With a classic look and plenty of colour options to customize to your home aesthetic, The Fluance Ai41 5” Stereo Bookshelf Speakers look like a part of your home straight out of the box. Fluance, a local company to CGM, has made a name for itself with its high-quality speaker systems and turntables that give us a beautiful, albeit large pair of speakers with a lot of options for the everyday audiophile.
The Ai41 speakers offer a range of inputs, including Bluetooth, RCA, and Optical to allow for any number of devices to be fed into them and a remote control to switch between the sources quickly and seamlessly. There is also a subwoofer out to connect to your own subwoofer to up the bass quotient. You can also personalize your audio experience with adjustable EQ.
With a 90W amp, 5” woven glass fibre woofers and 1” Neodymium tweeters, the speakers balance power, bass, and presence. They have a frequency response of 35Hz – 20kHz and are built internally with high quality 18-gauge lead wire for a crisp signal. An additional eight feet of 18-gauge wire is in the box to connect the speakers together.
While the Ai41 speakers are not Wi-Fi enabled, you can still enjoy all the features found on your favourite smart home devices, such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple TV by connecting them directly to the speakers via Bluetooth.
“The Ai41 speakers offer a range of inputs, including Bluetooth, RCA, and Optical to allow for any number of devices to be fed into them…”
Setup was a breeze. Follow the instructions, and you are up and running on Bluetooth in no time. The length of the wire and power cable is sufficient to accommodate any setup. The physical size of the speakers themselves would be the only consideration. They are not excessively large for bookshelf speakers by any means, but it’s worth noting their size if you haven’t owned bookshelf speakers before. The speakers are each 10.9” by 6.5”, so measure your planned areas of placement before purchasing.
Their big advantage, especially for those in smaller spaces, is the lack of a need for an external amplifier. Many people nowadays are looking for a simple solution to make their audio great and don’t want to be bogged down in extra equipment and complicated setups. These speakers make high-quality audio more accessible to the novice and less cumbersome for those who know their stuff.
Having tested the speakers in multiple circumstances, from streaming my Spotify playlists and podcasts to playing my favourite vinyl to doing a little gaming, I can say that the speakers give you amazing quality no matter the scenario. The richness that it offered while listening to a classic album, the clarity of the audio when listening to a podcast at loud volumes, so I could hear it throughout the house and the immersion you feel when you’re deep into a good video game.
At $249.99, the Ai41 speakers sound like they are priced a little high to some. To others who have a bit more experience in audio and what would be considered high end, but let’s think about the many functions of the Ai41 speakers. The multiple sources and ability to expand from the speakers themselves to include a subwoofer make it its own home theatre system in one simple solution.
