Home 350
To summarise last issue’s full review, the 350 continues the straightforward geometry of the two smaller units but goes bigger, indeed presenting a larger face to the world than either Naim’s Qb or even B&W’s expansive Wedge. It significantly ups the driver count over the Home 250, with six fully active drivers. In addition to the two 19mm tweeters it has a pair of 50mm midrange drivers, with the tweeters and midrange speakers firing at two different and no doubt carefully-calculated levels of angularity from the front baffle. In the middle of these on the front is one of its large 165mm woofers, firing forward from a central position, while the other identical bass driver fires backwards — so we can assume that bass frequencies are delivered in mono, as we find to be fairly common on medium-to-large standalone wireless speakers (while smaller ones are surprisingly often, as here, entirely mono).
As with the other two units, the Home 350 was firstclass operationally; adding the Home 350 to the HEOS app took all of a minute — ‘Add Device’, identify the speaker, press the Connect button on the back, and that was it. Not even a firmware update to sit through.
And we were immediately impressed by the sheer size of its presentation. During warm-up we were regularly halted in other tasks, by the impact of the taut bass pedal on Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain, the pounding of drums and clack of sticks during Philip Glass’s Attack and Fall from ‘Akhenaten’. Once we started critical listening, it was clear that much of the power behind these impressions came from a low bass of prodigious output, projecting so distinctly it sometimes felt an additional component of depth sitting in front of a more radiogram delivery of the higher frequencies. These characteristics were delivered by that rear-firing woofer, so that positioning greatly affects the balance — you can potentially tune the sound through positioning. Some vocals were not entirely natural, with a slight thinness from a dip in the lower part of the vocal. Yet the speaker complement created an impressive sense of space, a significantly advantage over some boxier-sounding competitors at this price. Overall — while the Home 250 had our favourite balance of these three — the Home 350 is certainly impressive for its sheer size of sound, especially if you like your music loud.