Fluance Ai41 Bluetooth Speaker System

"Two Speakers Better Than One"

- By Bob Ankosko

You can tell if a speaker is good the moment it starts playing, so I knew right away the Ai41 was good but didn’t fully appreciate how good until I had lived with it for a couple of weeks.

Designed by Fluance, one of the many excellent speaker companies hailing from Canada, and built to spec in China, the Ai41 replaces the outstanding Ai40, one of our Top Value Picks in 2019. It’s a standard two-way bookshelf design featuring a 5-inch woofer and 1-inch silk-dome tweeter in an attractive cabinet just under 11 inches tall—small but not super compact—and available in four woodgrain finishes: black ash or black walnut with a black baffle or a white baffle offset by walnut (shown) or bamboo. There’s no speaker grille.

The left speaker is passive and connects via an 8-foot cable to the right speaker, which is the brains of the operation, housing a Bluetooth 5.0 receiver for wireless streaming from a smartphone or other device, digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and a Class D stereo amplifier with an integrated digital signal processor to help “produce a more balanced frequency response.” The Ai41 uses the same drivers as its predecessor and, except for a tiny LED indicator next to the volume/ amplifier power to 90 watts (2 x 45), on/off control, looks identical when up from the Ai40’s 70 watts. viewed from the front.