Audio Pro C20

The Audio Pro C20 is a Swedish wireless speaker in a single cabinet, deliberately styled as a piece of luggage-like furniture with a leather handle and physical preset buttons on top.

Those preset buttons are the distinguishing feature. Rather than opening an app to start music, you press a button and a saved station or playlist begins, which is how a radio has always worked and how very few smart speakers do.

What Apple Home actually does with it

This is an AirPlay 2 speaker rather than a HomeKit accessory.

• It appears in the Home app as a speaker you can play to, and as an AirPlay target in Control Centre.
• You can assign it to a room and group it with HomePods for synchronised multi-room audio.
• Siri can send music to it by room name.
• It can be the audio output in a scene or an automation.

You cannot switch it on or set its volume from the Home app the way you would a light. Those stay with the speaker and its own app.

Before you buy

Audio Pro speakers can be grouped with each other in a multi-room system of their own, alongside AirPlay 2.

The C20 has physical inputs including HDMI ARC, so it can serve as a television speaker as well as a music system, which is unusual at this size.

Judge the presets seriously. For a kitchen or a workshop, a physical button is a genuine improvement over a phone.

Specifications