"Wireless" surround speakers still need a power outlet at every speaker location. Once that's clear, the decision stops being "cables vs. no cables" and becomes "run speaker wire vs. find or add a power outlet" — a much more useful question to actually answer.
"Wireless" surround speakers still need a power outlet at every speaker. Only the audio signal is wireless. So the real choice is running speaker wire versus having, or adding, an outlet near each surround.
Good modern wireless systems keep latency too low to notice. Wired is cheaper and more reliable; wireless wins when running wire isn't practical.
Every "wireless" surround speaker on the market still needs an AC power connection at the speaker itself — wireless only refers to the audio signal traveling from your receiver to the speaker, not to the speaker's power supply. Unless it's explicitly battery-powered (rare, and rarely practical for a permanent installation), a wireless rear speaker sitting behind your couch still needs an outlet within reach of its power cord.
That reframes the whole decision. You're never actually choosing between "cables" and "no cables" — you're choosing between running a speaker wire from your receiver to the back of the room, or making sure a power outlet already exists (or adding one) wherever you want the speaker to sit.
A transmitter connects to your receiver — typically at the speaker-level outputs or a digital output — and sends the surround channels over a proprietary RF link to a receiver module at each speaker. That receiver module needs its own power connection, and it either has a small amplifier built in (for a passive speaker) or simply hands the signal to a speaker with its own built-in amplification. Either way, the "wireless" part of the chain is short: receiver to speaker location, not receiver to speaker and speaker to power.
For a lot of rooms, this makes the decision easy in one direction or the other once you actually look at your walls. If there's already an outlet near where a rear surround needs to go — a common situation, since most rooms have outlets spaced along every wall — wireless genuinely saves you a wire run with no real downside. If the ideal surround location is nowhere near an outlet, you're back to running a wire anyway, just for power instead of audio, and at that point plain speaker wire (which our guide to running wire through walls covers in full) is usually the simpler job.
It's also worth remembering that a wired speaker needs speaker wire run from the receiver, while a wireless one needs a power cord run to the nearest outlet — both are cables, just serving a different leg of the connection.
You're not choosing between wires and no wires. You're choosing which wire — speaker cable from the receiver, or a power cord to the nearest outlet.
With a quality proprietary wireless system, no. The best modern wireless speaker links keep latency under 10 to 20 milliseconds, well below the point where a listener would perceive the surrounds as out of sync with the front stage. Manufacturers manage this with buffering, error correction, and frequency-hopping to dodge interference automatically.
Where reliability actually suffers is with cheaper generic kits, or in homes with heavy 2.4GHz traffic from Wi-Fi routers, baby monitors, and other wireless devices competing for the same spectrum — an occasional dropout or audible stutter is the realistic failure mode, not a constant problem. A wired connection simply doesn't have this failure mode at all, which is worth weighing if you've had bad experiences with wireless gear elsewhere in your home.
This is also the "middle ground" option we cover in our soundbar vs. full surround system guide — adding wireless rear speakers to a soundbar system without committing to a full receiver-and-wire build.