Working with Jorden Guth to produce the newest season of the SoundStage! Audiophile Podcast has got me thinking a lot lately about not merely the future of hi‑fi, but also its science-fiction present. Sci‑fi from the perspective of my old ass, that is. I just can’t help but look at something like PSB’s new iQ2 streaming active speaker system (US$1399, CA$1699, £1199, €1299 for standard finishes or US$1499, CA$1849, £1299, €1499 for the premium walnut veneer) and imagine how much it would have blown my teenage mind if I could plop the speakers (and accompanying network infrastructure) in a time machine and teleport them back to the 1980s, when my passion for hi‑fi began.
Frankly, I think the iQ2 system would have frazzled my half-cooked mind more than the iPhone I would have to send back in time to control the system, if only because the latter would be so alien as to be beyond wonder. These little active streaming speakers, though? Once I figured out that they’re simultaneously source, preamp, amp, and transducers, I would have been flabbergasted by how well they do all of the above as compared with anything available at the time. Plus, I don’t think I could have assembled an entire system for US$1500 in the late ’80s that could have come anywhere close in terms of overall performance. (I should have added a spoiler warning tag before that pronouncement, I know. Sorry about that.)
OK, but back up. What are we talking about here? What actually is this iQ2 system? In short, it’s a sequel to PSB’s popular Alpha iQ, although the 2 at the end of its name doesn’t mean what you think it means.
This is actually one of two follow-ups to the Alpha iQ, the other being the iQ1 (US$999, CA$1299, £899, €999). What differentiates the iQ1 and iQ2 is that the latter, under review here, relies on a low-latency wireless link between the speakers themselves, whereas the iQ1 has a physical tether between the cabinets. That has some implications for how the amps are designed, but both deliver 135Wpc of total output, with 90W for each 4″ (100mm) woofer and 45W for each 0.75″ (19mm) aluminum-dome tweeter, each of which sits under, not over, its respective woofer.
The iQ1 comes in your choice of black or white, whereas the iQ2 is offered in a veritable rainbow of flavors, including black, white, Granite Gray, Sandstone Beige, Ember Red, and Boreal Green, as well as the slightly pricier premium walnut veneer mentioned above.
The primary cabinet of the iQ2 system can accommodate one line-level or phono (MM) source via RCA, and also has an optical S/PDIF in (TosLink); an HDMI eARC port; ethernet and Wi‑Fi connections for BluOS, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Qobuz Connect, and Tidal Connect, as well as a Bluetooth antenna with support for aptX Adaptive. There’s a subwoofer output as well as USB‑A and USB‑C connections, the former of which supports FAT32- or NTFS-formatted thumb drives, the latter of which can be used as a USB‑DAC input for a connected computer.
Setting up and dialing in the PSB iQ2 speakers
Given that the iQ2 system is functionally a Bluesound streamer wearing an active-stereo-speaker-system-shaped trench coat, it should come as no great surprise that the BluOS app is central to setup, and not merely for the streaming stuff.
If you’re on iOS and connecting the speakers to your home network wirelessly, the very first step of the configuration process is AirPlay Setup, in which the primary iQ2 cabinet piggybacks on the Wi‑Fi connection of your phone, after which it searches for and installs any relevant BluOS updates before walking you through identifying which speaker is which by playing a test tone on one and having you tap the speaker that’s making noise on an overhead stereo diagram of the cabinets. It then firmly establishes the link between primary and secondary cabinets (the primary one being the one with all the I/O), and from that point you’re ready to listen to music.
Well, maybe. There’s still a bit of setting up to be done. The manual indicates that the dual-purpose phono/line‑in input “automatically detects whether the connected source is a turntable or a line-level audio device,” but that turns out not to be the case. Maybe it was when the manual was written, but when dealing with connected systems such as this, firmware updates can change everything.
You actually have to navigate to the Customize section of the Inputs screen in the BluOS app and toggle the Phono Pre-amplifier button on if you’re not using an outboard phono stage. While you’re there, by the way, you might also want to bop over to the HDMI ARC section and turn on Auto Sense, so the speakers automatically switch over to TV sound when you turn on your display.
You’ll have to navigate to the Player Settings menu for other relevant settings most people will likely want to tinker with, such as the subwoofer configuration. Interestingly, although you can toggle the subwoofer output on and off without having a sub connected, you can’t adjust crossover settings unless you have a sub physically plugged in (or unless you’ve linked to a Bluesound wireless sub). Crossover points are, in typical BluOS fashion, available from 40Hz to 200Hz in 10Hz increments.
There are also all manner of other things you might want to dig into here depending on your specific use case, from sleep timers to volume limits to gain settings and so forth, but anyone familiar with BluOS should already be familiar with those, so we won’t dive in too deeply here.
But there is one more setting I want to point to and underline, because it could affect your enjoyment of the iQ2 system without you really understanding what it does. That setting is called “A/V mode,” and the app describes it as follows: “Enabling A/V mode helps with real-time audio (such as TV synchronization) and is important when players are grouped. Disabling A/V mode prefers quality over speed and is best for audio-only sources (such as vinyl record players).”
We’ll dig deeper into what that means in the performance section below.
The iQ2 system unfortunately does not support the Bluesound RC1 remote control, nor does it come with one of its own. If you don’t connect the speakers to a display via eARC, the BluOS app is your remote control. But you can also use the app to set two handy presets, accessible via the touch controls atop the primary cabinet, alongside the volume controls.
To test the iQ2 system’s HDMI eARC functionality (and to add a remote control of some sort to the setup), I plugged a 32″ TCL QLED TV into it. The only other external source was my U‑Turn Audio Orbit Theory turntable. I also connected my SVS PB‑1000 Pro subwoofer for some brief 2.1 testing, but did most of my listening in pure stereo mode.
I did tinker briefly with a hard-wired network connection, by the way, but just note that there’s only one shared ethernet port for both speakers. In other words, the tether between the cabinets is going to be wireless no matter what you do.
How does the PSB iQ2 system sound?
How much easier would my job be if I could just say, “It sounds like a two-way PSB bookshelf speaker” and be done with it? Because if you’ve ever heard a two-way PSB bookshelf speaker, you’d know exactly what I mean by that. But what if you haven’t?
It really boils down to this, if all you’re looking for is the TL;DR: good tonal neutrality overall, good horizontal dispersion, amazing vertical dispersion (as a consequence of the woofer-over-tweeter design), and almost enough bass to satisfy SoundStage! Solo’s Geoffrey Morrison—by which I mean way more bass than you’d expect from a 4″ driver in a 9.7″H × 5.7″W × 7.6″D cabinet. PSB specifies on-axis frequency response of 64Hz to 20kHz and a low-frequency cutoff (-10dB) of 35Hz, and in my subjective testing, that seems pretty much spot on.
As I’ve mentioned so many times—I’m almost bored of reading it myself—one of my go-to bass tests is Björk’s “Hyperballad” (Post, 16‑bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Atlantic / Qobuz). And let’s be clear about something: this is an unfair test for a speaker like the iQ2. The song really requires bass extension down to ~32.7Hz to do it justice, as its bass line is a descending three-note sequence of D#, D, and C, all run through a subharmonic processor of some sort. The question I’m asking when I feed this song to a speaker like this sans sub isn’t “Can it do this?” but rather “Does this break it?”
I’ll be damned if the iQ2 didn’t pull it off, though. Perfectly? Of course not. But those three notes, while not delivered with absolutely equal amplitude, were close enough that I don’t think a lot of people would notice. So what gives? If I pushed the volume slider to its limits, the bass did start to modulate the vocals, and I could hear the cabinet resonating a bit. Plus, there was a bit of distortion.
Granted, when I added my SVS sub to the equation, the bass became much more robust and impactful, on top of the improved note-to-note consistency. But of much greater consequence, in my opinion, is that offloading the deep bass duties to a dedicated box along the side wall improved vocal purity and clarity and allowed the system to play much more loudly as a whole without compromise.
There’s another great bass torture test track that I could have sworn I relied on too recently to regurgitate here, but digging back through the SoundStage! Access archives, I’m not seeing a recent reference, so I’ll mine it again for all it’s worth. “Forty Six & 2” from Tool’s Ænima (24/96 FLAC, RCA Records / Qobuz) features a relentless, nonstop assault on the woofers that will pressure-cook a voice coil and generate some significant compression as a result. It’s as much a test for an amplifier’s power supply as it is of a woofer’s tolerance for punishment. Right around the 4:35 mark, there’s a bass-drum fill that either sounds weak or outright buried on most little two-way bookshelf speakers without the aid of a sub, and if I hadn’t spent a lot of time listening to this track critically on full-range systems, I’m not sure I’d have noticed anything missing from the iQ2 system’s delivery of it. I had to skip forward a few seconds, to the machine-gun spray of kick-drum bullets starting at around 4:45, to really get the sense that there was something in this song that these speakers weren’t delivering on their own. But that machine-gun spray didn’t stress or strain the speakers; it just sort of disappeared gracefully, leaving a shadow in its place.
Given that my theory of hi‑fi is largely centered on the reduction or elimination of distractions, I like this approach. If the iQ2 system can’t do something, it just doesn’t pretend to try.
On the other hand, when it excels at something, it’s not shy about it. “Forty Six & 2” is, in addition to being a great bass torture test, a really great reference track for soundstaging. Percussion early in the song is dominated by palm-muted guitar courtesy of Adam Jones and sampled tabla played on an electronic drum kit by Danny Carey, and all of it simply refuses to be constrained by the mere limitations of speaker placement, with the latter in particular extending wide and deep into the room. In the midst of this cyclone of sound, vocalist Maynard James Keenan’s voice serves as the eye, remaining composed and centered and beautifully positioned within the space created by the song.
It’s also such a dense and full-bandwidth mix that any appreciable degree of variation from tonal neutrality stands out like a red baseball cap at a public library. But in all of my torture testing, “Forty Six & 2” just sounded like “Forty Six & 2.” Full stop.
As with the Björk tune, the biggest benefit of adding a sub to the equation with this one wasn’t necessarily the depth or strength of the bass it added, but rather the load it took off the little 4″ woofer, which had the benefit of letting the system play much more loudly and appreciably more cleanly.
That’s with music, mind you. With movies, a sub becomes more important for overall impact. And I know I keep beating the same drum over and over again here, but I’m struggling to find a movie that tells me more about a system’s performance than does Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, although in this case I relied on the Disney+ app built into my TCL TV instead of the UHD Blu‑ray. Not that it matters. Both get the job done in terms of audio.
With the opening scene, in which Senator Amidala’s silver spacecraft glides through space into the atmosphere of the ecumenopolis Coruscant, I found the speakers themselves did a pretty good job of feeling weighty and substantial, even without the sub, but as the ship enters the atmosphere and approaches the cloud layer, it did briefly clip the left speaker with the volume at around the 95% mark. Engaging the sub and the crossover nipped that in the bud, and also added all of the impact you simply can’t get without a subwoofer for movies of this sort.
But that’s not actually the scene I want to dive deeply into here. As is usually the case, it’s the next scene that’s so informative. In this scene, a bunch of Jedi sit across the desk from Chancellor Palpatine to discuss the current state of galactic geopolitics, and as I’ve described the scene before, the dry dialogue is mixed into the center speaker, whereas the reverberance of the voices is mixed more left/right.
That’s all well and fine, but what happens when you don’t have a center speaker? At first, I thought the unique mix of this scene was contributing to a quirk I couldn’t unhear: voices seemed to spread to fill the space between the left and right speakers. There was a center image, but objects occupying it were massive. Not louder. Not more prominent in the mix. Not tonally off in any way. Just bigger spatially.
At first I thought there might be some phase issues, so I ran some stereo phase tests via YouTube and found that, nope, when you actually play an out-of-phase sound, said sound comes from the room itself, not the speakers. And in-phase sounds color entirely inside the lines drawn by the cabinets themselves.
So, what was it? Remember that A/V mode setting I told y’all about above? Turning that off turned the image specificity up. Centered voices became much less diffuse and easier to point at in three-dimensional space. Going back to Episode II, I found the mix worked as well as it reasonably could without a center speaker. Which is to say: pretty darned good.
How big a deal is this? I invited my wife into my stereo listening room and switched back and forth, asking her if she could describe the difference. She said, “I can hear a difference; I just can’t articulate what the actual difference is.” So I described it to her and played a few video clips and music samples to demonstrate how, with A/V mode on, everything sounded pretty much the same, but the center image became more diffuse. After a few rounds of A/Bing back and forth, she looked me dead in the eye and said, “I cannot understand the mind of anyone who would care about something like that.”
Ouch.
At any rate, I do care about spatial effects of this sort, and so A/V mode stayed off for the rest of my testing.
What did I give up as a result? Again, the app describes the setting thusly: “Enabling A/V mode helps with real-time audio (such as TV synchronization) and is important when players are grouped. Disabling A/V mode prefers quality over speed and is best for audio-only sources (such as vinyl record players).”
I figured I might have to deal with some latency as a result, but heading back over to YouTube and cueing up some A/V sync tests, I found latency to be under 50ms, which is below the threshold for perceptibility.
So I did some multiroom audio tests with my NAD C 3050 and my Bluesound Pulse M (unfortunately, the Pulse Flex is currently with my Wirecutter colleagues for photography, so I couldn’t add another multiroom sink). If turning off A/V mode caused any problems with synchronization or anything else of the sort, I couldn’t hear it. So my advice would be, unless you’re encountering issues that A/V mode might fix, turn it off during initial setup and don’t look back, because I think it’s introducing a bit of micro-delay between cabinets that doesn’t throw phase all the way out of whack but still results in a slightly diffuse center image for video sources.
Lastly, I apologize for subjecting you to too much of the sausage-making process, but when I received the iQ2 review system, the PR professional who coordinated it all went out of her way to ask me to do a firmware update immediately before I started listening, as there was a critical patch that affected HDMI eARC connectivity as well as phono-stage gain. Whether or not the latter affected the auto-sensing feature detailed in the manual but missing from the actual product in my experience, I’m not sure. But it still made me feel like I really needed to test the living hell out of both of these connections.
Let’s start with the phono stage first. Long and short: it’s a good’n in terms of RIAA compensation, and even has a pretty good rumble filter, as evidenced by its handling of my warped copy of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s 나비 3000 (KGLW‑008LP). I still very much preferred the output of my U‑Turn Theory turntable’s baked-in Pluto 2 phono pre, as it gave me more gain and a little less noise, but overall, the iQ2 system’s MM input will suffice for most people, I think.
The HDMI eARC connection, on the other hand, still has a few kinks that need working out. I spent weeks streaming YouTube videos for hours on end with no problems at all. I watched the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy via Disney+ and most of the newly remastered Beatles Anthology with the only hiccup being the occasional audio glitch whereby the left speaker would cut out for a few seconds and then pick up the slack again.
And then, one day, right in the middle of one of JT Chapman’s video essays on YouTube, the sound just stopped. I turned off the TV and rebooted the iQ2 system. Nothing. I unplugged the HDMI cable and plugged it back in. Nothing. I replaced said cable with a brand-new 8K-certified HDMI cable, fresh out of the bag. Nothing.
The only way I could get sound back was by unplugging the power cable from both the iQ2 system and my TV, leaving them unplugged for a minute, and then plugging them back in.
And then the same thing happened again the next day, this time not with YouTube, but with Critical Role’s streaming app, Beacon.
It never happened again in the two weeks that followed. HDMI eARC is finicky as heck, and there’s just no way of knowing whether this was my cheap TCL TV’s fault or whether to lay blame with the iQ2 system. Hopefully, it’s the latter because it means it’ll be fixed. But in the meantime, it wasn’t too big an inconvenience for me because I was primarily relying on the system for music playback, not A/V.
What other connected speakers might you consider in this price range?
Are you OK with basic black or white finish options? Do you not mind a 3m cable connecting your active speakers one to the other? Are you still chasing that PSB sound? Then you might also consider the iQ2’s little sibling, the iQ1, which sells for $400 less in the US.
Both have HDMI eARC, but I suspect the iQ1 might actually be better for A/V applications because of the physical tether between cabinets. If I’m understanding the architecture of the two correctly, the iQ2 is like two streamers paired in stereo mode, whereas the iQ1 is more like a stereo streamer that sends one channel of info to a separate box via a wire. Am I sure that has consequences for the center image of dialogue via the HDMI port? I am not, since I haven’t tested the iQ1. But I’d certainly like to test it out to see.
You should also take a gander at the KEF Coda W (US$999, CA$1198, £799, €899), which requires a tether between the cabinets, but also supports HDMI eARC, has a subwoofer output, and separates its MM and line-level connections, giving you a little more analog connectivity overall.
TL;DR: Is the PSB iQ2 system worth the money?
Are you going to connect your wireless stereo speakers to a display via HDMI eARC? If not, I don’t have any meaningful criticisms of the PSB iQ2. Tonal balance, dynamics, and soundstaging are excellent, and with most music that most of you are likely to listen to, you can consider a subwoofer a worthy upgrade that can be put off until you can afford it, since the iQ2 system didn’t meet many tracks in my testing that it couldn’t handle just fine without a sub.
Above all else, my brain just can’t help returning time and again to the point I made in the intro. I’m showing my age here, to be sure, but I simply can’t get over how well the entire system performs for the price. An entire stereo system, soup to nuts, including source, DAC, preamp, amp, and speakers, for less than the inflation-adjusted equivalent price of my beloved Pioneer A‑70 integrated amp from 1985? Wowzers.
And yeah, sure, it’s not the last word in image specificity, even with all the settings dialed in to perfection and toe-in obsessed over to the point of concern. But it more than makes up for it with room-filling soundstaging, exceptional tonality, good dynamics, great DSP design, and stunning good looks.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Display: TCL 32Q3K
- Subwoofer: SVS PB‑1000 Pro
- Sources: U‑Turn Audio Orbit Theory turntable; iPhone 16 Pro Max
- Interconnects: Monoprice HDMI and subwoofer cables
- Power conditioner: SurgeX XR115
PSB iQ2 streaming active speaker system
Price: US$1399, CA$1699, £1199, €1299 for standard finishes; US$1499, CA$1849, £1299, €1499 for premium walnut veneer.
Warranty: One year, parts and labor
PSB Speakers
The Lenbrook Group
633 Granite Court
Pickering, ON L1W 3K1
Canada
Phone: (905) 831-6555
Website: www.psbspeakers.com
