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LOUDSPEAKER
www.hinews.co.uk | Reprinted from Hi-Fi News for global distributionReprinted from Hi-Fi News for global distribution | www.hinews.co.uk
Two-way reflex-loaded floorstanding loudspeaker
Made by: Q Acoustics (Armour Home Electronics)
Supplied by: Armour Home Electronics Ltd, Herts, UK
Telephone: [phone]
Web: www.qacoustics.co.uk; www.armourhome.co.uk
Price: £1999
W
hen Q Acoustics launched its
Concept loudspeaker range
in 2013, it began with a
sub-£500 standmount – the
Concept 20 [HFN Feb ’14]. While this
was in keeping with the value-for-money
reputation the UK brand had developed
since its arrival in 2006, within a few years
it was reaching higher with the (then)
£3000 Concept 300 and £4200 agship
Concept 500 [HFN Jul ’17].
With the new £1999 Concept 50
reviewed here, plus companion £899
Concept 30 standmount, Q Acoustics has
nally lled the obvious gap in its range.
Yet it’s keen to point out the new models
should be viewed more as trickle-downs
from the Concept 300/500, and not merely
an update on (or replacement for) the
older Concept 20/40.
A two-way oorstander with an MTM
driver conguration, the ’50
is available in black, white or
silver gloss nishes, minus the
wood veneer details of the
Concept 500. It’s certainly
no less visually appealing,
just more modern, with
curved edges to the cabinet
performing the magic trick
of making it appear more slender than its
modest 180mm width might suggest.
CABINET BLUEPRINT
The Concept range is all but dened by its
innovative triple-layer cabinet design and
the ’50 is no exception, combining the
Gelcore damping, FEA-modelled internal
bracing and Helmholtz Pressure Equaliser
(HPE) tubing seen in the ’500 [see PM’s
boxout, p59]. Yet this is where the trickle-
down technology – for the most part –
ends, as the Concept 50’s bass/mid and
tweeter are new ‘ground-up’ designs, albeit
utilising similar materials (coated paper for
the bass/mid, fabric dome for the tweeter)
as for the rest of the Concept range.
all with adjustment so you can engineer
a little ‘tilt’ to keep you on-axis with the
tweeter. Note that the base plate allows
for a ‘calculated degree of movement’, but
can be locked via Allen xings if a third-
party isolation base is to be used.
While those long feet take the
assembled speaker’s full width to 418mm,
this isn’t an awkward oorstander to install.
Foam bungs are provided for its rear-
facing bass port, although the minimum
recommended rear wall distance is a
meagre 20cm (with 50cm from side walls a
suggestion). Q Acoustics rates the Concept
50 at a very generous 90.5dB sensitivity
with a minimum 3.6ohm impedance,
gures that are in close accord with PM’s
independent Lab Report [p61].
CoNCEPT BLASTS oFF
I won’t beat around the bush: these
loudspeakers are an absolute blast. Not
from the perspective of absolute detail or
transparency, as there’s evidence of the
Q Acoustics ‘house sound’ in the way the
Concept 50 massages treble, and plumps
up bass and lower mid. Yet this voicing isn’t
done clumsily, resulting in an engaging
but not too eager-to-please overall sonic
signature. There are robust lows and
sweet highs, accompanied by a
scale of soundstage that you
might not expect from cabinets
of such modest dimensions.
Most importantly, listening to
the Concept 50 never had me
wondering about the price tag – I was too
busy enjoying myself.
RIGHT: Two 125mm pulp-cone
bass/mid units are combined
with a 25mm soft-dome
tweeter in a classic MTM array.
The drivers are mounted onto an alloy bafe
and into the cabinet using spring-tensioned
studs. A curved outrigger improves stability
The drivers’ diecast chassis are xed
to a rigid, 3mm-thick aluminium bafe,
shaped to provide ‘smooth, low acoustic
diffraction’, which then attaches to the
cabinet by spring-tensioned bolts that
extend through to a corresponding plate
on the rear bafe. Furthermore, the
dome tweeter, which sits within a shallow
waveguide and features an inverted roll
surround to improve its dispersion, is
‘dynamically’ isolated from the bafe. The
125mm bass/mid, meanwhile, features a
30.5mm voice coil, plus Nomex spider and
FEA-optimised rubber surround.
CRoSSoVER oPTIMISATIoN
The crossover point is given as 2.1kHz,
made possible, says Q Acoustics, by its
tweeter’s low 700Hz resonant frequency
and low measured distortion above
1.5kHz. As is not uncommon these days,
this network is mounted
onto the Concept 50’s
cabinet base, ensuring the
components are withdrawn
as far as possible from the
drivers’ magnetic elds and
unwanted vibration.
This base plate itself has
also been designed with
an eye on acoustic benets. Formed of
three layers (upper and lower aluminium,
between which resides a layer of moulded
‘isolation spheres’), it acts to decouple
the cabinet as far as possible from the
supporting surface, in my case the oor. To
this you attach the Concept 50’s feet, small
at the front but as wide curved
outriggers at the rear,
‘Delicious Things’, from Wolf Alice’s Blue
Weekend [Dirty Hit DH01061], began with
a punchy drum roll but quickly grew in size
as the band’s operatic pop soundscape
took hold. The Concept 50s made it
sound large and tall, and brought enough
separation to the elements of guitar, bass,
drums and synths without the track losing
its shimmering, homogenous feel. Yet
when the rst verse arrived, Ellie Roswell’s
vocal, seemingly recorded as close to a mic
as it’s possible to get, sounded dramatically
focused and articulate.
With such well-recorded music these
speakers are in their element, and with
Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo’s country-
tinged ballad ‘Bright Phoebus’ [Despite
The Snow, Linn AKD 456D; 96kHz/24-bit]
they showed a talent for bringing varied
instrumentation to life. In this case, while
accepting an absence of that light and
airy quality some speakers deliver, I was
impressed by the gentle bite of a bow on a
violin string, followed by sustained notes
with a slightly rough texture, all before the
thinner prominence of Barker’s harmonica.
HoT STUFF
To the ‘well-recorded’ pile you can just
about add Billy F Gibbons’ Hardware album
[Concord Records, 96kHz/24-bit], 37mins
of Tex-Mex rock ’n’ roll that tumbled from
these speakers with irresistible energy.
Gibbons’ guitar riffs had a snarling, meaty
presence, distorted but not caustic, and
the rhythm section sounded ready to
perform an arena gig, not simply cut some
tracks in a studio in the desert.
Inspired by the agship Concept 500, Q Acoustics’ ’50
packs a host of trickledown thinking into its slender frame
Review: Mark Craven Lab: Paul Miller
Q Acoustics
Concept 50
‘It sounded
rock-solid, if
you’ll pardon
the pun’
Appearances are most certainly deceptive because the
Concept 50’s tower is not just ‘another curvy cabinet’. By
contrast, a signicant amount of computer modelling, driven
by insights from freelance designer Karl-Heinz Fink’s FAC (Fink
Audio Consulting), has been ploughed into developing as inert
a ‘launch platform’ for these drivers as possible. In practice,
Q Acoustics deals with the ramications of the drivers’
unwanted kinetic energy in three distinct ways.
Firstly, there’s its point-to-point bracing, connecting and
stiffening the sidewalls of the cabinet at critical locations
without bringing additional modes into play. The walls
themselves are not bluff slabs of MDF but a laminate lled with
a compliant gel [the thin blue line just visible in the illustration,
right] that damps out higher frequency cabinet vibrations as heat.
It’s not unlike a far lower mass (and far lower cost) version of the
constrained layer damping employed in high-end brand Magico’s
alloy cabinets [HFN Sep ’11]. The nal resonance-controlling bullet
in the Concept 50’s armoury are the two Helmholtz Pressure
Equalisers (HPEs). These long tubes, mounted inside the enclosure,
are tuned to ‘knock out’ the fundamental cabinet length
resonance by reducing the pressure differential between the
top and bottom spaces within this 29-litre oorstander. PM
RESoNANCE CoNTRoL
HFN Apr Q Acoustics Concept 50_Reprint.indd 59 02/03/2022 14:34