Can a one-box speaker really do it all? In recent years, a few brands have proved that, actually, they can - with products like the Naim Mu-so and Sonus Faber Omnia among them.
Now, Audio Pro fancies dipping its toe into this market with the Audio Pro C20 – its biggest, most powerful and most impressively specced speaker to date. It wants to do it all, across a range of wired and wireless inputs, to give you the ultimate flexibility in listening for under £500.
Lofty ambitions then, but does the C20 meet them?
Price
The Audio Pro C20 is the company’s largest and most expensive one-box wireless speaker, and is the flagship speaker of its popular C-Series. It costs £450 / $550 / €550 / AU$899, which isn’t exactly cheap – but then neither are the products that offer a similar list of features.
Consider the likes of the Naim Mu-so 2, which was released in 2019 and now retails for around £899, or the Sonus Faber Omnia, which would set you back a whopping £1599. These two speakers offer similar functionality, but will cost you significantly more for the pleasure.
There will be performance differences here, of course, but for a one-box system that can help you to play just about any other kit you have, it’s a pretty competitive little package.
Design
The Audio Pro C20 looks a lot like, well, pretty much every other Audio Pro wireless speaker that has come before it. It’s very simple and very Scandi – a simple rectangular box, with all clean lines and very little in the way of flash or flourish. Minimalist fans rejoice.
We have the ‘soft satin white’ finish in for review, but the wooden cabinet also comes in a choice of ‘stylish grey’ or ‘classic black’. Up top, there is a chrome control panel (silver on our white sample, but gold on the grey and a gunmetal colour on the black), and it comes with a magnetic removable fabric grille, so you can choose to hide the striking driver design now synonymous with the brand, should you so wish.
We like it on display, but having the option to hide it away – be that from smaller, pokey fingers, or just from an aesthetic perspective – is a nice option to have.
At 196 x 410 x 220mm and 6.2kg, this is a big, weighty speaker and so once set up, is very likely to stay put. There’s no battery power here like there is in its smaller C3 sibling, so there’s no leather handle for moving it around.
That makes sense, but we do miss having the handle a bit. It means you’ll have to bear hug the C20 into position – thankfully the bass port at the back gives you some good leverage for hoisting it out of the box.
As with all Audio Pro products, there’s no question here when it comes to build quality – it’s top notch. Everything feels solid, from the cabinet build and paint finish to the confident clickiness of the buttons on the control panel.
Features
As we’ve alluded to, this single-box speaker really does want to do it all when it comes to your music playback.
As far as physical connections are concerned, turn it around to its back panel and you’ll find a set of RCA inputs, a moving magnet phono stage for your turntable, an optical input for digital sources, an HDMI ARC for connecting it to your TV and a sub out for adding a subwoofer into the mix.
Power 190W
Bluetooth? Yes (5.0)
Wi-fi? Yes
Mains-powered or battery powered? Mains-powered
Battery life N/A
Features AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Audio Pro multi-room
Connections HDMI ARC, optical, RCA line in, MM phono stage, sub out
App? Yes
Dimensions (hwd) 19.6 x 41 x 22cm
Weight 6.2kg
Finishes x 3 (soft satin white, stylish grey, classic black)
For wireless playback, you also have AirPlay 2 and Google Cast for playback over wi-fi up to 24-bit/96kHz file resolution and Bluetooth 5.0 built in. There’s even Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect for direct control from within those apps, plus Audio Pro’s own multi-room offering too.
This allows you to stream the same music across all the Audio Pro speakers in your house, including music that’s playing back via an input, like a turntable or CD player.
You can set up this multi-room playback in Audio Pro’s simple-but-effective control app, where you can also team two C20s up in a stereo pair. It’s also here that you’ll get the C20 onto your wi-fi network – a straightforward process which the app will walk you through and only takes a minute or two.
You can also control music via the speaker’s top control panel. Here there are playback and volume controls, a Bluetooth pairing button, a power button and a source select – you can see which source is being used via a single LED light under the six options (wi-fi, TV, phono, line, opt and BT).
Finally, on the control panel are six presets. You can set these to a particular input or streaming service, or even a particular song or album – simply hold a preset button down for three seconds on the content you’d like to store, and you’re set. You can also do this within the app if you prefer.
Sound
The C20’s striking driver design that we mentioned earlier is represented here by a single 16.5cm woofer at its centre and two 25mm tweeters on either side. These are powered by one 130W and two 30W Class D amplifiers, for a total power output of 190W. For a speaker at this size and price, that’s not bad at all.
That power translates through to playback too, with the C20 serving up a big yet refined sound when we first take a listen using Tidal Connect.
And while its wide, open soundstage can fill our test room with ease, this isn’t a speaker that’s all about showing its muscle above all else. There might be power and bass weight by the bucketload here, but there’s focus and clarity too.
Playing Baddadan by Chase & Status, the C20 shows both its authority and dynamic capabilities from the off. While there is nothing tame about this big drum’n’bass track, it’s a song that does have light and shade – it builds in intensity, from the more stripped back intro to the busy, bass-heavy chorus, and the C20 doesn’t miss a beat.
It reaches deep to reproduce those synth-y bass notes, but keeps them packed with detail and texture too. There’s nothing boosted or artificial about the bass response here either, so it also sounds natural and rounded – never bloated or overpowering.
It does this alongside a well-integrated midrange that is never dragged down by any of the weight below it. It also avoids ever sounding separated or detached, creating a very cohesive and “together” sound, no matter how busy things get in a mix.
Strip things back to This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush and the C20 shows how it can handle something much more delicate too. The subtlety at play in the C20 helps it to relay every last drop of the emotional, haunting vocal just about as well as we’ve heard at this level.
The treble in some of Audio Pro’s more recent speakers had started to lean towards sounding overly bright, but we’re pleased to hear that the C20 wrestles back control here, serving up an open, airy response that never verges on harshness.
There’s plenty of bite where it’s needed too. The cymbals in System Of A Down’s Aerials can really grate on the wrong speaker, but the C20 delivers them with clarity and snap.
Playing the same tracks on the Sonos Era 300, and the C20 bests this five-star Award winner in just about every way.
Arguably, the Era 300 is looking to do things differently to the C20, with a focus on projection and creating a 360-degree soundscape. But the C20 has a better, deeper bass response – no doubt helped by its bigger cabinet – and there’s more detail and insight across the board.
The midrange is more forward on the Sonos too, which can give it a sense of more energy and enthusiasm, but when compared to the C20, it can sound a little detached from the overall presentation.
The Era 300 remains a superb speaker at this price, but for someone who isn’t focused on spatial sound, and who isn’t too concerned about the (admittedly excellent) Sonos ecosystem – the C20 is a far better way to spend £450, particularly if you want to stretch your system beyond wireless sources.
To that point, we switch away from our Tidal streaming to listen via the optical input. Arguably, everything stated about its performance above becomes all the more clear. The presentation tightens up a bit more, there’s a touch more fine detail up for grabs and dynamically it takes the ebb and flow of tracks up a notch too. There’s no change in character here – it sounds the same as it does wirelessly, just a little bit better.
HDMI works well too. Dialogue is focused and projects well towards the viewer, and there’s no lack of power and bass punch for movies either. The size of the C20 isn’t going to work for all TV set-ups though – you’ll really want it placed centrally underneath your TV for the best performance, so just make sure you have space for it if this is one of your intended use cases.
There is an end to the good news though, and that’s when it comes to the phono stage. We use it to play Michael Jackson’s Thriller album on our reference turntable and everything just sounds a bit flat and undynamic. It’ll work if you’re in a pinch, but you would be much better investing in the most budget of external phono stages to get the best performance here – the difference is night and day.
As something of a ‘nice-to-have’ on an otherwise very talented speaker, it’s not enough to dampen our overall enthusiasm for its performance – just don’t rely on its phono stage to make your records sound their best.
Verdict
The Audio Pro C20 is a fantastic wireless speaker that can do a lot of things, and do almost all of them very well indeed. The performance up for grabs here is so authoritative, and so detailed, it offers a taste of hi-fi in wireless speaker form. If you have the budget, space and system to make use of the C20’s many capabilities, we struggle to think of another wireless speaker that comes close.
SCORES
- Sound 5
- Features 5
- Build 5
MORE:
Read our review of the Sonos Era 300
Sonos Era 300 vs Audio Pro C20: which wireless speaker is right for you?
Want a cheaper option? Read our Audio Pro Addon C10 MkII review
