Напольная акустика — Venture Audio QA-3

The QA-3 belongs to the QA Series, what Venture Audio presents as the second line of its active reference speakers inside the Quantum Series. The QA models are intended for mid-sized or smaller rooms, and the QA-3 is the three-way floorstanding member of the group, above the two-way QA-2 tower and the QA-1 stand-mount. Venture Audio runs offices in Brasschaat in Belgium and in Singapore, and it has designed its own drive units since 2001, when the founder Didi decided the company should build drivers matched to its crossover filters.

Key specs that matter

Three amplifier channels are built into each cabinet, rated at 500 W, 500 W and 150 W. The driver complement is a 2 inch full-range AGC unit working as the tweeter, one 6.5 inch CFGC midrange and two 9 inch CFGC woofers. Venture lists harmonic distortion of 0.003 percent and a power bandwidth reaching 25 kHz. The only signal input is XLR. A universal mains stage accepts 85 to 265 V, so the same speaker runs on grids worldwide without a voltage selector. Each cabinet measures 35 cm wide, 45 cm deep and 124 cm tall and weighs 70 kg.

Engineering and use context

Venture replaces the passive crossover with a SHARC DSP running at 300 MHz, processing at 96 kHz with 40 bit floating point maths and asynchronous high resolution sample rate converters. The DSP assigns each driver to its own operating range and aligns the drivers in time, a task that a passive network with fixed components can only approximate. CFGC stands for carbon fiber graphite composite, a cone in which long carbon fibres are laid in a graphite matrix in a proprietary pattern to stiffen it while keeping mass low. AGC cones use abaca pulp from a plant native to the Philippines as the base of the composite. The cabinet walls alternate high-density fiberboard with solid hardwood and are braced vertically and horizontally inside. Luxe Amara veneer is hand selected, mirror matched and sealed under polyester high gloss.

Pairing

With its amplifiers on board, the QA-3 needs only a source or preamplifier with balanced XLR outputs, and it works well with a streamer or DAC that has a volume control. Venture Audio also makes the VP 200DT, a preamplifier with an integrated DAC, which fits this role within the same catalogue. No speaker cable runs from an external amplifier, but every cabinet has to be plugged into a wall socket.

Alternatives

The Venture Audio QA-2 is the lower QA Series tower, a two-way design with two 6.5 inch CFGC drivers in a 104 cm cabinet weighing 55 kg.