102 MACWORLD JANUARY 2022
PLAYLIST REVIEW: Q ACOUSTICS 3030iwith bass master Ron Carter and friends in
concert on Foursight—The Complete
Stockholm Tapes. The 3030i portrayed the
audiophile-grade Kronos and Carter
recordings so vividly that I could close my
eyes and be sitting in on the sessions.
More of a hip-hop homie? A Tidal
Masters playlist mashing up Trey Songz
(Rain), Lil Wayne (Green & Yellow), and the
percolating Fredo Bang (To p) proved the
3030i equally adept at message spreading
and party starting, with well-articulated
vocals and raps, samples, and deep bass.
I also spent lots of time revisiting
well-engineered recordings I know like the
back of my hand, including Steely
Dan’s jazz-rock catalog, James
Taylor’s recent American Standard
collection, and Joni Mitchell’s
classic Blue and orchestrated A
Case of You sets.
And then there was the
auspiciously stumbled-upon
classical blast from my childhood
past—Brahms’ Piano Concerto
No. 2 in B-Flat, Op. 83—as done
up by Van Cliburn with the
Chicago Symphony. That’s an
early RCA Victor stereo recording
my father played incessantly and
that sometimes drove me batso
because of distorting piano bits I
detected in the first and third
movements. Yeah, I was a
precocious teen audiophile wannabe. I
used to think my dad had purchased a
bad pressing. But as the warts-exposing
Q Acoustics 3030i revealed, streaming
the same recorded performance from
Chicago classical radio giant WFMT, the
original engineering had been botched!
(The piece and performance are still
pretty terrific, though.)
How do these honest speakers fare
with TV content? DirecTV and streaming
shows played reasonably well, too,
presenting a convincing stereo
dimensionality with ghost-centered
dialogue even though I had the speakersBespoke speaker stands elevate the Q Acoustics 3030i
so the drivers fire precisely at ear height when the
listener is seated on a sofa.