SMSL Q5 Pro - Features
- Direct Digital Amplification (DDX)
- 25W max @ 8 Ohms nad 40W max @ 4 Ohms output
- 3 Digital inputs & 1 Analogue input.
- Optical & co-axial inputs accept 192/24
- Micro USB limited to 96/24
- Sub output.
SMSL Q5 Pro - Functionality
- The supplied USB cable was little hard to plug it in to the amp.
- Front panel is clean with power button & volume knob.
- No physical buttons to switch between inputs.
- toggling the power button switches between the inputs.
- Long pressing the power button, enables switching on & off the amp.
- Toggling the volume knob gives you accees to 8 different preset modes.
- Prest modes (Bass, Super Bass,Heavy Rock, Lite Rock, Jazz. Country, Rap) and EQ0 - FLAT
SMSL Q5 Pro - Remote
- Remote is simple and quite easy to hold. Almost the size of waffer's.
- Round D-pad to adjust the volume.
- input switching, EQ & mute are independent buttons.
- some buttons dont have any functionality assigned.
- Guess future versions of the amplifier will have some feature assigned to this butons.
Klipsch RP 160M Bookshelf - Speaker features
- 96db effcient
- Horn loaded titanium tweeter (First time hands on with metal tweeter)
- The horn looks different from the previous generation ones. They start with a circular shape around the tweeter for about 20 - 30mm and then opens to square area.
- 90 x 90 degrees Horizontal x Vertical beam dispersion Horn. Earlier generation used 90 x 60 degrees..
- Looks like the horn have rubber coating to tame the famed harshness of the Klipsch speaker.
- Tactrix shape rear ported.. looks very good.
- Huge for a bookself.. To me it looks like Half the floorstander.
- Heavy @ approx 10 Kgs each..
Klipsch RP160M - Design & Apperance
- From the front, the speaker looks like it is slightly tited backwards. The speaker sits on a base.
- it is speaker base that has been designed in such a way that is slightly tapered towards the back side. Nice touch. Felt like the speaker were saying hello
- Trapezoid front grille gets attached to the speaker cabinet magnetically.
- The front of the speaker sides has been designed to deceive a Trapezoid appearance, while it is regular rectangle shape
.. Nice touch.
- The copper woofer looks lovely with grille off..
- Surprised to see speaker Binding posts are plastic.
- full marks for design & appearance.. Love it.
Pairing the Klipsch RP-160M with SMSL Q5 Pro...
Listening Area - 14 feet length x 11 feet wide. (Untreated room)
Speaker placement : Approx 5 feet apart, minimum of 25cms away from the rear wall and to the side wall of right speaker. Speaker was placed on plastic chair (temporary)
Acoustics in the room : A sofa right opposite to the tweeter @ 14 feet distance, not so thick screen that starts on the sides of each speaker.
cables & connector - MX banana plugs with Belden speaker cable.
Connectivity - PC connected to the amp via Micro USB.
HD STB - Co-axial connection.
Burn in - - Roughly would have clocked 50 - 60 hrs of uage.
Stereo Playback - Used foobar to play the FLAC/WAV & MP3 file (44/16), HS STB & You tube video's. (2.0)
- My first experience with Klipsch speakers was few years back in Cinebels, it was paired with Marantz.. Don't recollect if it was an AVR or stereo amplifier. It was very harsh even for 5 - 10 min listening
- Though Cinebels, Chennai have decent acoustics in the room, it was really harsh.
- Right out of the box, when i played it, the speakers didn't sound harsh
Was pleasantly surprised. Klipsch being commonly known for famed brightness in treble.
- played some familiar indian films songs that have sounded fractionally bright on silk dome tweeter (Sonodyne Sonus 1501 BS paired with ONkyo AVR).
- Again surprised that the same material didn't sound harsh on metal tweeter.
- Bass was stupendous for a BS. They are slick not bloated.
- With a volume of 12 - 16 out of 60 max, it was playing loud in my 150sqft room.
- Picks good amount of details. (Think this is because of sensitivity and the crossover point in the speaker @1.5 Khz, and horn that preserve the details beam them to the user. Sonodyne Sonus had 3.5 Khz crossover point).
- I could sense that something wasn't right.. The high frequencies are not playing the way it should.. It is somewhere skewed.
- To double confirm that , i connected to STB channels (Co-axial) and observed the same thing. Some HF were not right.
- Don't think it is distortion that causes the skewed HF, since rest of the band, felt clean.
- Even when pushed to little more volume, it went loud, but didn't feel distorted.
Multichannel movie playback - Used Kodi, and selected output as 2.0
- Didn't check the subwoofer output as i dont have a sub. Will coonect to my brother's subwoofer in a weeks time & update here..
- Takes more volume for a decent output.. Went up to 25/60 on the amp..
- Don't think there is much difference when i increase volume beyond a point.
- If you have movies in 2 channel AAC, Dolby format, volume is right up there.. But down-mixing 5.1 to 2.0 is not what the amplifier meant for in my opinion.
Anyways have SMSL IDOL USB DAC that i have. Will try connecting to Analogue input of the amplifier and update here..
Finally
- Good enough for small rooms (Second system)
- some more power, atleast 50Watts per channel @ 8 ohms would do good.
- If the SMSL Q5 Pro had DTS/Dolby decoder, would have been a brilliant product.(Basically a 2,1 receiver).
- For movies, i would love LFE to be untouched and fed to the suboutput.
- There is no mention of crossover for the amp. If it was aval, would have taken the load off the speakers when watching movies..
hyeah:
..But i managed to get a pair for 27K... Not sure if the dealer/distributor is carrying the speaker on his shoulder all the way from china to India to charge more than 100% of the US price.. So saved 33K by not buying it from Cinebels, India. The more i hear the prices here, the more it encourages me to get it from the cheapest place in the world.
