Home Review Q Acoustics Concept 300 monitor

Review Q Acoustics Concept 300 monitor

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Pros

  • Sounds great!
  • Looks neat
  • Good value

Cons

  • None we can think of

Price: € 3750

Build quality
Usability
Sound
Price
Concept 300

Intro

Many manufacturers say they innovate. However, as with detergents, the label “NEW” does not always mean a clearly visible improvement. Often that innovation is hidden somewhere. The Q Acoustics Concept 300 has by no means hidden its greatest innovation. In fact, the monitor’s on it, literally. Spoiler alert: this is the first review where we attribute the quality of the speaker to a tripod. How’s that?

A few months ago in London we witnessed the launch of Q Acoustic’s flagship monitor speaker, the Q Acoustics Concept 300. Central figure of Q Acoustics and our host was Alex Munro, who has been in the loudspeaker business for forty years. He started as a speaker designer at KEF, was director at Tannoy and then went to work at Armour Home, the parent company of Q Acoustics.

In those forty years Munro has put down a sloppy 2 million loudspeakers. Anyone who knows the brands KEF and Tannoy and their lifespan (and we’re counting on you, Alpha reader, for that matter) will realise that there are still a lot of Munro speakers on this earth! In the video of the introductory story Alex talks about the Concept 300.

Tensegrity

After the success of Q Acoustics’ floor stand, the Concept 500, it was a logical step to also work on a monitor version of this reference series. For us, the most intriguing thing is the tripod on which the Concept 300 rests; in terms of design, material and technology this is at least as interesting as the speaker. In a search for ways to maximally decouple the monitor from the standard, the design team came up with a construction that is most reminiscent of tent poles held under tension by metal cables in a twisted construction. It is undoubtedly a design discovery, although it is mainly for acoustic reasons that the stands have been designed in this way.

Tensegrity is a construction method used in the last century for bridges and other structures where low weight, high stiffness, flexibility and load-bearing capacity have to be matched to an optimum. A well-known example is the Aviodome, the aviation museum that once stood at Schiphol Airport and is now near the ports of Amsterdam-West.

It is definitely a design discovery, because the rather large speaker seems to become an anchor on the tripod. Especially in the silver version, the whole falls away against the background. In the dark tones it looks a bit like an old-fashioned camera placed on a tripod. Of course you can’t argue about taste, but we like it.

Speaker and tripod are preferably sold as a set. The speaker base also has a springy bottom, similar to how the plinth of a turntable is separate from the plateau and the tone arm (and with much stronger springs).

Type test
Single Test
Speaker class
Monitor - bookshelf
Speaker type
Dynamic
Speaker system
Bass reflex
Signal control
Passive

Winkels met Q Acoustics

Grotestraat 23
5931 CS Tegelen, NL
St. Ceciliastraat 28
5038 HA Tilburg, NL
Beethovenstraat 9-b
1077 HL Amsterdam, Noord Holland, NL