This has been a long time coming. We first heard the Q Acoustic Concept 300s back on 11th January. Our order was placed immediately. Conversations about the radical stand design run back a further two years.
Anyway, now they are here.
The packaging is the standard Q Acoustics tour de force with the speakers packed in separate cocoon-like boxes and the Tensegrity (a real word, by the way) stands already fully assembled.
Once assembled, they have an astonishing level of isolation with the speakers able to move quite dramatically on sprung suspension top of the stands. This suspension is within the base of the speaker and it is bolted to the stand via an interface panel.
Our demo speakers are in metallic grey with ebony trims at the rear. Other options are black lacquer with rosewood and white lacquer with oak. The finish quality is stupendous.
The upshot is that there is no physical vibration conveyed to the structure of the room.
Our semi-suspended insulated floor comprises 18mm flooring chipboard with a secondary layer, again of 18mm, ‘engineered’ oak resting on timber bearers on a concrete pad. Most speakers, floor-standing or stand-mount will inject a fair amount of energy that you can feel with your feet.
Devices like the Iso Acoustic Gaia isolators help quite dramatically but will not kill the energy totally.
The Concept 300s inject zero energy into the floor and the gains are quite surprising. Bass is extended and powerful but very well controlled and clean. Tracks that normally set off resonances in the room to some degree or other simply don’t trigger anything.
It’s not that the speakers lack energy either. As with other Q Acoustic designs with the damped layers in the cabinet walls, it’s just a lack of colouration, not a lack of colour. These sound like a whole lot more than £3k’s worth and look, quite genuinely like nothing else.
So far, casual visitors have been intrigued, impressed but not horrified by the looks. Those who have heard them have praised their naturalness and lack of conventional limitations. They also look quite small once positioned.
They give fine results from fairly modest electronics but also allow our, now permanently powered-up, Naim 500 system to shine. Read more here.
Feel free to give us your opinion! You can even buy some if you like . . .
6/4/2019