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Sep 05, 2023

Audioengine A2+ Wireless Active Speakers

What precisely are the Audioengine A2+ wireless active speakers? Are they

What precisely are the Audioengine A2+ wireless active speakers? Are they loudspeakers for your room? Are they for something else? They are tiny and Audioengine itself says that they have "quickly become the new reference standard for multimedia computer speakers". So we’re going with computer speakers.

This isn't the first time we’ve reviewed Audioengine wireless active speakers. Just over a year ago we reviewed the much bigger A5+ models and were so impressed we scored them at 4.7 out of 5.0. But how would the Audioengine A2+ speakers stack up. They are so very, very tiny.

How tiny? Each stands just 152mm tall – that's six inches –and 102mm wide by 134mm deep. The left-hand speakers weighs 1.6 kilograms,while the right-hand speaker weighs 1.4 kilograms.

Why the difference? That's because all the electronics are packed into the left-hand speaker. It contains the two 30-watts continuous amplifiers and the power supply and the various connections, including Bluetooth. The right-hand speaker is passive. Included with the speakers is two-metre cable for driving the right-hand speaker from the amp in the left. Gold-plated binding posts on both speakers make for secure connections.

Each speaker is two-way unit, with a 19mm silk dome tweeterwith neodymium magnet and a 70mm aramid fibre woofer. The cabinets arebass-reflex loaded, with a slot port at the bottom front of each. There are nospeaker grilles, so the drivers are visible. I reckon they look good. Check outthe photos for yourself.

Audioengine is one of those companies that makes its ownspeaker drivers, rather than simply using off-the-shelf parts. It says that thisincreased control allows its designs to work together more effectively.

On the back panel of the left-hand speaker are:

The other input is Bluetooth. The speakers support the regularSBC stereo audio codec, as well as aptX. That means higher quality audio fromthose phones which support it.

There is no input selector. If you send music to the Audioengine A2+ speakers via its analogue inputs and the Micro-B USB, it's mixed and all comes out together. If you send music to the speakers via Bluetooth, it switches off the other inputs and only plays the Bluetooth music. When that stops – even though the Bluetooth connection remains active – the other inputs come back to life.

In their computer-speaker role, you’d typically plug a USBoutput of your computer into the Micro-B USB socket of the speakers. Theyoperate in USB Audio Class 1.0 mode, which means that they’re compatible withjust about all computers, including Windows 7 and Windows XP models.

Windows makes it clear they are locked to 16 bits and 48kHz.The purist in me objects a little to that, and it's not because of a lack ofsupport for high resolution.

The great majority of music people will listen to with thesespeakers is sampled at 44.1 kHz. When these speakers are being used, yourcomputer will have to convert 44.1kHz to 48kHz sampling. That's a conversionwhich does not have a mathematically neat solution, so some low-level noise anddistortion is necessarily added.

But, to be clear, it's extremely low in level, and the chances are few of us would be able to pick it, even in direct A-B comparisons. So it's probably a reasonable design choice.

Um, what's going on here? I’m playing The Offspring's Americanaat a rather high volume and the music is rocking. It's reasonably clear. Thedrum kit has good punch. A little stressed? Perhaps. Drum kit a trifle anaemic?Well, yes. But those things are easily overlooked when one is listening to two tinyspeakers. And when the output is peaking at – I’ve just measured it – at slightlyover 100 decibels.

The Audioengine A2+ speakers got me thinking quite deeplyabout what defines quality audio. You see, with some music I was utterlydelighted by the speakers, and other times rather less so.

These speakers clearly want to be high fidelityloudspeakers. With sensible music played at sensible levels, at their best the AudioengineA2+ are simply delightful. For example, I’ve switched to Laura Marling's album OnceI Was an Eagle, and her customary close-miked voice is clear and precise,yet restrained. Many speakers and headphones deliver this with some significantsibilance. There wasn't a hint of that with these speakers. The acousticpercussion was clean and clearly audible, even when underlying the main musicalelements.

There was an English sensibility to the sound: a littlerestrained, a little mellow. And that tempted me to wind up the volume. Atemptation to which I, of course, succumbed. She continued to sound lovely.

At their best, the Audioengine A2+ speaker delivered a three-dimensionalsound with astonishing precision in their imaging. A fine studio-speaker likeintimacy and superb clarity, at surprisingly high levels.

That sense of true high-fidelity playback kept on popping up. Instances in "Burger Queen" by Placebo delivered tangible instrumentation at varying distances into the sound stage.

Coming back to The Offspring, the tonal balance wasrather good, apart from the absence of a couple of octaves of bass at thebottom. That absence? I don't know of any speakers of this size that couldprovide much better. But there is a solution for that, which I’ll get to.

It wasn't as clear as the Laura Marling. That continued tobe the case: fine recordings sounded good, busy, complicated recordings lost abit of detail, especially if the volume level was pushed.

But, still, these speakers are perhaps one eighth of thevolume of my regular computer speakers – they look positively diminutive on myisoACOUSTICS stands. I had to put an MDF platform atop the stands because theAudioengine A2+ speakers were too small to fit.

And, yes, you should use stands with your desktop speakers.Preferably ones that tilt up the front so that they point more directly towardsyour ears. Audioengine sells ($49) wedge-shaped ones which look like they’d dothe trick.

Right now, I’m playing Wynton Marsalis’ Blood on the Fields, a live jazz performance. The sound quality is astonishing. "Computer speakers" have a bad name for audio quality. The Audioengine A2+ speakers utterly defy that.

Now, I shall confess that while I spent about ten daysrunning these speakers, I listened to them in their native state for only abouthalf that time. The other half I supported them with a subwoofer.

The sub is the one that belongs to my desktop system, the exceptionally fine Krix Seismix 1. Mine is a few years old, so its 200mm downwards-firing driver gets "only" 200 watts. The current model is up to 350 watts.

I just plugged the two RCA outputs of the Audioengine A2+speakers into the two RCA inputs on the Krix, turned the low pass filtersetting of the sub to around 70 hertz, and balanced the level by ear.

Good as the Audioengine A2+ speakers sounded alone, theysounded so much better with the sub. The missing lower octaves were filled in.

That said – and I note that Audioengine says that these are third generation speakers – when Audioengine is planning a fourth generation, one useful addition would be to have a "Sub" switch on the back. And what would that switch do? It would switch in a high-pass filter on the signal going to the main drivers at, say, 100 hertz, or perhaps even 120 hertz. That would relieve them of the responsibility of handling even mid-bass, let alone deep bass. And that would mean that they could cleanly go significantly louder with bass-heavy music since they wouldn't be wasting their capacity on handling all that 70-ish hertz stuff.

That they do handle those deeper frequencies quite well ontheir own is a remarkable achievement. If you aren't using a sub, they areimpressive. But they could be much more impressive than they presently are whensupported by a subwoofer.

You can see how much work they’re doing with the woofersvisibly flinging themselves to and fro at times. There's often a fair bit ofair pumping through the bass reflex slots.

The shape of a bass reflex port has no effect on bass tuning as such. Square, slot, round, whatever, it's all the same. The important thing is the area of the outlet and the length of the tube, and thus the contained volume of air. The shape and finish of the outlet can have other effects, such as creating noise as the air pumps in and out. Sometimes slot-style ports can produce "chuffing" sounds due to turbulence at the port mouth, but I did not experience any of that with these speakers.

I measured the bass response both up close and at a distance.Up close the bass output diminishes from around 150 hertz to be down by 6dB at85 hertz. Back where my ears were, it maintained a better level out to 100hertz and then fell away sharply. That was less bass than my listeningimpressions had suggested.

The fact is, the Audioengine A2+ wireless speakers arelovely sounding little things, true high fidelity loudspeakers, so long as theyare used within their limits. And those limits are quite high. If it were me,I’d be looking to add a neat subwoofer. I’ll be seeing if I can get ahold ofthe companion Audioengine S8 subwoofer – $499 – to see if that will do thetrick.

You can read more about the Audioengine A2+ speakers here.