app-based multi-room control that's easy to use and sounds genuinely excellent. It's a popular choice for clients who want flexibility without the cost of a full control system.
What does it cost?
Garden audio is one of the more accessible areas of AV installation. A basic system — two or four landscape speakers covering a terrace, run back to a Sonos amplifier with underground cabling — typically starts from around £2,500 installed. Larger gardens, higher-specification speakers, or integration into a smart home system will increase that, but the core technology is well within reach for most renovation budgets.
The honest answer is that cost depends significantly on what's already in place — if you're mid-build and the groundworks are open, cable runs are inexpensive. If the garden is fully landscaped and mature, there's more labour involved in routing cables discreetly. We'll always give you a clear, fixed-price proposal before any work starts.
Thinking about adding garden audio to a renovation or new build? The best time to run speaker cables is when groundworks, landscaping or a new terrace are being laid. It adds almost nothing to the cost at that stage compared to doing it retrospectively. Worth flagging to your builder early.
Hear it for yourself
We appreciate that outdoor audio is difficult to evaluate without actually hearing it. That's why we've installed an Origin Acoustics demonstration system in the garden at our Maidenhead showroom. If you're in the area — or happy to make the trip — we'd encourage you to come and listen. Bring your own playlist, we'll make the tea.
Interested in Garden Audio?
Talk to our team about your outdoor space. Whether you're mid-renovation or starting from scratch, we'll give you honest advice and a clear plan.