The next-generation Q Acoustics budget floorstanding loudspeaker is here – and it’s really rather special, says David Price
It is not easy to be a new speaker brand. First, anyone trying to enter the loudspeaker market will find it crowded. Second, designing a competitive speaker requires a team of talented people, and that is not easy to come by. Q Acoustics solved this problem by collaborating with talented engineer Karl-Heinz Fink, but getting around the first problem was more luck than judgement.
Q Acoustics’ Steve Reichert admits that at the time the new brand was launched, the big fish that swam in the deep British speaker sea had momentarily vacated it. He confides that when the first 1000-series models came out, big names like Mission and Wharfedale weren’t quite as strong as they had traditionally been – for various reasons. This opened up a space, he says, for Q Acoustics to move in and start selling decent-sounding but highly affordable boxes, traditionally the province of these bigger, more established brands.
He freely admits that the company has been pushing for market share rather than profit. As (still) a newish name, the aim was to get people to know the brand and trust it, and this involves making a more expensive speaker – he suggests – than some rivals sell at the price – in order to entice customers of established names over. One of the things that makes this possible is the fact that Q Acoustics is part of Armour Home Electronics, and can share office space and resources with the group’s other brands, giving useful economies of scale. In short, the brand is a little less expensive to run, more nimble and partnered up to a really good designer who also does many other projects for other people.
The first 1050 was really impressive at the price. Costing £330 in 2007, few – including me – had heard such a capable-sounding cheap floorstander. It rather shook up the market, offering sound more in keeping with £600 models. The 2050 (HFC 335) followed, which was a big step forward, making its predecessor sound opaque and flabby. It too was remarkable for what it was, and now the new 3050 is tasked to be just the same again, in 2015’s loudspeaker market which has evolved a fair way since the earlier incarnations arrived. The price has gone up though; it’s now £500 for the stock matt graphite or American walnut finishes, or £650 for the gloss white or black, or grained vinyl ‘leather effect’ finishes.
Boxing clever
The 3050 is not a small loudspeaker, standing one metre tall, and it weighs almost 18kg apiece. Compared with its predecessor – a sample of which I have to hand – it’s a significant advance in styling terms. Its softer, cleaner design gives it a more ‘designed’ look, as if its creators have put some thought into how it looks in a room. The 2050’s bottom-mounted binding posts have gone, thank goodness. It certainly looked good, cleaning up the rear of the speaker, but it was a huge pain to wire up; the 3050 has its terminal board at the rear of the cabinet where it should be. As it happens, Steve says this has allowed the whole box to be substantially more rigid too, which doesn’t hurt the sound.
This new design is the same as its predecessor inasmuch as it’s a two-way floorstander with a single 25mm soft dome tweeter and twin 165mm mid/bass units, although these now feature paper doped in Aramid fibre. Steve says the designers moved to this from a paper/mica mix, and it has made the cone slightly stiffer and better controlled. The crossover point is set at 2.6kHz, which is fairly conventional. The company claims a sensitivity of 92dB/1W/1m, which is a good figure that will suit low-powered amplifiers and/or tube designs. The crossover follows the ‘less is more’ principle, using a fourth order Linkwitz/Riley design, with new ‘U’ inductors with a more compact magnetic field, helping to reduce crosstalk between the components.
The big cabinets are decently rigid, although nowhere near as quiet as those on the twice-as-expensive Concept 40 (HFC 385), for example. Indeed, I would suggest that this is where much of the money has been saved on the 3050, which is slightly taller yet a little lighter.
Sound quality
For most of my listening I use the speaker in conjunction with the supplied foam bung in its rearmounted bass reflex port, which tightens up the timing and dials down the bass. Unlike its immediate predecessor, though, it seems a good deal more relaxed about being used close to a rear wall without the bung. As before, a slight toe-in benefits stereo imaging, snapping the soundstage into focus.
This new loudspeaker superseded the 2050i (HFC 365) last month. Its predecessor was the best large, budget floorstander on sale, at a price point where you can barely get a listenable standmount, let alone a big floorstander. It sounded warm, open and musical – making it a hard act to follow. To succeed, the 3050 not only has to outperform its rivals, but also be a significant upgrade on the 2050i – and thankfully for both Q Acoustics and budget loudspeakers as a breed, it is.
Coming up trumps
The new design adds focus, grip and insight to the 2050i’s combination of smoothness, size and power. Its predecessor had a big, broad-brush stroke sound which was lots of fun, whereas the new one is tighter, tauter and more regimented. It doesn’t quite have the former’s ‘valve amplifier sensibility’, where everything was sumptuous and slightly opaque – instead it brings a more sharply focused and detailed character. Part of this manifests itself as more low-level information, another aspect you notice is the more precise location of instruments in the stereo soundstage. The most profound upgrade, however, is the improved dynamics, making the 3050 a far more engaging and musically articulate design.
For example, Simply Red’s Holding Back The Years is a gentle, almost balladic song with little in the way of high intensity musical energy, but the 3050’s new-found delicacy and detail makes it much more fun to listen to. By comparison, the 2050i seemed bland, compressed and a little leaden – while its replacement is better able to track the gentle dynamic inflections in the playing and also singer Mick Hucknall’s phrasing. The music acquires a sense of rhythmic snap that had previously been lost, as well as better location of the instruments within the mix. There is a finer sense of fl ow, giving a superior sense of the song having a beginning, a middle and an end.
Moving to some higher powered house music, in the shape of K-Klass’ Rhythm Is A Mystery – a nineties club anthem with pounding bass and thumping drums, along with some rousing high-energy vocals. It’s wonderfully incendiary stuff, but can sound a little hard and brittle on lesser loudspeakers, or all-too-easily losing its dynamic impact. The 3050 copes impressively well, diving into the track with aplomb and punching out lots of clean, tuneful synthesised bass and a tight, gripping snare drum sound. At really high levels it seems to compress this a little, but it is way beyond the realistic listening levels encountered in your average terraced house. You can hear the cabinets introducing a slight slurring and overhang in the bass too – in a way that you don’t in the gel-reinforced Concept 40. Yet that’s not to say the 3050 is bad in this respect; for example the Cambridge Audio Aeromax 6 (HFC 391) sounded no tauter in the bass than the Q Acoustics at half the price.
Some of this new-found grip comes from the new mid/bass drive unit material, I suspect. It definitely gives the 3050 a crisper and more spry sensibility, which is able to get deeper into the recording without becoming bogged down. The mid/bass units cross over smoothly to the tweeter, which is also an obvious improvement over what came before; it seems crisper and has better air and space; the hi-hat cymbals on Thomas Dolby’s Airwaves via CD sound sweeter and more delicate, making the 2050i sound like it was playing a low bitrate MP3 by comparison. The track comes over really convincingly, with the various strands in the mix separated out beautifully. This is a splendidly recorded song that gets better every time you upgrade your sound system, and comes over with considerably more depth and insight than the 2050i ever did. Indeed, that sums up this new floorstander – it’s a less superficial performer, digging down deeper into the mix and getting more of the music out than its esteemed predecessor. That’s no small feat!
Conclusion
Q Acoustics’ new 3050 is a clear step up from the 2050i that preceded it, and that – lest we forget – was already one of the very best budget floorstanding speakers around. First, it’s better looking than before; the previous version was attractive, but this is positively stylish and lifts any room in which it sits. Second, it is extremely well built at its price; frankly there’s nothing around that betters it. Then there’s its sheer physical size; no rival comes close, and size bestows any speaker a deeper bass and/or better efficiency – the 3050 is very easy to drive and goes low. Last but not least is the sound, which is excellent at the price – only when you spend £1,000 on designs such as its own big brother do you really get an appreciable performance gain. If you’re a cash-strapped audiophile, you simply have to hear this loudspeaker.