Q Acoustics has produced a handful of flagship Concept speakers in the range’s six-year lifetime, but none has reflected the ‘concept’ name quite as much as the newest member.

The Concept 300 standmounters not only build on the innovative driver and cabinet technologies introduced by the Concept 20s, 40s and 500s, but also widen their focus beyond the speaker boxes to the stands. The spindly-looking tripods upon which these speakers sit wouldn’t look out of place in a modern art exhibition, but they were designed exclusively for the Concept 300s, and are included in the price.

To ensure they perform at their best, standmount speakers should be placed on stands – at this level, it’s an absolute must. Q Acoustics’ engineering team felt they could improve on conventional solid designs, the idea being that such stands with relatively large surface areas have significant acoustic footprints, and transmit a lot of sound into a room.

In a bid to support the speakers better, the futuristic-looking three-pronged prism stand applies Buckminster Fuller’s 1960 works on ‘tensegrity’ (‘tensional integrity’) to a speaker domain. 

These Q Acoustics are an innovative pair of standmounters that technologically and sonically are set apart from a lot of similarly-priced competition. The fact they aren’t the most entertaining speakers available at this price point might detract from that achievement slightly, but these are still among the most interesting speakers to have passed through our test rooms so far this year.