There are a lot of speaker brands out there and some get more attention than others. Market share is a funny thing and here in South Africa we seem to be a little more brand loyal than the rest because, in a land of uncertainty, a man sticks with what he knows best. Amstel or Castle?

Just to run with this concept of market share a bit more, you have to stop and wonder why certain brands get the attention they do when there are others out there that are just as good or even outperform the competition.

Often it’s a tech rider thing, which is understandable if you work in that sphere. For some it’s about price over performance. Sometimes, when money is no object, it’s about performance over price. More often than not, however, it’s about brand consciousness; the footprints that have been impressed upon the minds of the market and some of them are embedded as deep as BMW, Coca- Cola and Spur Steak Ranches. This is a difficult thing to break through.

Australian brand Quest Engineering is one of those brands that, because of their immaculate track record overseas and bang-for-buck sound, is slowly working its way into the consciousness of our local market. In my experience they simply make great sounding, robust and well-designed kit.

The newest addition to the Quest loudspeaker range is the QM700 single 15-inch, passive two-way multi-purpose box aimed at small to medium FOH and monitoring applications. If there ever was a bang-for-buck Quest box this is it because I hear the price is too good to miss. But wait. There’s more!

German amplifier manufacturer Camco has partnered up with the Quest engineering team and is loading presets in their iD4 DSP-driven amplifier in order to get the most efficient drive possible out of the QM700 while enhancing its performance and sound quality. I had a chance to go to local Quest and Camco distributors Tadco to hear what the shenanigans are all about and to show the Oates boys how to play ping pong. Watch out for Simon’s sneaky left!

The QM700

The QM700 is a very clean-looking, single 15-inch, two-way enclosure with a simple black steel mesh grille, holes for poles and an angled rear baffle for use as a floor wedge. It is constructed from the same heavy duty birch plywood found in Quest’s high performance HPI systems and is finished in a tough flat black coating.
The high frequency driver is a 1.4-inch ferrite compression driver which, in normal operation with the 15-inch woofer, gives the box a frequency response of 50Hz to 16kHz. It has a power handling of 700W program and 1400W peak at 8Ohms, which is nothing to sniff at, while supplying a maximum SPL of 130dB at 1m. It has two Speakon connectors at the back – one input and for through operation when daisy chaining.

Now, that’s pretty standard spec stuff. What makes this box special, you may ask? Well, Quest has developed what they call their asymmetrical rotatable wave guide which, in conjunction with the LF driver, provides smooth near field coverage, optimised dispersion and imaging in the far field while keeping room reflections to a minimum. This is achieved by keeping the top end of the wave guide narrower than the bottom which results in a tighter, longer throw up top that spreads nicely to the back of the room while keeping near field spread a little wider and “gushy’ up front, if I can put it that way. The wave guide can also be rotated when used as a floor wedge or when horizontally orientating the enclosure for FOH duties. Tend to forget which way you rotated it? Simply pull and rotate the “Q’ logo on the front of the box to the correct orientation to remind you later. Clever, ne?

Camco iD4

As previously stated, Camco and Quest partnered up in order to bring presets for the QM700 to the iD4 DSP-driven amplifier. However, truth be told, Quest and Camco have come together for more than just presets. The upcoming Quest QX4500, which will not be available in South Africa, is basically a Camco iD4 dressed in a Quest suit albeit aimed mainly at its own line of loudspeakers. The reason behind its unavailability here remains unclear but suffice it to say that the Camco iD4 will do exactly the same job and has exactly the same innards as the QX4500.

Getting down to business, the iD4 is a 1900W x 2 (4 Ohms) amplifier with on-board 64-bit digital signal processing. It features two analogue inputs, two AES/EBU inputs, two outputs and the can handle an input signal all the way up to +23dBu; more than enough headroom for most modern mixers.

DSP-driven amplifiers imply a use of some sort of digital audio conversion in order to digitally process the incoming and outgoing audio. The iD4 features AD/DA conversion that supplies 120dB of dynamic range on the inputs and 117dB on the outputs which is pretty good considering most studio-grade converters exhibit these sorts of specs. The internal sampling rate is 96kHz, ensuring utmost reproduction of your audio source; corresponding to a frequency response up to 40kHz with a latency of only 600 microseconds. Of course, 64-bit DSP provides the utmost precision and almost zero quantisation error; none that the human ear can hear, anyway.

With the aid of the DSP each input and output receives 10 bands of parametric EQ with options for bell, shelf, notch or all pass filters. Crossover filters include Butterworth and Bessel and Linkwitz-Riley shapes up to 24dB/octave. Maximum delay comes in at 1s for inputs and 20ms for outputs while each input and output receives both limiters and multiband compressors. Input gain range is -48 to +12dB.

All parameters can be accessed by six quick access buttons on the front panel with left and right selector buttons for “Channel’, “Item’ and “Menu’ and an accompanying rotary knob. The only difference I can see between the iD4 and the QX4500 is 100 presets versus 50 presets, respectively.

The sound

It’s always difficult in a review like this to give an objective analysis of the “sound’ of a specific loudspeaker under conditions that aren’t ideal and when there isn’t a reference point such as comparing them to a known control system you are familiar with. However, given that this speaker’s wave guide technology claims to minimise room reflections, the conditions might have been a bit more ideal than expected. In this case I was at the Tadco head offices in Laser Park and was given a demo of the speaker in their showroom, first without the DSP preset and then with it enabled.

My initial impression of the speaker was that it sounded very balanced tonally. It had a nice punchy bottom end that hit me in the chest nicely and the midrange seemed quite smooth without any erroneous bumps in the harsh upper midrange or honky zones. The top end, while on paper extending only to 16kHz, seemed very fast and transparent. Standing in between the two speakers, the stereo spread was enhanced greatly by a very fast transient response which made the stereo mix of the material dance around my ears. It was a pleasing experience.

Next I took a walk from front and centre towards the rear-left of the room and made an arc towards the right. The QM700 certainly seemed to tame the room’s reflective surfaces and I could certainly hear evenness in its dispersion. The asymmetrical wave guide seemed to be doing its job.

When the preset was enabled the bass end immediately jumped forward and the top end got a bit more sparkle. The midrange, however, didn’t disappear into smiley-face land which was encouraging. I don’t have too much information on what exactly the preset does but according to my sources the DSP doctors at Camco applied some EQ tuning to the cabinet along with some multiband compression for further tweaking. It wasn’t heavy handed by any means but rather just took the speaker from flat, studio monitor-like clarity to a more hi-fi quality with a fuller low end.

The wrap

The Quest/Camco combination seems to be working. Granted, I am no expert on either brand because you just don’t see enough of them out in the field to get the full experience of their range but I have reviewed the HPI range in the past and they were equally impressive. Quest is yet to let me down, even in showroom conditions, so if the brand barrier can bend a little I think they have a shot at getting in the hands of more people who will appreciate them for what they are: good, well-made, great sounding loudspeakers. The price ain’t bad, either!