A great compact speaker design that seems to be durable and sounds pretty good.

Non-removeable metal grills (call me crazy, but I become suspicious if I can't see the drivers)

Ever since stores have been trying to get rid of their overstock of this model, I have become more interested in purchasing it. It always seemed like a good unit, but not for the asking price of $300! On a side note, Infinity makes great stuff, but unless you got something from them aftermarket or at a 50% off discount, you paid WAY too much for what it is worth...(In my humble opinion).

***The Good***
As for this unit, I was impressed with how good the highs were. Since it has four 3 1/2 inch full range drivers I was expecting it to be a little bit weak in the highs. Not so, if anything, the highs seemed clearer than many similar units that have dedicated tweeters in them.

Moreover, the design of the unit, (all woofers facing in different directions) gave it a very spacious sound. You can get pretty close to it without being able to specifically point out the location of the speaker. IMO, as long as the sound is crisp, I am all for being unable to localize a surround speaker. Another neat thing about the design, is that it is only 4 1/2 inches think and can be hung on a wall via its keyhole slot. This is great if you want a speaker to blend into the wall and not stick out from it.

***The Not-So-Good***

While this speaker makes a lot of great trade offs in functional design, some limitations are rather apparent. First, if deep bass is your thing, you will want to look elseware. Although it does play its promised 80Hz limit, it will simply not go any lower without damaging the unit. Clearly, Infinity had this in mind when they put "Be sure to set you speakers to SMALL in you setup" in big boldfaced capitalized font in the manual.

However, I would argue that this is really not that big of a deal if you have a subwoofer in your system. Because deep base, below 100Hz or so is non-directional anyway, it is not as if you would have heard a cannon being fired out of a rear speaker anyway. The bass part of the sound would have came from all over. :)

***Overall Opinion***

In my opinion, for $99 a pair, this is one of the best bargins that I have seen in a long time. Even if you have a great system costing upwards of 5 figures, the QPS-1 is hardly an unreasonable option for a rear speaker. On a final note, the sensitivity of this speaker is about 88 db 1w/m. If you do not have a very powerful rear amplifier, or if you have ultra efficient main speakers, the QPS-1's could be overpowered. But for most of us without these constraints, myself included, these units may do rather nicely and save you a bundle to boot!

Similar Products Used:

Mirage, Klipsh, DCM, ect..

appearance, diffuse sound

I recently got these speakers from shop4.com for $171 (pair). They produce a pretty good surround sound; the sound envelopes you but doesn't call attention to itself (you generally can't localize where the sound is coming from). However, I found it necessary to increase the sound levels of these speakers, via my receiver, quite a bit relative to the other Infinity speakers that I have.

I had also tried the Infinity Prelude P-QPS speakers. I decided to go with the QPS-1 speakers because:

1) Price... even at ubid the price was nearly double for the P-QPS.

2) The P-QPS speakers have cheap grills that kept coming loose.

3) I couldn't really hear a difference in sound quality between the two (although I didn't test this extensively or do a side by side comparison).

4) Frequency response... although the P-QPS goes lower (50Hz vs. 80Hz for the QPS-1), the P-QPS speakers don't go as high (15Khz vs. 20Khz for the QPS-1). I figure that it's better for the surround speakers to be able to reproduce the higher frequencies more effectively and to leave the low frequencies to the subwoofer.

Similar Products Used:

Infinity Prelude P-QPS

Most of your reviews are right on. The QPS are a nice set of surround sound speakers if they are only being used for this purpose. But why spend even 200 dollars for a pair of speakers that will only be used for this purpose? Here is a suggestion ... believe me it will be worth some further investigation. Infinity has a pair of full range speakers that look almost identical to the QPS models we are talking about but they are in the Prelude series speakers. Their model number is P-QPS. You may see them in high-end stereo shops as high as 750.00 a pair ... but wait. Go check out www.ubid.com. I just purchased another pair for 227.00. They have 4 midrange drivers with a centered 5 1/4 bass driver. I saved 13.00 from Circuit City's price for the reg. QPS and got a speaker that should not be even considered in the same group. These P-QPS's are great for 5.1 surround, DTS, my first pair have been through it all. Check it out and you can thank me later!

Got these as a part of complete speaker set for a Marantz 880 MkII System. Installed them high on wall at rear of room. Initially weak sounding, until I discovered volume controls on Marantz unit. Once optimized, these speakers make the entire set-up functional. With Star Wars videos, I am looking over my shoulder for the phazer, directional effects are realistic without being overwhelming. With Armageddon (sp?), launch sound effects are complementary without being obstrusive. You feel like you are in the spacecraft!! Nice shape and easy to install.