One of the scariest considerations for new vinyl listeners is that the best turntables are just the first of many expensive purchases you’ll likely need to make. Unless you buy a turntable with a built-in speaker, you’ll have to shell out for a fairly expensive and bulky hi-fi setup, involving amps and speakers, to hear your music.
These are two problems that audio company Victrola aims to solve, with a new speaker, released at CES 2026. It’s the Victrola Soundstage, a sound base that should go on sale in summer 2026 for $349.99 (around £260, AU$500, regional availability TBC).
On the Victrola high up
If you’re buying for this first reason, get a tape measure. The Soundstage measures 42.95 x 38.37 x 8.95 cm and, as shown in the image at the top of the article, it is about the same size as a vinyl turntable. Perfect for raising your vinyl player – or, uh, putting the Victrola up high (sorry).
As you might imagine, offering a single speaker instead of a complex setup can potentially impact audio quality, but Victrola has two technologies that go some way to offsetting this.
One of them is what it calls the Symmetric Drive Woofer, a dual-diaphragm, downward-firing woofer that it says delivers well-tuned, powerful bass while avoiding any vibration. As you can imagine, shaky bass on a turntable will have you scratching tracks faster than a DJ.
The other technology added by Victrola is a balanced mode radiator, designed to disperse music evenly over a wide area while maintaining the original sound profile of your music. We hope this will make up for the lack of stereo speaker spacing and the breadth of sound it creates, which is virtually impossible to achieve when you only have one speaker.
The Soundstage was designed specifically to work alongside the Victrola Wave and Victrola Automatic, but the company says it will be compatible with many other turntables as well. It’ll connect via Bluetooth, 3.5mm AUX, RCA or USB-C and, in a first for a sound base, Auracast – and as this listing suggests, you’ll also be able to use the Soundstage with other inputs as a wireless speaker. A sound base is for life, not just for vinyl.
Alongside the Soundstage announcement, Victrola also revealed a new color scheme for the Wave turntable and Tempo bookshelf speakers. You can now get them in a walnut shade, which the Soundstage also comes in if you don’t want its black option.
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