The Fluance Ai81 powered floorstanding speakers are far more than your average pair of Bluetooth speakers, from design and setup to actual sound.
When we think of powered speakers, our minds tend to lean toward more compact bookshelf speakers such as the superb KEF LX II or the renowned Klipsch The Fives. But as the complexity of our home theater setups increases, so has the demand for bigger, more powerful tower speakers with a wide range of connectivity options — from optical to line RCA to Bluetooth.
While we are seeing more of these powered tower speakers entering our living rooms, many of them are in a price range that’s unobtainable. This is why I was pleased to get the opportunity to review the Fluance Ai81 Elite Powered Floorstanding Tower Speakers, a reasonably priced ($500) beast of a pair of floorstanders with a multitude of connection options and serious sound driven by their own 150-watt amplifier that are suitable for everything from daily music listening to all your home theater viewing.
We’ve been reviewing Fluance speakers for years (their turntables are pretty great, too), but how do these powered towers stand up? Let’s find out.
The Fluance Ai81 Elites are available in four finishes — black ash, white walnut, lucky bamboo, and natural walnut –with no price variance between the them. In-box accessories include a power lead, an eight-foot run of speaker wire, a remote, and manuals.
My test speakers were black ash, which blands well with my general living room decor. But no matter which cabinet choice you opt for, the one-inch neodymium tweeter and 6.5-inch glass fiber drivers are always going to be black. These being floorstanding speakers, the ash shell combined with the black drivers may look a bit too sinister for some listening spaces, and there’s currently no magnetized grille option. I personally didn’t mind the aesthetic.
Dimensionally, the Fluance Ai81 are 37.8-inches tall, 8.50-inches wide, and 10.24-inches deep from front to back. The MDF cabinetry has a nice grainy finish, and the wood itself doesn’t feel cheap in any way.
All connections are located on the back of the right speaker. Here you’ll find two sets of RCA line inputs for connecting things like a turntable (a phono preamp is required, however), receiver, TV audio out, or even a smartphone with the right adapter cable. There’s also a digital optical input for running sound from TVs, receivers and more, as well as a subwoofer output, speaker wire terminals (the output set), and an AC power port. There’s also a master on/off switch for the system, as well as a volume adjustment dial located up top, which doubles as an input selector when you push the knob in.
Around front, a single LED indicator is your guide for determining if the speakers are on or off and what input you’re set to. Volume, treble, and bass adjustments will make the LED flash, with a red blink meaning you’ve hit the maximum level for each adjustment.
Over on the left speaker, the only connections to speak of are the speaker wire terminals (the input set).
The Fluance Ai81 may appear like a normal pair of passive tower hi-fi speakers that you would connect with speaker wire to an amp or receiver. And that’s how I first attempted to wire them. Yes, the speaker terminals on both the left and right channels fooled me into thinking I could connect the Ai81 to my A/V receiver, but that’s not the case here. Similar to most powered speaker sets, like desktop computer speakers even, the terminals on the back of each speaker are to be connected by the included speaker wire.
