Q Acoustics Q Active 200
Very different, yet rather beguiling; Q Acoustics doesn’t merely convert an existing speaker to active wireless operation, but rethinks the breed from scratch.
It’s rare to encounter something genuinely different in the loudspeaker arena. It’s more than a century since Jensen and Pridham created the moving coil speaker, and getting on for seven decades since Edgar Villchur created the acoustic suspension principle. Since then nearly every speaker has put a tweeter and some woofers facing forward in a box. Occasionally someone has drivers firing backwards. But Q Acoustics not only does none of that with the Active 200 speakers, it’s introducing the new speaker design not as a conversion from a passive model, as with most contenders here, but as an active model from its genesis. What is the company up to?
Strange drivers, neat hub
The Q Active’s design is certainly a differentiator. The 28cm-high boxes are finished in a lovely matt white (black is also available), extending onto the front baffle, which has just that dark rectangular grille cut-out on one side — a look which seems highly on-trend for today’s open and light homes, although different enough to raise eyebrows; we have been unable to erase from our minds the description of one visitor who thought it looked like a smartphone had been stuck on the fascia. Below this is a mirrored ‘Q’ which, depending on what it reflects, can vary in perception from invisible to grey to black.
Housed inside the front grille are not the expected tweeter and mid/bass woofer, but instead two round, 58mm BMR (balanced mode radiator) drive units. BMRs deliver treble and midrange in combination, the midrange via a normal pistonic movement of the driver, but the treble via the front flat surface being excited in the manner of the flat-panel surface speakers pioneered by first Mission and then NXT in the 1990s. Noted advantages of BMRs are that they don’t require a mid-bass crossover, and that they also radiate sound more widely. But they are rarely used as treble units in critical listening speakers, so it is an interesting choice here.
These are offset to one side on each speaker. Q Acoustics says the asymmetry improves diffraction characteristics, and offers flexibility in positioning. If the two speakers are widely separated, put the drivers on the inside. If close together, widen the sound field by putting them on the outside. You select which is left and which is right using one of two little switches on the back panel; the other has three positions to adjust the EQ to deal with boundary conditions — in a corner less than 0.5m from two walls, or next to one wall (less than 0.5m), or in free space more than
0.5m from any wall. Q Acoustics recommends simply placing the
Active 200 speakers on a flat surface, though you may be attracted by the gorgeous and similarly unusual optional stands, which go for $799 a pair.
There is a port at the rear of each speaker, but to see the 114mm bass woofer itself you must peer into one of the slits on the sides. Inside the driver can be seen firing backwards onto an omnidirectional reflector which is pierced by a vertical rib, so that the speaker’s energy is firing outwards from the slots on both sides of each speaker. (The floorstanding Active 400 repeats the arrangement with a second driver and pair of side slots the same distance from the bottom of the speaker.)
So it’s all pretty weird as far as the drivers go. The connections are rather easier to understand, because there are none on the speaker, other than a figure-of-eight power socket and a USB-A slot which is for servicing only. Everything else flows from the included transmitter unit. This is, compared with some others, gloriously straightforward, and for our money, perfectly provisioned, with one analogue input on RCA sockets, one optical digital input, and an HDMI socket with ARC to play sound back from your TV. The analogue input can be switched to phono status, able then to play from a turntable with a moving magnet cartridge, no phono stage required. There’s also a subwoofer output, should you feel the need to supplement the deep end.
All signals are sent wirelessly from the hub to both speakers simultaneously (no master/ slave arrangement) as 24-bit/96kHz signals over a 5GHz wireless connection. Imagine then a minimalist Q Active 200 system, with these modernist speakers sitting either side of a TV, with a turntable to one side. Nice. What about your streaming music? Plenty of options there. The hub connects to your network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, enabling built-in Spotify Connect (just use your usual Spotify app and select the Q Active 200s as the output). There’s also Chromecast inside, able to receive from any app that supports it, and addressable from the Google Home ecosystem. (If you’re more an Alexa user, there is a different version of the hub which swaps out Google for Alexa; this is not available yet, but coming, we told.) Then there’s Apple AirPlay 2, receiving from any Mac or iOS device.
All that will cover services like internet radio, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Qobuz and Tidal from their native apps. Then there’s UPnP for networking streaming (bring your own UPnP app), able to receive up to 32-bit/192kHz (which subsequently gets downsampled to 24-bit/96kHz for transmission to the speakers). You can use Roon, if you have that paid software; the hub is fully Roon Ready. And there’s Bluetooth too, though limited to the base-level SBC codec, but with so many other options for both iOS and Android users, we’re not sure why you’d be bothering with Bluetooth at all.
Listening
All this makes for the most comprehensive and complete hub of the group here — and all without the need for a dedicated app. Our only note would be that most systems we can imagine will position the hub very close to the speakers, rendering the hub-to-speaker wireless connection somewhat unnecessary. As with some of the others here, if there were an option to hardwire from hub to speakers to achieve even higher quality, we’d gladly use it.
But set-up was quick enough, with our TV and turntable plugged in, and our digital music streaming. Bonus points for a physical remote control which also selects inputs on the hub, though the hub tends to switch automatically anyway, auto-sensing an active input. There’s a strip of touch buttons across the rear of each speaker’s top panel, which more or less mirrors the remote control, too. Their communication with the hub introduces a slight delay in the operation of both, so it feels initially stodgy, but you soon get the hang of it.
Besides, you don’t need the physical controls often, as music will likely be flowing under app control. And from the first tune these speakers were clearly doing good things despite — or because of — their unusual set-up. We started off playing from the Qobuz app on a Mac, capable of 24/192 but limited to CD quality by the AirPlay connection we made. And realising there was no way to
confirm what quality the Q Acoustics system was receiving, we switched to Roon, where we could check this with Roon’s excellent quality-check pop-up. So while Ry Cooder & VM Bhatt were sounding nicely spacious as they played Ganges Delta Blues, the file was streaming at 88.2kHz across our network, then being converted to 96kHz by the hub for transmission to the speakers (see screengrab opposite). It’s not ideal, a non-integer scaling, but with plenty of bits to spare it didn’t seem to affect the level of detail the Q Active 200s were delivering in a nicely room-filling presentation, if lacking a little of the realism we know this album can deliver at its best.
Better results still with Stockfisch’s recording of the Blue Chamber Quartet playing Chick Corea’s ‘Children’s Songs’: those rear bass drivers were underpinning the sound nicely, while the BMRs were crisp and clean on the combined piano and glockenspiel lines. As we played on, we found the strengths of these speakers came to the fore with open and spacious recordings, whether acoustic or electronic, and at levels anywhere from low up to medium-high. On the title track of ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ (24/96 all the way, and a very different, more subtle mix to that on the CD-quality standard release), the piano was nicely located with a discernable room acoustic off to the left, while the upright bass was solid if not entirely full in the centre, percussion details off to the right, and Ry’s slide guitar almost inaudibly masked in a deep position back in the soundstage.
Crowded House’s new track Playing With Fire (24-bit from Tidal) sounded great up to medium-high levels, though its layers started to congest if we went much louder, as we often do like to do during critical listening. When the zingy guitars heralded the middle eight where the mix simplifies, the sound opened up beautifully, then closed up again when back to the more complex stuff. This pattern repeated at volume; Coldplay’s Arabesque (24/96 from Qobuz) played deep and crisply enough at a medium level, but as we turned it up the layers collapsed into something more flat and lumpy.
If you have a Google Assistant device in the room, you can quickly enjoy voice control of playback. The Google Home app linked the Q Active 200s and renamed them as ‘Living Room speakers’. Thereafter all that was required was ‘Hey Google, play music in the living room’, and the Q Acoustics would jump into life and play. ‘Hey Google turn it up’, pausing, next track, all worked perfectly. The lower-res Spotify was notably brasher, but for daily music at medium levels this is a wildly convenient way to have music at your call.
We noted the hub tended to shut down quite quickly when transmission stopped, making a small electronic sigh as it closed, doing this sometimes even between tracks if Roon was taking its time sending them over.
We should also note that this was one of the speakers where our TV audio (from a Samsung Q950TS) proved incompatible with either the HDMI ARC or optical, sounding OK but with regular sync drop-outs, often every 4.5 seconds. Q Acoustics acknowledges the problem with wayward digital outputs from TVs (see comment p8), noting some LG models in its FAQs as being problematic, and replying to us that “it does seem to affect only specific models across a variety of manufacturers”. There’s really no way to know until you plug up, so if TV audio is important to you, perhaps ask your dealer for a loan before purchase to check compatibility. This issue is not unique to Q Acoustics, and might more reasonably be blamed on the TVs — however, you’re unlikely to replace a TV because it doesn’t work with your speakers, rather than the other way around.
Conclusion
We loved the Q Active hub and its many ways to play music. And we enjoyed the novel design of the Active 200s, though repeatedly we found them challenged when playing complex music at high levels. Up to mediumhigh playback, however, their convenience, positioning versatility, and undoubted style is likely to please many users.