Srixon Q-Star Review (2026): The Ball That Got Replaced

Quick answer

Srixon’s value shelf, priced per ball

Prices verified August 24, 2026 from Srixon’s US store, DICK’S Sporting Goods structured product data, and Rock Bottom Golf.

The Q-Star page doesn’t go where it used to

Type Srixon’s old Q-Star product URL into a browser and the server answers with a 301 redirect to q-star-ultispeed. That redirect is the whole story. The Q-Star series on Srixon’s US site now contains three balls — Q-Star Tour, Q-Star Tour Divide, Q-Star Ultispeed — and the plain two-piece Q-Star isn’t one of them.

Srixon never put out a press release about it, but MyGolfSpy said it plainly when the Ultispeed launched: “ULTISPEED replaces Q-STAR but it’s hardly a one-for-one swap.” Srixon’s European site shows the same three-ball Q-Star series, so this isn’t a US catalog quirk.

Retail agrees. DICK’S carries the Soft Feel at $24.99, the Ultispeed at $29.99, the 2026 Ultispeed Trackline at $29.99 and the 2026 Q-Star Tour at $39.99, with no plain Q-Star anywhere in the listing. Rock Bottom Golf still hosts a Q-Star 6 page at $27.99 a dozen and shows it out of stock. The listings that do show it in stock are used-ball resellers grading and reboxing old inventory.

This matters more than a model-year refresh normally would, because the replacement is a different ball. The Q-Star was two-piece at 72 compression. The Ultispeed is three-piece at 85. A golfer who has bought Q-Stars for years and grabs whichever box looks closest on the shelf is picking up 13 points of compression and an extra layer.

Srixon Q-Star (~72): the ball that got replaced

The Q-Star (~72) was a two-piece ionomer ball on the FastLayer core with the 338 Speed Dimple pattern, and its appeal was easy to explain: a soft-feeling value ball sitting near the middle of the amateur compression range rather than at the bottom of it. Srixon’s last generation of it is usually labeled Q-Star 6.

If you have sleeves left, nothing about them has changed. Solid-core balls don’t age on a shelf in any way that reaches a scorecard, which our piece on whether golf balls go bad covers with the storage data. When they run out, the nearest match by compression in Srixon’s current line is the Soft Feel at ~58 going down or the Ultispeed at ~85 going up. Nothing is left at 72.

Srixon Q-Star Ultispeed (~85): fast, and no help around the green

The Q-Star Ultispeed (~85) is Srixon’s three-piece ionomer distance ball at $29.99 a dozen. Srixon’s spec sheet lists it as 3PC Ionomer, 85 compression, soft feel, high flight, on the FastLayer Core and the 338 Speed Dimple pattern. On March 3, 2026 Srixon added the Ultispeed with Trackline, a two-stamp alignment version at the same price in Pure White and Tour Yellow.

It’s also the only ball here with independent robot data behind it. MyGolfSpy included it in the 2026 48-ball test, and the results are unusually consistent with the marketing:

MyGolfSpy’s own summary of the iron-speed chart is that “ionomer offerings like the Srixon Q-Star Ultispeed and Titleist Tour Soft also produced plenty of speed, both landing inside the top seven.” On the greenside test the same report lists it third from the bottom for spin, behind the Titleist Velocity and Callaway Supersoft.

Those two rows are the whole fitting picture. The Ultispeed does what a $2.50-a-ball distance ball is built to do, leaving the face fast and holding up off an iron, then hands almost all of it back on a pitch that needs to stop. Eighty-five compression is a sane number for the swing speeds Srixon is aiming at: TrackMan’s published club-speed data puts the average male amateur at a 94 mph driver swing, and the average 14.5-handicap player at the same 94.

Srixon Distance (~89): sold, but not merchandised

The Srixon Distance (~89) is a two-piece ball with a thin ionomer cover, the Energetic Gradient Growth core and 324 dimples. Srixon’s US store lists it at $27.99 a dozen — orderable, but on a product page that does not appear anywhere in the site’s ball navigation, and quoting a ship-out date rather than shipping today. Golfballs.com shows it temporarily out of stock, and DICK’S and Golf Galaxy don’t carry it.

It’s for sale. Nobody is selling it to you. In the UK and Europe it gets the opposite treatment, stocked in three-dozen multibuys and carried by Golf Monthly’s cheap-ball guide as a distance pick. The split is normal for Srixon, which runs a partly separate ball catalog on each side of the Atlantic — the AD333 is the mirror image, a British staple that is near-invisible in American pro shops.

Compare that $27.99 to the box beside it. The Ultispeed is $2 more, has an extra layer, sits four points softer, and has robot numbers behind it. The Distance has none.

Srixon Marathon (~98): the firmest ball Srixon makes

The Srixon Marathon (~98) is a two-piece ionomer ball on the Energetic Gradient Growth core with 333 dimples, sold as the Marathon 3 in a 15-ball pack rather than a dozen. Rock Bottom Golf lists it at $19.99, which is about $1.33 a ball.

At 98 compression it’s the firmest ball in Srixon’s whole catalog, tour balls included:

Srixon’s own store lists both the Z-Star and the Z-Star XV at $54.99 a dozen, and builds the XV for golfers swinging above 105 mph. The Marathon is firmer than that and sells for less than a third of the price, in a 15-ball pack priced for golfers who lose a lot of balls. Those two facts describe different players.

Against the 94 mph TrackMan average, 98 compression is a stretch. Our compression chart puts that number in the top band, and the fitting logic behind the bands is that a core you can’t fully compress gives ball speed back rather than adding it. The Marathon is a real bargain for a fast, straight hitter who wants a durable ball in wind. It’s the wrong ball for the average buyer that 15-ball pack is priced to attract.

Price and firmness run in opposite directions

Sort Srixon’s value line by price and you get one order. Sort it by compression and you get close to the reverse:

• Cheapest per ball: Marathon ($1.33) → Soft Feel ($2.08) → Q-Star and Distance ($2.33) → Ultispeed ($2.50) → Q-Star Tour ($3.33)
• Softest: Soft Feel (58) → Q-Star Tour (70) → Q-Star (72) → Ultispeed (85) → Distance (89) → Marathon (98)

The cheapest ball in the line is the firmest, and the most expensive is the second-softest. Only the Soft Feel lands in a sensible place on both lists.

This is the same pattern we found in Callaway’s value tier, where the $21.99 Warbird measures ~90 and the $24.99 Supersoft MAX measures ~40. Cheap and soft get conflated constantly in shelf-side decisions, and they’re unrelated. Compression tracks what a ball is engineered to do, not what it costs.

What the cover costs you

Three of these four balls were never robot-tested. The Q-Star, Distance and Marathon are all absent from MyGolfSpy’s 48-ball field, so anyone quoting you specific yardages for them is quoting a manufacturer.

The test still gives you the cover-material picture, and that’s what should decide whether you buy any of them. In a follow-up analysis published August 21, 2026, MyGolfSpy published its cover-type averages from the same field:

The dry gaps are large. The wet gap is the one that changes a round. By that article’s numbers the average urethane ball held about 90 percent of its dry full-wedge spin once moisture was introduced, while the average ionomer ball held about 55 percent. Dew, a damp lie, a ball out of the rough: those conditions cost an ionomer cover roughly half its bite. All four balls this article covers (Q-Star, Ultispeed, Distance, Marathon) have ionomer covers. The Q-Star Tour is the one urethane ball in the table above, and that cover is the whole of what the extra $10 buys.

Two honest counterpoints from the same data. The Vice Tour, an ionomer ball, finished fourth in the field for iron spin and out-spun 35 of the 38 urethane models there. And on the greenside test urethane balls varied by more than 1,600 rpm among themselves. Cover material is a strong signal rather than a guarantee, which our urethane vs ionomer breakdown works through in full.

One more number worth keeping. MyGolfSpy’s best-performing ionomer ball on the greenside test was the Srixon Soft Feel, and it still finished 36th of 48, roughly 1,400 rpm behind the leaders. Top of the ionomer pile still left it in the bottom quarter of the field.

Which one fits you

Buy the Q-Star Ultispeed if you want a current, easy-to-find value ball and you swing somewhere near the amateur average. It’s the only ball here Srixon is still pushing, 85 compression is a defensible fit across most of the range, and it has independent iron-speed and distance numbers behind it.

Buy the Marathon if you swing hard, lose a lot of balls, and treat greenside spin as a luxury. Fifteen balls for $19.99 is cheap, and the firmness that makes it a poor fit for a 90 mph swing also makes it last.

Buy the Q-Star Tour instead if short shots are where you lose strokes. It’s $39.99, urethane, and ~70 compression — the entire $10 premium over the Ultispeed goes to the cover, and the 2026 cover-type data says that is money well spent for a golfer who plays a lot of pitches. Our Q-Star Tour review makes the full case.

Buy the Soft Feel if you are under about 85 mph. At ~58 compression it’s the softest ball in Srixon’s line, $2 cheaper than the Ultispeed, and the best of the ionomers around the green even at 36th of 48. Covered in our Soft Feel review.

Start with your driver speed, then look at price. The order to work through it is in our swing-speed fitting guide.

The next step

Six balls, a 40-point compression spread, one that’s been replaced without announcement and one you have to hunt for. That’s more than a shelf label can resolve, and the answer moves with your driver speed and where you actually drop shots.

Run the BallCaddie fitting quiz — it scores your answers against the full catalog, Srixon’s value line included, and tells you where each of these lands for your numbers. Or browse the ball catalog to compare the specs side by side.

For deeper dives

• Golf ball compression chart — every ball in the catalog by measured compression, and how to read the bands
• Srixon golf balls: the complete lineup — the whole brand mapped from the Z-Star XV down to the Soft Feel
• Srixon Q-Star Tour review — the urethane ball one step up, and what the extra $10 buys
• Urethane vs ionomer golf balls — the cover-material trade, with the wet-spin data
• Best value golf balls — the value tier ranked across every brand
• The 2026 MyGolfSpy ball test — the 48-ball robot test read as fitting criteria

Key takeaways

• Srixon’s US product URL for the two-piece Q-Star now 301-redirects to the Q-Star Ultispeed, and the Q-Star series page lists only the Tour, Tour Divide and Ultispeed.
• The replacement is a different ball: three-piece at 85 compression rather than two-piece at 72, $29.99 a dozen, with a Trackline alignment version added March 3, 2026.
• The Ultispeed is the one ball here with robot data. It finished inside the top seven of 48 for 7-iron ball speed and among the highest-launching balls in the field, and third from the bottom for greenside spin.
• The Srixon Distance is orderable at $27.99 on Srixon’s US store but absent from the site’s ball navigation and from DICK’S and Golf Galaxy, while remaining a mainstream seller in the UK and Europe.
• The Marathon sells as a 15-ball pack for $19.99, about $1.33 a ball, and at 98 compression it is the firmest ball Srixon makes — firmer than the Z-Star XV that Srixon sells for $54.99.
• Price and firmness run opposite in this line. The cheapest ball is the firmest and the most expensive is the second-softest.
• All four subject balls have ionomer covers (the Q-Star Tour, priced alongside them for comparison, is the urethane exception), which MyGolfSpy’s 2026 cover-type averages put at 3,506 rpm on a 35-yard wedge against 5,415 rpm for urethane, and at about 55 percent spin retention when wet against roughly 90 percent.