Q Acoustics Q7000
The stylish, gutsy Q7000 is our speaker package Product of the Year for 2011
Write your own reviewFor
Well made; tidy finish; confident and well-integrated sound; impressively musical
Against
Fractionally short where out-and-out scale is concerned; treble can get glassy at extremely high volume levels
Speaker package Product of the Year, Awards 2011
It’s been rather a hectic five years for Q Acoustics. At the start of 2006 the company had yet to launch its first product; by the end of 2010 it had won multiple What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision Awards and established itself as a leading light in the budget speaker arena.
So it’s hardly surprising that Q Acoustics is now going toe-to-toe with some of the industry’s biggest brands in one of the most competitive markets of all: style speakers.
Beautifully made and finished
There’s certainly no doubting the Q7000’s showroom appeal. The five identical, glossy (black or white) satellite speakers are cast from aluminium and are slim, sturdy and beautifully finished.
Each has integrated cable management, mildly fiddly speaker-cable binding posts and stands that can be swivelled to turn into wall brackets.
Filling each enclosure to capacity is a pair of 75mm coated-paper mid/bass drivers, one either side of a 25mm ring radiator tweeter.
The subwoofer is a neat and compact design housing a 25cm paper cone and 250 watts of analogue amplification. Its innovative design means the drive unit fires horizontally towards an internal sounding board (held in position by a single bolt).
This means sound is evenly dispersed, the subwoofer is very flexible about position and can even be wall-mounted (the necessary bracket is already available).
Once you've connected powder and input cables and bolted the sounding board into place, you're left with a glossy, discreet box that's a lot less intrusive than some competing designs.
Performance hits the bulls-eye
The market’s not short of affordable, self-consciously ‘stylish’ speaker packages, though – what separates the men from the boys is performance. And here Q Acoustics has hit the bull’s-eye almost as comprehensively as it has with the Q7000’s looks.
We threw it in at the deep end with the DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack to the Skynet Edition Blu-ray of Terminator 2: Judgement Day. This is a disc that’s brought some seemingly promising speaker packages to their knees, but the Q7000 stands up to the provocation without flinching.
Its soundstage is expansive, coherent and rigorously focused, effects are sited with absolute assurance and detail levels are sky-high.
Tonally the Q7000 is neutral, but while it remains relatively uncoloured it has no difficulty describing texture, and is as capable of delivering nuance as it is thundering along with the biggest bangs.
High frequencies are crisp and attacking without spilling into hardness (unless you wind the volume around to antisocial levels), and the midrange is explicit and packed with character.
Despite being identical to its four partners, the centre channel has no problem projecting dialogue ahead of the general tumult. The handover between satellites and sub (which occurs at around the 120Hz mark) is smoothly realised, and the subwoofer itself is something of a star.
Everything its fixed-boundary design seeks to achieve comes to pass: bass hits hard, digs deep, is tonally articulate and not remotely directional.
From the subtle underpinning of a basso profundo voice to the overt crash bang-wallop of your average action movie, the Q7000’s subwoofer is a fast, controlled and implacably punchy device.
Equally impressive with music
A switch to the equally, if entirely differently, testing DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack to Stop Making Sense lets the Q Acoustics demonstrate another strength: the ability to play music in a convincing and, well, musical way.
Many rival speaker packages can deliver the meat of a musical performance, but
the Q7000 serves up all the nuances – low frequencies start and stop promptly, the midrange information is packed with detail and the entire frequency range is integrated with a casual unfussiness more commonly the preserve of much more expensive packages.
Timing, and the co-dependence of instruments on each other, is outstanding, with the result that the Q7000 organises and delivers music as naturally as any similarly priced package we’ve heard.
Fundamentally, then, the Q7000 is among the most accomplished style-orientated packages we’ve heard in a good while. And it’s remarkably gregarious when it comes to partnering electronics, too.
That’s not to say it’s perfect, of course – little in life is. There’s that tendency to harden a little when the going gets really loud, for example, and you’re never going
to fill a cinema-sized room with sound from five such modestly proportioned speakers.
But taken in context, the Q7000 is an outstanding offering from a young company that has yet to put a foot badly wrong, and something of a gauntlet to other, longer-established rivals.
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