Listening
Contents
We start with the a great EP “Ache of Victory” by Zsela, a young singer from New York. Each song convinces lyrically and her lyrics are inspiring. A number of songs have a nice beat and the Q Acoustics handles that perfectly. The bass, is not fat or slow at all. It’s rather punchy and full of definition. Voices never get sharp and details come through pretty well. It is mainly because of the powerful bass at the bottom-end that the rendition creates a relaxing feeling.Â
But can this monitor also play up-beat? Does it follow the tempo and rhythm of the music well enough as the music gets more complex? We can test this with the guys from Compact Disk Dummies who released their best work to date with their latest album “Neon Fever Dream”.
Where we found the 3050i rather tame, we find the Q Acoustics 3030i much more dynamic and faster and within no-time we’re dancing and shaking along with the music. There are of course faster speakers out there and if we play very loud we notice they harden a bit and that the purity decreases somewhat. But hey where nitpicking here.
Quieter work now with Denison Witmer on his new “American Forsquare”. A wonderful album that gets enough nuance and detail on the Q Acoustics 3030i. Of course there are speakers that render this album more sophisticated but we are amazed at the coherence of this speaker. Violins do not sound artificial or sterile and voices are presented in a natural way. The soundstage is spacious and the imaging is more than decent. This speaker plays big and generous and nowhere is does one element feel out of tune.
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Our reference in this price range is the tiny Cabasse Surf monitor which sounds surprisingly similar. Although the bass is a bit forced with this little French speaker, the tonality is almost the same. You get even more emotion and detail through the Surf but they play smaller and they run out of breath faster. They also have to be a bit closer to the wall to be able to produce a decent amount bass. Once perfectly set up, these are small miracles but they can’t compete in terms of smoothness and relaxing reproduction of the 3030i.