Fluance Ri71 Review

Price

The Ri71 can be purchased from the Fluance website for an exactingly specific £328.15 at the time of writing (July 2025). In the USA, they can had for $399.99. They do not appear to be available in Australia currently however.

The UK price is conditional on a few things though. It does not include international shipping which will be added on to that price and it is reasonably likely that you will be collared for import duty when the speakers hit customs – this happened to the review samples.

It may well end up making more sense to buy the Ri71 from Amazon UK where they are listed for £399.99 with next day delivery for Prime customers. This is more than the home website price but you know it is the price you are going to pay with no add ons so that certainty is probably worth something.

Design

• Well-proportioned standmount design
• Choice of finishes
• More than reasonable build for the price
• Good remote

The Ri71 is technically a standmount speaker; a cabinet too short to be placed directly on the floor so it needs to be raised up to a more appropriate listening level. Fluance uses the interchangeable term ‘bookshelf speaker’ though and you can see their train of thought.

Each Ri71 cabinet has some small feet on the bottom to isolate the cabinet slightly and avoid making surfaces which means that the Fluance should work happily on a sideboard or similar.

What’s more, this is a well-proportioned speaker that can perform this role very effectively. At 31 centimetres tall and 18.5 wide, the Fluance is large enough to look like a serious bit of hardware but not so large you need to give over large parts of your room to them at the same time. It’s a very well judged sense of scale.

There are three finishes available. The review samples showed up in the black finish which is a black ash wood veneer effect rather than a black sheen as is increasingly more common. I think the result is unoffensive but does look a bit old fashioned.

I’m more positive about the other options though. The ‘Walnut’ wood option (I use the speech marks because no part of the Ri71 has ever been a living, breathing walnut tree) is a good ‘split the difference’ choice between dark and light and the white option will work for many people as well. Like the black, this is a wood effect but it’s rather less pronounced and it looks the better for it.

Given that the Ri71 is pretty affordable, it looks and feels more than reasonable. The overall level of fit and finish is good and everything feels like it isn’t going to come apart any time soon. The Fluance will sit in most living spaces without looking or feeling cheap and details like the controls and connections on the back feel solid and confidence inspiring.

Quick mention also needs to be made of the remote handset as well. It’s no looker but it contains every control you actually need and has the good sense to have a removable sticker explaining the coloured light input system that can be peeled off once you’ve committed it to memory. This is logical thinking and it should be encouraged.

Features

• AMT tweeter and glassfibre midrange
• 60w per channel Class D Amplifier
• aptX Bluetooth, RCA in and HDMI ARC…
• …when you can get it to work
• Subwoofer out for 2.1 use

When I tested the Ai81, I noted that the drivers were decent enough but not terribly sophisticated things. I’m not sure if Fluance took this personally but the Ri71 rather redresses the balance.

The midbass driver is a 130mm unit that is made from woven glassfibre composite. This is a very stiff material that keeps its shape even when being pushed hard and it is an interesting device to encounter at this sort of price.

It’s not as interesting as the tweeter though. It’s called an Air Motion Transformer and it’s a type of high-frequency drive unit that works on a principle more akin to bellows moving in and out (on a tiny scale- you can’t actually see this happening) than your more conventional tweeter.

This gives the AMT plenty of radiating area but very little mass, and the result is clean and immediate high frequencies with wide dispersion. Finding these in a pair of powered speakers at this price is a bit like getting a Dunhill wallet in a supermarket Christmas cracker and it’s very unusual indeed.

The Fluance is a powered speaker rather than a true active one – there is an amplifier for each speaker that acts on a normal crossover to power the drivers. This amplifier is built into the plate on the back of the main speaker and it powers the second speaker via a run of speaker cable (which Fluance supplies).

Power is quoted as 120 watts but this is the result of adding two 60 watt amps together and isn’t reflective of the actual power that the Ri71 actually has. This is all the more peculiar because 60 watts per channel is plenty – there’s no real need for more.

This power is made available to an aptX capable Bluetooth connection, an RCA line input (with all those turntables in the range, this connection won’t be going away) and an HDMI ARC input for simplified connection to a TV.

This is a broad but shallow set of connections and it does limit the Ri71 a bit. If you connect a turntable to the RCA input and a TV to the ARC connection, your only option for music streaming is to use apps built into the TV or rely on Bluetooth. It would be have been handier if the optical input on the Ai81 had been retained as well as the HDMI but this hasn’t happened.

The other limitation is that the HDMI ARC connection has put up something of a fight while here. I have two TVs on hand for testing; a 65-inch Philips 909 and an older 55-inch LG B8.

The Ri71 has not worked at all with the LG, regardless of cable changes and checking the LG’s settings. The TV detects the Fluance and sends output to it but there has never been any audio. I did get it to work with the Philips but even this took a bit of experimenting. HDMI is not and never has been an ‘it just works’ type of connection but this one really has needed some work to be put in.

A connection that is fitted is a subwoofer out that allows for you to run the Ri71 as a 2.1 system. This isn’t terribly sophisticated; it simply sends everything below 80Hz to this output but it means that the Fluance can be used in larger spaces than the speakers on their own might be able to manage.

Sound Quality

• More than reasonable Bluetooth performance
• A fine partner for TV viewing
• Possibilities for the RCA input too
• Hard to better at the asking price

With the Fluance parked on either side of the Philips, the performance I’ve secured from the speaker has been consistently good. Key to getting the most from the Bluetooth input is having access to something that can use the aptX codec. This allows for rather more information to be sent in the signal with a useful jump in the sound quality that results.

This means that listening to Qobuz via an Oppo Find X2 I keep on hand for aptX testing is a genuinely musical experience. Listening to My Baby’s fabulous Echo via this connection isn’t ‘good for Bluetooth’, it’s genuinely musical in its own right. This is a band of tremendously talented musicians and the Fluance is able to give you enough of a sense of their prowess to pull you into the music at an emotional level.

Those two drivers work well too. Despite their very different characteristics, their handover is seamless and refined and the Ri71 manages to be both detailed and reasonably natural in how it delivers material.

The AMT tweeter is not a magic bullet; at this price point, there are dome tweeters that can keep it honest in an absolute technical sense, but it gives the Fluance a space and airiness that is quite unusual for a relatively small speaker at this price.

And, once you have got the HDMI working, the Fluance is a strong partner for TV viewing. Using stereo speakers on either side of a screen instead of a soundbar underneath it results in a performance that has a width and scale to it that most single box speakers can struggle to get anywhere near.

What the speakers need to do to make this perception work is to push information back into the centre so the information on screen makes sense. The Fluance does this very effectively and it meant that a nostalgic blast through some episodes of Elementary are very well handled. Some of the dialogue mixes in this series were always somewhat veiled and the Ri71 does a decent job of keeping them clear and discernible.

There is also scope to be creative with that RCA input. I made use of a WiiM Pro+ streamer for testing the Fluance and the step up with lossless streaming even over an aptX capable Bluetooth source was notable. As the WiiM also has an RCA looped input, it would allow the RCA connection on the Fluance to be shared between the streamer and a turntable if you wish. It’s not as slick as having more than one RCA input in the first place but it would work well enough.

What’s more, these comments have to be taken in light of the asking price of the Ri71. At £400 most speakers will need to have an amp and source attached to do anything at all while the Fluance arrives as a self-contained device that only needs a phone to start making music. This is a lot of speaker for the money.

Should you buy it?