ACOUSTIQUE QUALITY AQ Passion

Developing proprietary drivers consumes infinite financial resources and yet, at the end of the job, one is unavoidably benchmarked against the best. So the path was set right from the beginning – let’s not reinvent the wheel and source from the very masters of the trade. Thus Scan-Speak Illuminator occupies the top of the cabinet. This ring radiator is a kind of engineering miracle that reaches to ultrasonic frequencies and can be found in many praised speakers, including Sonus Faber, Franco Serblin and GamuT. Its tipped aluminum cap is probably the most recognizable feature of the Illuminator – it dissipates the heat plus corrects tweeter’s dispersion pattern. Alike the tweeter the 12cm midrange driver and 20cm bass driver are from Scan-Speak, and the bass output is supported by front-firing reflex port. All the drivers are mounted into a rigid enclosure of a rather untypical footprint.

The AQ Passion is not a monumental speaker yet it is pretty heavy. It can effectively disappear in a room as the cabinet recedes from your sight due to tits quarter-circle footprint, but it is not easy to move due to metal damping elements that are strategically placed inside the massive layered enclosure. This “active damping” is a proprietary technology that has been for the first time used in the AQ Passion and its floor-standing sibling, the AQ Orca. The baffle of the speaker is vertically curved to align all the drivers in time domain, plus its resonance modes are eliminated by a central milled groove which can be decorated by a veneer or a paint of your choice.

Unlike many others Acoustique Quality does not use non-name wiring in the speaker – all internal components are wired by AudioQuest cables that employ their active 72V DBS system. The dielectric bias system aka DBS continuously sends voltage into the cable’s insulation to polarize molecules of dielectric, thus replacing necessity of burning-in the component again after it has not been played for a while - the wiring is always in its optimum condition. The capsule with the DBS is mounted in a slot above the speaker’s terminals so it is actually easy to test if the speaker benefits from the active conditioning, so it is easy to replace the battery once in a few years. The binding posts facilitate bi-wiring, they are aligned vertically however. I recommend using banana plugs instead of spades as I had hard time to get some stiffer speaker cables into the posts.