Audio Pro C20 W review

The original Audio Pro C20 wireless speaker was something of a Swiss Army Knife. As multi-faceted as Inspector Gadget and as polymathic as Stephen Fry, the Award-winning C20 was as comfortable sitting below your TV accompanying your latest movie marathon as it was perched in your kitchen serving up a slice of Saturday morning Sade.

The new Audio Pro C20 W promises to build on the original model’s many talents, and while it doesn’t bring in a host of proverbial new tools to the metaphorical party, Audio Pro promises to have sharpened the ‘W’ edition’s blades in pursuit of more potent performance and greater overall usability.

That all sounds promising on paper, so here’s hoping the Swedish audio brand hasn’t messed too much with a winning formula.

Price

The Audio Pro C20 W officially retails at £450 (approx. $600 / AU$900), which is the same original UK price as the standard C20 when we reviewed it in early 2024. Credit to Audio Pro, then, for keeping prices stable in these tricky economic times.

There aren’t too many wireless speakers floating around for that sort of money, although the excellent Sonos Era 300 retails at full price for £449 / $449 / AU$749 if you want a former What Hi-Fi? Award winner. Otherwise, you’ll have to spend more cash on the likes of the five-star Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Pro Edition (£699 / $799).

Build & design

Like the Olsen sisters or that creepy pair from The Shining, it’s incredibly hard to tell the difference between the old C20 and the newer model. That’s because, in essence, there are almost no differences on the exterior between the generations, aside from a back panel which has shifted from black on the older iteration to shiny silver on the newer version.

There is a walnut finish that’s exclusive to the C20 W (and costs £40 more), but if you placed the two generations side by side and had both daubed in the same white, grey or black finish, spotting the difference would be nigh-on impossible from a front-on perspective.

As before, the C20 W can be controlled via the speaker’s top-mounted control panel, on which are housed playback and volume buttons, a Bluetooth pairing toggle, a power button and a selector for cycling through the six options of wi-fi, TV, phono, line, optical and Bluetooth sources.

We’d maybe like those buttons to be a little more tactile, and there’s always a small delay between pressing a given input and the speaker’s response to the command, but such things aren’t enough to ruin the general experience.

That control panel also offers the choice of six programmable presets which can be configured to your favourite input, streaming service, song or album by holding a preset button down for three seconds on the content you’d like to save. If you want to do things the more modern way, you can also lock in your presets via the new Audio Pro W app. More on that, later.

In terms of drive units, don’t expect much of a switch-up. As before, the ‘W’ edition uses a single 16.5cm woofer at its core with twin 25mm tweeters flanking either side, all powered by a total power output of 190 watts. A magnetic front grille is provided in the box, with Audio Pro’s ‘Sound Compensation’ mode adjusting the speaker’s output depending on whether you go for grille on or grille off.

The main drivers, then, are unchanged, but if Audio Pro is to be believed, the resulting audio quality should be a step up from the not-inconsiderable talents of the current C20. According to Audio Pro, the goal “wasn’t to tweak the sound, it was to rethink it from the ground up”.

That rethink includes improved input stages for uniform sensitivity and an improved dynamic range, as well as changes to the speaker’s acoustical design for more optimised performance. Those more mechanical tweaks are complemented by a tuning overhaul in pursuit of further sonic gains.

Features

So much of the original C20’s appeal came from its excellent versatility. Here was a box that was as happy being a soundbar for your TV (provided you had room) as it was connecting wirelessly to your iPhone, with the ‘W’ iteration looking to refine that experience.

For your physical connections, the C20 W offers a set of RCA inputs, a moving magnet phono stage, an optical input for digital sources and an HDMI ARC for once again hooking it up to your TV. There’s also a sub out option, so you can boost your bass by adding a subwoofer if you so choose.

Wireless support is extensive. Google Cast and AirPlay 2 are both on the menu for offering wireless playback up to 24-bit/96kHz, while Bluetooth 5.0 is also built in. As before, you get access to Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect, as well as Audio Pro’s own multi-room offering, which is backwards compatible with the older, non ‘W’-adorned generation of speakers.

The C20 W’s app has been updated throughout, with a fresh layout and easy navigation for controlling all aspects of the speaker, including selecting inputs and linking your streaming services. If it looks rather familiar, that’s because the new platform comes courtesy of LinkPlay, WiiM’s parent company. That’s no bad thing – the usability and depth of the streaming platform supporting WiiM’s expanding roster of products have been one of the main drivers of the brand’s mushrooming success.

You can set up multi-room playback in Audio Pro’s simple-but-effective control app, where we teamed up two C20s in a stereo pair. We also linked up other Audio Pro speakers (such as the new C5 W and A28 W) together for a wholesale multi-room set-up.

It’s a reasonably easy process, and aside from a few instances of the app momentarily failing to recognise our test speaker, we find the core elements involved to be simple and easy to navigate.

Sound

Audio Pro may have teased a complete reinvention, but to our ears, what we hear is more akin to a subtle realignment as we begin our testing by streaming Tidal. It retains that clear, open and spacious presentation we’ve come to expect from the brand’s established range of wireless speakers.

The C20 W offers an expansive, open soundstage, granting a pleasing airiness to the likes of Ramin Djawadi’s choral Across The Oceans Of Time or Massive Attack’s Paradise Circus.

Those qualities of refinement and clarity walk hand in hand with a gift for overall organisation and cohesion. Even when things become challenging or overly dense, the C20 W has the poise and refinement to avoid ever sounding cluttered or slipshod.

Ludwig Goransson’s Can You Hear The Music is a tricky beast that adds layers and layers of skittering strings and woozy horn blasts, but the Audio Pro keeps its cool and handles it with grace and maturity.

The versatile speaker is, in truth, talented across the sonic spectrum. Via streaming, the well-integrated midrange is a highlight, sounding cohesive enough to be a part of the ensemble but distinct enough to shine on its own terms, allowing for vocal passages to come to the fore with sufficient personality and brio to keep us engaged.

We’re pleased to find that Audio Pro has once again resisted the urge to pump in excess helpings of blobby bass into its latest wireless recipe. As before, the C20 W can reach deep enough to sound full and hefty, yet it has the control and restraint to keep that lower end firmly in check.

In doing so, it gives authority to the synth pulses on Muse’s Madness without allowing them to become amorphous or ill-defined. Just make sure you’ve got the C20 W placed somewhere suitably stable, as poor quality surfaces can make it sound just a touch boomy if you’re not careful.

So the baby hasn’t been thrown out with the bathwater, but does the C20 sound better now that there’s a ‘W’ attached to the end of its name? Pitted against each other (quite literally side-by-side), the C20 W is a step above its predecessor. It’s not night and day, but it’s enough for us to notice a difference from one speaker to the other.

The C20 remains impressive, but against the newer version, it sounds a little rounded off, even soft, thanks to the new degrees of richness and clarity the updated unit brings to the party. Play Jay Z’s Allure, for instance, and Jay’s central performance, not to mention the bounce and weight of the track, are more authentically uncovered when the ‘W’ model is called into action.

The original C20 is a little more forgiving, and it will smooth off any peaky top-end harshness that you might find on, say, a slightly raw recording of Debussy’s Claire de Lune, but when all’s said and done, it’s the newer speaker which offers a clearer and more cohesive performance.

As the C20 W is about more than mere wireless streaming, we take a break from Tidal and make use of its handy optical input. Once connected to our Cyrus CDi CD player, the Audio Pro ups its game, sharpening up its presentation to bring out more detail while upping the ante dynamically as it sinks its teeth into Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack to The Dark Knight.

If you’re considering dipping your toes into the vinyl craze, you can plug a turntable directly into the Audio Pro C 20 W thanks to its built-in phono stage. We were a little lukewarm regarding the older C20’s vinyl talents, so we’re pleased that the ‘W’ edition adds more clarity and a touch more energy when paired with our Rega Planar 6/Nd7 turntable.

It’s not a perfect performance, and if you’re serious about your records we’d advise investing in a dedicated phono stage, but the C20 W does a serviceable job when tasked with tackling Lukas Graham’s Happy Home and a chunk of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Even if the midrange is a touch hollowed out, it’s a clearer and more dynamic performance than the older C20 can muster.

Verdict

The excellent C20 W sees Audio Pro honing an already Award-winning recipe. In retaining the versatility of the original while adding boosts to usability and sonic performance, Audio Pro has elevated a great wireless speaker to new heights. In our book, ‘W’ might as well stand for ‘Winner’.

Review published: 7th October 2025

SCORES

• Sound 5
• Build 5
• Features 5

MORE:

Read our review of the Sonos Era 300

Also consider the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Pro Edition

Best Bluetooth speakers tried and tested for every budget