British Steal
Q ACOUSTICS is a relatively new British loudspeaker manufacturer who has made a goodly amount of noise in the value/performance speaker arena for a dozen years now. I count the firm among the 21st-century flowering of affordable-speaker-makers catalyzed by partnerships with Chinese manufacturing firms and ever-more powerful and widely accessible computer-modeling design processes. The result of this confluence has been a bounty of excellent designs in the most competitive price ranges, from new and old names alike, that in the aggregate make the home-theater dollar go further than ever before.
To learn just how well Q Acoustics plays in this consumer-benefiting fray, we called in a $1,499 “Cinema Pack” culled from its latest 3000i series: 3050i floorstanders, complemented by 3010i compact two-ways for the surrounds, a 3090i center-channel, and a 3060S powered 8-inch subwoofer. All of these (save the 3060S sub) employ either 4- or 6.5-inch woofers, and 0.9-inch soft-dome tweeters, in handsomely radiused cabinets that the firm claims exploit “point-to-point bracing” to achieve stiffer, less resonant enclosures. The 3050i also uses Helmholtz Pressure Equalizer technology, a feature
