Audio Pro Addon C5A with Alexa built-in, Wireless, Bluetooth, Smart Speaker with Multi-room – Grey

Product Information

But it’s important to point out the Audio Pro is far from the most limited multi-room app out there, and its occasional bug and rudimentary nature is forgivable when you consider the price and sound quality of the speakers it's controlling. The Addon C3 has a 9cm woofer, it measures 10cm on the Addon C5 and Addon C5A, while the Addon C10 has the largest at 13cm. The power output from the Class D digital amplification rises in similar increments: 15W, 40W and 80W respectively.

Though there is a pair of unknown quantities in the Audio Pro line-up as far as we’re concerned – the Addon C-Sub can help those smaller speakers delve deeper into the low frequencies, while the A40 is set to receive a wider release following its design for the company’s 40th anniversary– our time spent with the rest of the company’s speakers allows us to confidently celebrate it as the best-sounding multi-room suite available for the money. The functionality of multi-room is aided with a custom-made app, curated in-house by Audio Pro themselves: Audio Pro Multi-room; somewhat self-explanatorily.

Sound performance

Setting up the speaker for the first time with Wi-Fi is very easy, you can choose to do so with the Audio Pro Control app, Google Home or Apple Home. For the purposes of this test, I used both the Audio Pro Control app and Google Home. Of course, it helps that Sonos' app is first class, as is its sound quality. Is Bose or Sonos better? These are limited to optical and analogue auxiliary - though with a 3.5mm-to-RCA cable included, connecting to pretty much any existing set up could hardly be easier.

The bugs are neither constant nor devastating, but the odd stutter and hang – particularly when pairing or splitting speakers – gets annoying in a short time. As much as anything else, your chosen path for migration to multi-room should be about whose speakers you want around your house. For us, Audio Pro makes that particular decision admirably simple. Multi-room speaker systems are tested for sound quality, features, ease of set-up and use, and overall performance. And we aim to test multiple products in each family, usually involving at least two wireless speakers and a soundbar but this will vary depending on each system's product line-up. All the controls for the speaker are located on a metal panel on the top. These are all clearly labelled, so it doesn't take long to get to grips with them. They also have a satisfying "clunk" to them when pressed; they are a world away from the cheap plastic buttons you find on many other speakers. There's also a separate panel for the built-in Alexa feature, with an LED strip to tell you when the C5A is listening and a button to manually mute the microphone. They time with metronomic precision, but temper it with the kind of dynamic sense that captures rhythmic emphasis nicely. And that dynamic expression is a strong positive over the speakers’ entire performance, able to reflect lavish shifts and subtle nuance alike. It simply does everything right, and without fuss.Through the Audio Pro Control app, you can actually adjust the bass and treble to better suit you as well. Other features in the app include a sleep timer to save energy or alarms to get you out of the house on time in the morning. This includes a clever process where the speaker uses in-built sensors to optimise its sound settings for its position in the room. Testing the feature by moving it closer to a wall in our listening room, our reviewers could hear the HomePod 2 adjusting its sound in real-time. Very impressive. It's a combination of factors. Sonos has been in the game for a long time, so it's built up a reputation. Its ecosystem is one of the most comprehensive out there, with all the main streaming apps and services covered, and an 'everything just works' approach.

As a rule, we do comparative testing – ensuring new products are tested against their rivals according to product type, features and price. Almost all the testing is carried out by our team of expert reviewers at our dedicated test rooms.

Features

Most importantly for this particular speaker, though, is the question of how well Audio Pro has integrated its voice control abilities, and whether there is enough reason to pay the extra over a regular Addon C5.