When it comes to loudspeakers, I like all kinds.
But I especially enjoy speakers that can grab me, emotionally and physically, without letting go due to some standout character of their own. I am definitely not talking about some measurable quality, rather the way I interact with the sound of music as produced by a hifi whose main voice is the loudspeaker. At least according to me.
The Audiovector QR 7 SE loudspeakers opened a large, inviting, and well balanced door into the music experience that was at once clear and precise but not overly so that tickled my mind coupled with enough oomph and impact to bring my body along for the ride.
Let’s start at the beginning. Audiovector was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1979 by Ole Klifoth. In addition to that being a long time ago, it was also the year I learned Transcendental Meditation and graduated high school. You can decide which was most important. Today, the company is owned by Mads Klifoth, CEO, and remains, as you may have surmised, a family owned business with every pair of Audiovector speakers still designed, developed and produced in-house. I admit I have real respect for longevity and family-owed businesses in this wonderful hobby of ours and believe both are a testament to quality and character.
The QR 7 SE sit at the top of Audiovector’s QR Series, which includes 6 other speakers, a center channel, a subwoofer, and an in-wall. The QR 7 SE is a 3-way, 4-driver bass reflex design that sports an AMT 2 tweeter that “features a rose gold-plated dispersion mesh, which works as an S-Stop filter” that helps control sibilants according to the company, a 6″ Pure Piston midrange driver, and a pair of 8″ Pure Piston bass drivers. Sensitivity is a claimed 90.5dB with a rated frequency response of 23-52 kHz.
From Audiovector on the Pure Piston drivers:
Based on our experience with stiff light and sound dead membranes in the SR-and R-series speakers, we have developed a new sandwich membrane, which combines the strength of Aero Space Grade Aluminum with the excellent inner damping properties of softer materials. The result is a 3 layer sandwich membrane with no sound of its own and very low distortion, because it performs like a pure piston up to and above its working range.
Audiovector’s drivers are designed in-house and manufactured by a third party.
The new SE version adds (according to Audiovector):
- New in-house designed capacitors result in a cleaner treble and improved detailing.
- Improved heat dissipation via metal housed resistors delivers even more stable high-power precision.
- Cryogenically treated internal wiring improves dynamics and detailing.
- Strategically positioned Nano Pore dampening material enhances midrange openness.
- Bass reflex optimization increases precision.
- Stainless steel high-end spikes with knurled nuts allows easier micro adjustment.
The QR 7 SE stand nearly 45″ tall and the space you see between the base plate and the bottom of the speaker cabinet leaves room for the down-firing port for those 8″ woofers. Woof!
As I hope you can see, the QR 7 SE are built to a high standard and the Walnut finish in the review sample, they also come in White Silk and Black Piano, have a soft, understated appeal and I enjoy the interplay of Walnut, black base, silver surrounds, and golden tweeter. A quiet symphony of stuff for the eyes.
I paired the QR 7 SE with a number of amplification partners including the Barn resident Leben CS600x, the Vinnie Rossi Brama Integrated (more info) just for fun, the ModWright Stack (review), and the Unisons Research Unico 90 Integrated Amplifier (more info). And I’ll say right up front that the Unico 90 proved to be a perfect partner to my ears so the following listening notes were written with that pairing in mind.
And when I say perfect, I’m talking about more than sound. The Unico 90 costs $5499 and the QR 7 SE comes in at $6500/pair which, to my mind, makes sense from a system building perspective. I also mainly used the review Linear Tube Audio Aero DAC (more info) and Barn resident Auralic ARIES G1.1 (review) for most of the review period for the same reasons. You can rad about the Barn and system details here.
One of the things the Audiovector/Unison combo achieved was full-range grip and drive with seemingly plenty of power in reserve. The Dual Mono, Zero Feedback, 2-Stage Valve-MOSFET Unico 90 is rated at 100 Watts of output power into 8 Ohms and 160 Watts into 4, while the QR 7 SE claim a 90.5 (dB/W/m) sensitivity and 6 Ohm impedance. See, even the specs agree 😉 I’m obviously joking because specs will never tell you how a system sounds and the differences in presentation between the Leben, Vinnie Rossi, ModWright, and Unison amps paired with the Audiovector speak to the character of reproduction more than basic functional parameters and this character is what we, as listeners, connect with. Or not.
There are times when I want to listen to music just for fun. And one genre that always spells fun is surf music, where musicians like Link Wray and Dick Dale hold sway. But I recently swan into the UK’s Japanese Television and their 2024 instrumental EP Automata Exotica. As you might imagine Automata Exotica, which was recorded live to tape, has some contemporary twists to its variation on the surf music theme and I really dig their heavy space-surf sound.
From a recent interview:
Tim Jones: For whatever reasons, we were thinking a lot about nuclear weapons, robots, and UFOs. Also, I got a wild new fuzz which is all over the record.
Ian Thorn: Thematically, the album takes in UFO sightings, ritualism, Northern Soul, and nuclear weapons. Sonically, it’s a blend of fuzz guitars, haunted organs, crushing basslines, and pounding drums.
The full lineup also includes Al Brown and Eléa-May Bonnet and together they make a lovely racket that leapt out of the Unison-powered Audiovecter QR 7 SEs with real physical appeal. The Audiovector reproduced this big ball of energy sound with real tactile appeal, especially when pushed past 11. Here, drums have a very nice visceral kick, overdriven organ feels positively menacing, and the fuzzed to max guitar created a rich and large mass of pure music energy. Nice.
And then there are times when I just want eerie. From Boomkat’s review:
Apparently discovered in the goodwill bins of a Portland, OR thrift shop during the short window before said bins are sent to the dump, Carola Baer’s sole album – originally a demo tape for prospective collaboration – came this • close to escaping everyone’s attention, but now takes pride of place as the first Concentric Circles release.
Written circa 1990 on a Yamaha DX7, a Casio CZ-101, and a basic drum machine while UK-based Carola was passing thru San Francisco on her way to Australia, ‘The Story of Valerie’ is a transfixingly intimate and melancholic affair whose heightened emotive atmosphere was the result of meeting new spirits and foreign partnerships that turned into relationships.
By no means an audiophile recording, and thank goodness for that!, Carola Baer’s The Story of Valerie is all raw emotion all the time. While I wouldn’t call the Audiovector overly pleasant in a negative sense, they do a wonderful job reproducing less than stellar sounding recordings due to their evenhanded and anything but shrill sound. There’s a softness to their overall character which moves things like texture and color to the fore, while their full range performance keeps things rich and robust. Of course you can get more—more nuance, texture, and refinement—from other speakers but in my experience that means spending more money.
The only relevant comparison I’ll make, albeit with a lot of time lapsed, is to the GoldenEar T66 (review), which cost $6900/pair. The T66, in brief, house a high-velocity folded ribbon AMT tweeter, two 4.5″ high-definition cast-basket mid/bass drivers, two 5 x 9″ long-throw quadratic subwoofers, and two 8 x 12″ quadratic planar back-wave-driven radiators, with internal 1000W peak/500W RMS, DSP-Controlled amplifiers to power the subs. After re-reading my review of the T66 to refresh my memory, yea I really do that, I would say the GoldenEar are bit more exciting, a bit more lively and certainly offer more deep and powerful bass, even thought their frequency response is rated down to 29Hz (-6dB on axis @ 29Hz, anechoic bass response), while the QR 7 SE are rated down to 23Hz. Hmm.
That being said, the Audiovecter strike me as sounding less lit up, which invites more of a relaxed and lean into kind of listening. What I mean by ‘lean into’ is the sound image and energy coming out of the QR 7 SE seems to hover around the speakers as opposed to the GoldenEar’s more speaker-forward presentation. Or to put it in simpler words, relaxed (QR 7 SE) versus energized (T66). Pick your flavor.
Moving further out but staying the course of folk-inspired roots, with much better recorded quality, Keeley Forsyth’s The Hollow gets deeper and deeper the more I listen. Released back in May on FatCat Records, The Hollow fronted by Forsyth’s wonderfully distinct vocals backed by an amazing cast of characters including Matthew Bourne and Colin Stetson, this record unfolds like a hallucinatory dream state and the QR 7 SE did a good job of recreating the atmosphere, the deep recesses of Stetson’s baritone sax, and most importantly a sound world that was tactile and engaging. While I’ve heard more compelling presentations of this very album, I’m again talking about systems with speakers that cost more. That being said, if I closed my eyes, and I did, and focused on what this system was doing as opposed to what it wasn’t, I was able to nearly picture myself walking along the moors that are within eyeshot from Forsyth’s studio. Strange and beautiful.
Mal Waldron’s The Quest is as classic as classic gets. Featuring Waldron on piano, Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone and clarinet, Booker Ervin on tenor saxophone, Ron Carter on cello, Joe Benjamin playing double bass, and Charlie Persip on drums this is an allstar band at their peak running around inside Waldron-penned wonders. Recorded in 1961 in the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, The Quest also gets better with age (mine). Dolphy is at his meandering in an alternate universe best while Ron Carter dances his way around the cello (and proper pitch), while Waldron races around the keys like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in sound making for a real mind-bending ride with moments of stunning beauty, a kind of reward for the adventurous listener. And the Audiovetor handled all of these distinct voices, moods, and movements with grace and ease.
While I’ve spent words talking about what the QR 7 SE do not do as well as other speakers, and I’ve certainly heard even greater distinction between the varied voices on The Quest, the more relevant takeaway is just how much they have to offer. Spinning through countless records and ‘test tracks’ during the Audiovector’s 3-month+ Barn stay, I was continually impressed by their even-handed, full range, and easy way with all of the music I sent their way. All to say my criticisms/comparisons are largely related to what they don’t do as well as more costly alternatives and decidedly not about faults of their own.
The Audiovector QR 7 SE are an easy speaker to enjoy and recommend in every way—from fit ’n finish to performance. Their special sonic sauce offers a well balanced blend of full range performance, delicacy, and detail presented with an inviting ease that I found welcomed me into the moods and movements of whatever music I asked them to play.
Audiovector QR 7 SE Loudspeakers
Price: $6500/pair
Company Website: Audiovector
Specifications
Frequency Response: 23-52 kHz
Upper Limit: 102 kHz
Sensitivity: 90.5 dB/W/m
Impedance: 6 Ohms
Power handling: 330 W
x-over frequencies: 425/3000 Hz
Bass drivers: 2 x 8” Pure Piston Technology
Mid drivers: 1 x 6” Pure Piston Mid
Treble driver: Gold Leaf AMT 2 with S-stop
Principle: 3 Way
Bass System: Q-port bass reflex
Dimensions cm (Height/Width/Depth): 114 x 25 x 40
