Audio Pro
Audio Pro Addon C5, Audio Pro Addon C10 & Audio Pro Link 1 Price £630 (£230, £300 & £100)
FOR Detailed and expressive sound; plenty of low-end
AGAINST App lacks slickness
As Leonardo da Vinci once said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. That sentiment appears to have been adopted by Audio Pro, whose Addon wireless speakers earned the Swedish manufacturer three What Hi-fi? Awards last year. Having embraced multi-room, that only points towards a potential sweep of this market in the future.
Here, we test the Award-winning Addon C5 speaker, its larger sibling, the Addon C10, and the Link 1, whose job it is to connect existing hi-fi components or wireless speakers into the chain.
Bear shaped
For their part, the two Addon speakers are almost identical, but for their size. This is a pair of smart yet appealing boom-box-style speakers with a familiar driver configuration – the koala design that has become these speakers’ distinguishing feature.
The difference in cabinet size is reflected in the Addon C10 possessing a larger mid/bass driver – 13cm in diameter compared with the Addon C5’s 10cm. This is compounded by the C10’s larger reflex port and an 80W digital class-d amplifier, double the power of its sibling, meaning it’s able to reach an extra 5Hz into those bass frequencies, with a lot more oomph.
But, apart from some rearranging of inputs to the rear, the rest is essentially the same. Both house a large circular volume control flanked by sets of four smaller buttons on the top: for power-on, play/pause, input selection and Bluetooth pairing to the left, and pre-sets to its right. Here, you’ll find the aux-in jack, which will save you having to fumble around the rear to find a connection.
Inputs on the back of each Audio Pro are reserved for those more permanent fixtures, such as the power cord, ethernet cable and RCA, alongside outputs for sub-woofer and USB device charging, as well as a toggle switch for optimised playback depending whether you’re using wi-fi or anything else.
Before mentioning the sound, it’s also worth running the rule over the Link 1. The size and shape of an ashtray, its duties are to collect song selections from the app, connecting to your home network via either wi-fi or its ethernet input, and dispense via whichever output you have selected.
Those are limited to optical and aux, though with a 3.5mm to RCA cable, it connects to pretty much any existing set up. That’s about the size of it: for £100, any extra audio equipment – another Addon speaker or full hi-fi system – is now part of your multi-room network.
It’s difficult to imagine a less stressful set-up procedure, either. The Audio Pro app seeks out all available products, with the option of adding those not already tethered manually, and they are then all there to manipulate as you wish.
Living with the app is a different proposition, though. In some ways it’s simple – drag and drop to partner or separate speakers, either in stereo pairs or multi-room zones, and tweak the bass and treble at your leisure – but it can be a little buggy and is certainly limited compared to most rival systems.
To play music from Spotify or Apple Music, you need to leave the Audio Pro app, leading to a rather disjointed user experience. It also means you can’t create on-the-fly playlists with tracks from those services and others on board (Tidal, Qobuz, Napster and Deezer), or your own digitally stored collection.
Audio Pro has sought to integrate Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, but through the app rather than a speaker with a microphone. This is less useful and we experience some bugs, where the music changes in accordance with the voice command, but the app still acts as if it’s playing the previous selection.
But the Audio Pro is far from the most limited multi-room app, and the occasional bug and rudimentary nature is forgivable when you consider the price and sound quality of the speakers.
“The Audio Pro range is small and its app is rather rudimentary. But for value for money and sound quality this system is currently unbeatable”
The key to their performance is a musicality unrivalled by anything at this price. Take the Addon C5: the level of detail is insightful, exposing the textures and timbre of each instrument without shunning cohesion or organisation in favour of nit-picking analysis.
It times with metronomic precision, but tempers it with a dynamic sense that captures the rhythmic emphasis. That dynamic expression is a blanket over the speaker’s performance, able to reflect lavish shifts and nuance alike. It simply does everything right, and without fuss.
Now add that increased heft of the Addon C10 and the performance is expectedly grander, able to rattle trinkets with its low-end authority. But Audio Pro doesn’t allow such gains to come at the expense of all we love about the rest of the family. Instead it betters itself in almost every aspect. There is more space in the presentation, more dimension and ambient detail, with more headroom for dynamic variation. Every penny of its loftier price tag is paid back with interest.
Simple decision
The Link 1 perhaps shoulders a lesser burden in what is effectively a midwife role, but it performs its own specific task with equal aplomb. It fits our Addon T3 like a glove, but even hooking it up to feed Spotify into our reference hi-fi system doesn’t hold the performance back, despite the inherent limitations.
Compared with its rivals, the Audio Pro range is small and its app is rather rudimentary. It might limit the appeal for some, but for value for money and sound quality this system is currently unbeatable. As much as anything, the chosen path towards multi-room should be about the speakers you most want around your house. For us, Audio Pro makes that decision admirably simple.