Designed for either soffit-mounted or free-standing use, each QB1-A incorporates the latest generation of PMC's driver designs, Class-D amplification, Advanced Transmission Line (ATL) bass-loading technology, DSP control, and a quartet of 10-inch carbon fibre/Nomex piston bass drivers to create a single reference monitor that has "the transparency, resolution, dynamic range, frequency response, forensic sense of detail, and wide, consistent imaging demanded by the international audio elite".
The QB1-A has its roots in the observation by PMC's design team that there were no large-scale active studio monitors on the market taking advantage of the latest developments in loudspeaker driver analysis and design and DSP-aided control.
This starting point, coupled with PMC's own extensive research into driver performance, using opto-acoustic laser inferometry at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), aided and honed the design of the QB1-A.
"We saw that there was a gap at the high end of the market," explains Oliver Thomas, R&D project manager at PMC. "In the main, the current products on the market don't offer the flexibility of analogue and digital inputs, and suffer from giving listeners an insufficient sense of resolution, compared to what can now be attained with good Class-D amp design and DSP-aided crossover management."
The QB1-A makes up this ground, additionally employing recent advances in PMC's transmission line design concept, as used in the company's IB2 midfields and twotwo nearfields, and the aforementioned NPL analyses, to achieve even more efficient, high-performance designs.
"In this day and age, we felt the market could benefit from a modern, large-scale, high-resolution monitor with digital and analogue inputs," concludes Oliver Thomas. "We couldn't find one. That's why we designed and built the QB1-A."
(Jim Evans)
