While gaming headsets are the number one way for gamers to experience audio, sometimes you want to share it with others. Sometimes you want enough volume to annoy the neighbours, and sometimes you want enough lights to annoy everyone in sight. It’s fair to say that Edifier have achieved both those things with the QD35 Hi-Res Speaker, a Bluetooth and USB-equipped speaker that can serve as a centre point for both your gaming and musical audio.
The Edifier QD35 is monolithic. It’s a chunky black plastic box, with a visible central speaker and tweeter housed in clear plastic so you can see some of its innards. It’s imposing, and, compared to other similarly powered speakers like an Amazon Alexa Studio, or Apple HomePod, thoroughly overpowering.
While it has all of the subtlety of a brick, the QD35 begs for you to look at it. Some of that is due to its industrial styling, and huge Edifier logo on top in bold white font, but really it’s because of the vibrant and customisable RGB lighting. The majority of the front panel can play out a cascade of different colours, in a variety of patterns or styles. It’s very attractive, if you like bright neon lights while you’re gaming, or partying. What am I saying – they’re both the perfect times for bright neon lights.
There’s a single button and two clickable control dials on the right-hand side of the QD35 which control power, inputs, volume, and changing the lighting. Besides those controls, there’s also a 35 Watt GaN charger built in, able to deliver power through USB-A and USB-C ports, and, somewhat oddly, a digital clock.
While that might give it a bit of an old-school vibe – I greatly annoyed my wife by suggesting the QD35 was my new alarm clock – it is actually a handy little readout to have on your desk.
The QD35 can accept a trio of inputs, with Hi-Res Bluetooth available via the LDAC codec, if your device is capable of using that signal. You can also hook it up by USB, taking a direct feed from your computer or similar, or there’s a classic 3.5mm aux input. Whichever you use, they’re all capable of handling high-resolution sound, and they definitely do that with some style.
The output from the QD35 is powerful, clear and has a good level of depth, making the most of its dual driver system. The blurb is clear to point out that the speaker setup is able to handle the mid and treble ranges, with no mention of bass, but despite that, music and audio sound full and pleasingly weighty. That will be because there are bass ports in the rear of the unit.
What it doesn’t tell you is that you need the QD35 to be backed up against a wall to get the best tonal response. If your desk is free-standing, and there’s nothing for the bass ports to fire against, you lose some of that frequency.
I used Apple Music’s lossless downloads for all of my testing, and that meant I could experience the same tracks via all three inputs. The opening piano of Linkin Park’s ‘Up From The Bottom’ rang out with perfect clarity, before the vocals and guitar swept them away with plenty of aggression and bass. You can hear every rasp of Emily’s punchy voice, and you can almost feel Linkin Park’s signature guitar tone. There’s loads of detail, and decent separation between the instrumentation, but I did find I had to tweak the EQ to bring all of the different elements out.
Turning to gaming, and I’ve been playing a lot of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, as well as my regular hops into Overwatch, and the QD35 did a decent job of firing game audio at me from my desk. The downside when compared to my regular setup is that it’s a single unit, rather than a stereo pair, and I definitely missed that width while playing, especially in Overwatch where directional audio is nigh-on essential. I probably enjoyed the light shows and the clock more than using it for gaming, but the option is there, and it was handy to have the wired connection to my PC, with the availability of Bluetooth for my phone as well.
Discovering that the three inputs are fundamentally all very similar was something of a surprise, as I’d expected the wired options to be clearly superior to Bluetooth. Whether that shows that the LDAC codec is doing an exceptional job, or the wired connection is losing something it’s hard to say, but if you’re looking for a speaker that gives you plenty of detail, the QD35 is a good pick.
Edifier’s Connect app is a great addition for interacting with the QD35, and it does a fantastic job of letting you tune and change different elements of the speaker setup, particularly the lighting. There are also different EQ settings, and you can create your own custom one as well. Beyond that, you can control the speaker from here, turning it off, changing the input, and that’s about it. There is a bank of ‘soothing sounds’ in the app, but these are so short as to be utterly meaningless, and sound incredibly artificial.
The QD35 has got a lot of competition, and depending on your setup you might find them a better fit. For gaming, I’ve always loved Creative’s Pebble Speakers, particularly with the addition of the 2.1 bass unit, and they’re cheap and cheerful, albeit with none of the Hi-Res certification or Bluetooth connections.
If you’re after a pure Bluetooth speaker, there’s a cavalcade of options, from something like the Audio Pro C10 MkII, albeit without RGB, or smart speaker options like Apple’s HomePod 2, if you’re in Apple’s ecosystem. I’m sure there are plenty of houses where the QD35 will be the perfect fit, but personally, I’ll stick with the Pebble and a HomePod. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I might already have too much RGB on my computer.