When I wrote up the Audioengine A5+ against the Kanto YU6, I called the A5+ the audiophile’s choice and the desk speaker, and I left it there because a head-to-head can only give each side a few paragraphs. People kept asking the obvious follow-up: forget the Kanto for a second, is the A5+ actually worth five hundred dollars on its own? I have had a pair on my desk for years, so here is the long answer. The Audioengine A5+ is the powered bookshelf speaker I have stopped trying to talk myself out of.
This is a review of the standard wired A5+, the one without built-in Bluetooth. Audioengine sells a wireless version that adds aptX-HD for more money, and it is a fine thing, but the wired model is the one I own, the one I recommend, and the one whose deliberate minimalism is the whole story. If you want a remote and Bluetooth in the box, that is exactly the case for the Kanto YU6 instead, and I will come back to that.
What the A5+ Actually Is
The A5+ is a pair of powered bookshelf speakers, which means the amplifier is built into the left cabinet and a speaker cable runs to the right one. You do not buy an amp, you do not buy a receiver. You plug a source into the back and you have a stereo system. Each speaker has a 5-inch Kevlar woofer and a 0.75-inch silk-dome tweeter, the pair puts out 150 watts peak, and the cabinets are hand-finished MDF that weighs more than you expect when you pick a box up.
On the back of the active speaker you get RCA inputs, a 3.5mm input, a built-in moving-magnet phono preamp you switch to with a rear toggle, and a subwoofer output. That phono stage matters more than it sounds, because it means you can plug a turntable straight in with no separate box. This is a complete system in two cabinets, and that completeness is a big part of why it has stayed on my desk while flashier gear came and went.
The Voicing Is Warm, and That Is the Point
The single most important fact about the A5+ is how it is tuned. It is voiced warm. The bass is generous for a 5-inch woofer, the midrange has a pleasing bloom that gives vocals and acoustic guitar real body, and the treble is rolled off just slightly. That last choice is the one that defines the speaker.
A slightly rolled-off treble means the A5+ is forgiving. Bright, compressed Spotify streams do not turn brittle. Older digital recordings with a hot top end do not stab at you. Loud pop production that was mastered to sound aggressive on earbuds calms down into something you can actually enjoy. After an hour of listening you are not fatigued, and after eight hours of background music while I work, I still am not reaching to turn them down. That is a specific, deliberate engineering decision, and it is the right one for a speaker that is going to sit two feet from your face all day.
The trade is honesty about detail. An analytical monitor like an ELAC or a KEF, or the flatter Kanto YU6, will pull a little more fine texture out of a great recording and let you hear deeper into a busy mix. The A5+ smooths the very last layer of that away in exchange for never being harsh. If your listening is critical, seated, and focused on pristine recordings, that smoothing is a cost. If your listening is all-day, at a desk, across every kind of source material including a lot of mediocre streams, the smoothing is the entire reason to own them. I am firmly in the second camp at my desk, and the A5+ was tuned for exactly that person.
Build That Outlasts the Gear Around It
The A5+ feels more expensive than it costs, and that is not a throwaway line. The cabinets are solid MDF with a real hand-finished veneer, the binding posts on the back are proper five-way beefy connectors rather than spring clips, and even the included speaker cable is decent. The matte finishes, walnut and black and bamboo, age gracefully. Photographs genuinely undersell them. On a desk they read as furniture, not as gadgets, and they do not have the plastic-brick look that most powered speakers in this range cannot escape.
That build is not just cosmetic. These are speakers people keep for a decade and then hand down still working. Audioengine has been making essentially this design, refined over successive versions, for years, and the longevity shows up in the used market where old pairs still command real money. When I say buy once, I mean it in the literal sense: this is not a speaker you upgrade out of in two years because a driver rattles or the amp develops a hum. It is a speaker that outlives the laptop, the DAC, and probably the desk it sits on.
The Missing Remote Is a Choice, Not a Miss
Here is the thing that will either not bother you at all or will genuinely annoy you, so I want to be direct about it. The standard wired A5+ has no remote, no display, and no Bluetooth. The only volume control is a dial on the rear of the active speaker. That is it.
On a desk, where the speakers are within arm’s reach, this is a complete non-issue and arguably a virtue. The volume dial is right there next to your hand, the minimalism photographs beautifully, and there is nothing to lose in a couch cushion. I reach four inches to my right, I turn the knob, done. I have never once wished for a remote at my desk.
Across a living room it is a real limitation. If the speakers are ten feet away on a sideboard and you want to skip a track or drop the volume when the phone rings, getting up to reach a rear-panel dial gets old fast. Audioengine knows this, which is why the wireless A5+ and its Bluetooth sibling exist, and why I steer living-room buyers to the Kanto YU6 with its remote and front-panel display instead. The wired A5+ is unapologetically a near-field speaker, and the missing remote is the clearest signal of that intent. Buy it for a desk and the omission disappears. Buy it for a room across which you sit, and you will feel it every day.
The Phono Stage: Good Enough to Start
The built-in moving-magnet phono preamp is a genuinely useful inclusion, and it is fine. Not spectacular, fine. If you are running a budget turntable like an Audio-Technica AT-LP60X straight into the A5+, you will not hear a meaningful difference between the internal preamp and a hundred-dollar external box. Plug the turntable into the phono input, flip the rear toggle, and you have a vinyl system with no extra hardware. For a huge number of people that is the whole appeal, and it works.
Where the internal stage becomes the bottleneck is with a more serious deck and cartridge. Run a proper turntable like the AT-LP120XUSB with a hundred-dollar-plus cartridge and the built-in preamp is the weakest link in the chain. At that point you add an external phono stage into the RCA input and switch the rear toggle back off phono. But that is an upgrade you make later, if you ever care, and the fact that the A5+ gets you started with zero extra boxes is exactly right for its price and its buyer.
Bass: Honest About the Limits
A 5-inch woofer in a sealed-ish bookshelf cabinet makes real bass for its size, but it does not move air the way a bigger box or a subwoofer does. Vocals, jazz, acoustic, indie, and podcasts all land with satisfying body. Electronic music with deep sub-bass and action-movie explosions are where you feel the want of the bottom octave.
The fix is the subwoofer output on the back, and Audioengine will happily sell you the matching S8 subwoofer to plug into it. Crossed over around 80Hz, the A5+ plus a sub becomes a genuinely full-range system that will move a kick drum in your chest. I run mine flat for music, where the 5-inch woofer is plenty, and lean on a sub when I want movies or bass-heavy tracks to hit. If your listening is mostly music at a desk, you may never add the sub. If you want the low end to be felt and not just heard, budget for one, because the A5+ alone is honest about where it stops.
Where It Belongs: On a Desk, Pointed at Your Face
This is the actual recommendation. The A5+ is a near-field speaker, and near-field is where it is close to unbeatable. Sit two to four feet away, get the tweeters roughly at ear height, angle them slightly toward your head, and the warm voicing turns into the most pleasant all-day listening I have found at this price. The soundstage on a desk is wide and stable, vocals sit right in front of you, and nothing about the presentation fatigues over a full workday.
Feed it from a decent source and it wakes up further. A WiiM Pro Plus streamer into the RCA input gives you high-resolution streaming with a proper app and a real DAC for not much money, and it is the pairing I recommend most often. A USB DAC from a computer works just as well. The A5+ assumes you feed it one clean source and let it do the rest, which is exactly how a desk system should be built. Where it struggles is the opposite scenario: pushed loud in a big open room it can feel slightly congested, and that is precisely where a flatter monitor scales better. It is not a party speaker and it was never trying to be.
A5+ vs the Alternatives
If you are cross-shopping, three names come up and here is where each lands. The Kanto YU6 is the living-room answer: more inputs including optical and Bluetooth, a real remote, and a flatter voicing that scales better at distance. I sort the two by room, not by quality, and the full breakdown is in that comparison. The Edifier R1700BT at around two hundred dollars is the value alternative, roughly two-thirds of the A5+ experience for less than half the money, and it is the right call if five hundred is more than you want to spend. The KEF LSX II at three times the price is a clear step up with network streaming built in, a different league entirely, and worth a look only if you can stretch the budget hard.
Against all of them, the A5+ wins on one specific axis: warm, fatigue-free, furniture-grade near-field sound that you buy once and keep for years. If that is what you want, nothing in the segment does it better.
Who Should Buy Them
Buy the A5+ if you want a warm, forgiving, beautifully built pair of speakers for a desk or a small room, you value longevity and build over gadgetry, and you are fine feeding them from one source without a remote in your hand. It is the canonical “I am done upgrading” near-field setup, and I mean that as the highest compliment. Pair it with a USB DAC or a WiiM, point it at your face, and stop shopping.
Walk past it if your speakers are going to live across a living room where you need a remote, or if you listen critically at high volume in a large space and want every last detail exposed. In the first case buy the Kanto YU6, and in the second spend up to a proper monitor or a floorstander. The A5+ is a specialist, and its specialty is the desk.
The Bottom Line
The Audioengine A5+ is the near-field speaker I have stopped trying to beat. The warm voicing is fatigue-free through a full workday, the build is furniture-grade and outlasts everything around it, and the built-in phono stage plus sub output make it a complete system in two cabinets. It gives up the last sliver of detail and the bottom octave, both deliberate trades, in exchange for being warm, easy, and built to last a decade. It has no remote because it does not need one where it belongs, which is two feet from your face on a desk. Buy it once, point it at yourself, and enjoy not shopping for speakers again.