Q Acoustics Q Active 200
It’s a simple fact of life that the more there is to do, the more there is to prioritise. For Q Acoustics’ first all-in-one streaming speaker system – and the third of this trio – the British speaker specialist could have focused most of its attention on the streaming side of things – that is the uncharted territory for it, after all.
Not so; this appears to be a speakerfirst design, given the ambitious acoustic engineering on show here. Still, get the speaker part right, as you’d hope a firm with such plaudits in the field would, and you’re halfway there.
If you were expecting an active set of speakers resembling Q Acoustics’ current range of standmounters, the Q Active’s design may raise your eyebrows. The boxes are narrow, deep and in a beautifully finished matt white – so far, so Q Acoustics. But instead of the usual tweeter and mid/bass woofer decorating each façade, there is a rectangular grille in the top corner that hides two round, 58mm BMR drive units.
It gives the classy cabinets a unique, neatly minimalist look that might sit well in contemporary designed living spaces – but that is likely to divide opinion.
Q Acoustics has chosen to use a pair of balanced mode radiator (BMR) drivers in each cabinet in preference to conventional cone units. BMRS have two big advantages: they deliver both midrange and treble (and a bit of bass) from their modestly sized forms, so avoiding the need for a separate tweeter and mid/bass combination and the distortion-generating crossover that goes along with it. They also radiate sound uniformly across a 180-degree plane, reducing the usual tendency for speakers to create a listening ‘sweet spot’.
Sonic flexibility
Their positioning on the speaker – the dual BMR configuration can sit either on the inside top corner or outside top corner, depending on which way round the speakers are placed – brings some benefits too. According to Q Acoustics, the asymmetry in the acoustic path lengths from the BMRS to the baffle edges improves diffraction characteristics. It also offers flexibility in positioning: for far-field listening (further away or to the sides) they should be positioned to the inside, or for near-field listening, on the outside.
Of course, there’s only so much quantity and depth of bass a 58mm driver can dig up, which is why Q Acoustics has integrated a ported 11cm woofer into the rear of each cabinet.
Q Acoustics has designed a pair of dedicated stands for the Q Active 200, the Q FS75. For £350 per pair, they feature a skeletal, highly rigid ‘space frame’ made up of rods in compression stabilised by cables in tension, and have fixings that enable them to be bolted to the standmounters.
Q Acoustics has taken the decision not to house the streaming architecture and connectivity inside the speakers, but instead in a separate hub. There are two hub options to choose from, depending
on where your voice-control loyalties lie. The Google Home box offers Google Assistant voice control, plus built-in Google Chromecast, while the Amazon Alexa box variant works with Alexa.
Whichever hub you choose, you get the same physical inputs – HDMI (ARC), optical, and an analogue input that is switchable between line-level and moving-magnet. Essentially, that means everything from a CD player to a TV to a turntable can be connected to the hub and streamed to the speakers. The two channels of audio are sent directly to both speakers over a 5GHZ wireless connection. This helps ensure accurate syncing between the two speakers.
The hub is also a streaming gateway to Airplay 2 for IOS users, Spotify Connect for Spotify Premium and Family subscribers, and Bluetooth.
If you own a NAS drive with music, UPNP support is onboard for playing networked music files up to 32-bit/ 192khz (which subsequently gets downsampled to 24-bit/96khz for the transmission to the speakers).
Still to come
Q Acoustics is due to release its dedicated Q Active app that will help with registration and set-up, control hub customisation, software updates and basic controls. It won’t, however, be an all-encompassing music-control app from which you can browse networked or local music libraries and access streaming services.
A compact infrared remote control lets you adjust volume, pause, play and skip tracks and change inputs, and a strip of touch buttons across the rear of each speaker’s top panel more or less mirrors the remote’s control, too. They’re nicely responsive – sometimes more so than the apps we use.
We play Radical Face’s The Missing Road, from Tidal via Chromecast and the melodic acoustic strums, cello and vocal humming come through with an eager lucidity, the presentation startlingly clear and direct, not to mention room-filling. You shouldn’t necessarily expect Q Acoustics’ typical richness and warmth here, but the active speakers’ leaner, more forward tonal stance gives them a likeable sense of snappiness.
We stream over Bluetooth, and although we expect the usual drop in quality, the Q Active 200 keep things surprisingly tight. Bluetooth loses a bit of solidity and space compared with UPNP and Google Chromecast playback, but still largely serves as a worthwhile method of playback.
The BMR drivers keep their end up, spreading sound generously and evenly around our test room and ensuring the speakers produce an impressively big presence for their compact footprint. They have the volume and punch to make easy work of John Williams’s climactic compositions, and while that rear-firing woofer is limited in terms of absolute bass depth, it proves taut and terse as the bassline in SBTRKT’S Wildfire (played over UPNP) comes into play. Bass blends in nicely with the rest of the frequencies, too.
To help optimise positioning, each Q Active 200 has three settings. There is ‘Positioned close to a corner’, ‘Positioned close to a wall’, and our preferred ‘Free-space’, which we find works best not only when the speakers are out in the room, but also near the back wall. We’d recommend experimenting to see which works best in your listening room.
Taking a stand
We switch from the dedicated stands to a pair of Custom Design FS104 Signatures and the presentation sheds a small amount of clarity – from both a sonic and aesthetic point of view we’d recommend the custom-built accessory.
There’s a bit of harshness in the upper mids, which remains audible even after a week of use. It’s not the end of the world, but it does mean higher-pitched voices can start to grate after a while. It also does nothing for a dense, cymbal-heavy track such as Touché Amore’s I’ll Be Your Host.
The big issue
But our biggest issue with the Q Active 200 is their lack of dynamic and rhythmic expression. With Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Galleon Ship, the piano and vocal pairing comes through clear and solid, yet is bereft of real feel.
Everything seems to ride along one audio plane, lacking forward momentum and dynamic tiers. It doesn’t help that the soundstaging isn’t particularly well layered either. In combination, these things mean the track isn’t all that interesting or emotionally grabbing.
Whether trying to grasp the grooves that underpin Thundercat’s Them Changes, or nail the rhythmic logistics integral to the SBTRKT track, the
Q Active 200 don’t quite tie the musical strands together with the coordination necessary for them to thoroughly entertain. They conduct themselves in a startlingly clear and upfront manner, but beyond that they fail to captivate.
There’s much to admire here – not least the vast connectivity, clever speaker engineering and dedicated stands – but the bottom line is that KEF’S LSX (see p32), which cost £500 less, make for a more successful package.
It’s rare, if ever, that we publish sentences featuring the words ‘Q Acoustics’ and ‘disappointing’ together, but here the Q Active 200 cannot hide behind their thoughtfully considered spec sheet and speaker engineering. Performance-wise, they simply aren’t entertaining enough to recommend.
“THE ACTIVE SPEAKERS’ LEANER, MORE FORWARD TONAL STANCE GIVES THEM A LIKEABLE SENSE OF SNAPPINESS”