Q Acoustics M40

A pair of powered baby floorstanders that have big shoes to fill

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Q Acoustics refers to the M40 as a “powered micro-tower wireless audio system”. That’s quite the mouthful but, translated, what we are looking at is a pair of petite floorstanding speakers with Bluetooth, amplification and extra connectivity built in.

Now, we know floorstanders, or ‘towers’ as they are more affectionately known, can be quite tall and dominate smaller spaces, but trust us when we say the M40 speakers are less Burj Khalifa (which is 830m tall) and more Blackpool Tower (158m). Standing just 71cm tall they are anything but imposing – it’s almost as though they have shrunk in the wash; yet Q Acoustics has packed plenty inside for ultimate convenience.

The M40s, which are available in black, white or the walnut finish of our review sample, build on the company’s M20 desktop system, which we reviewed back in 2022 and to which we gave five stars. No pressure, then.

Once they are out of the box you will need to attach a support base to the rear of each speaker and then screw in the supplied spikes. Each base takes the form of two wings that bolt into the speaker’s underside. They add stability, but we could see them flexing slightly when moving the speakers around and experimenting with positioning.

You can’t take the grilles off the M40 (Q Acoustics claims that they bring added strength to the front baffle), but if you could you would see a two-way speaker design, with twin 13cm mid/bass drivers positioned beneath a 22mm tweeter. The mid/bass drivers use Q Acoustics’ C-cubed Continuous Curved Cone design, which first appeared in the Q Acoustics 5000 Series (we have already given five stars to the 5040 and 5050 floorstanders from that range).