RICHTER MERLIN SERIES V LOUDSPEAKERS
Richter’s new Merlin Vs sound bigger, better and more beautiful than you’d ever imagine a pair of small two-way speakers could sound… as you’d expect when you discover who designed them!
Richter’s floor-standing loudspeakers get so many press mentions, so many reviews—and garner so many awards—that its smaller speakers tend to get ignored by hi-fi reviewers, including yours truly. I did a fairly intensive web search and found only one Merlin review, by Sound + Image magazine (www.tinyurl.com/S-I-Merlin) and that mentioned the Merlins only in passing, as just one element of a complete home theatre speaker package. I did find a user-review of a pair of Merlins from back in 2007, on a British Ex-pat’s forum where the poster wrote that he’d compared the Merlins against equivalent models from Wharfedale, JBL, Cerwin-Vega and Bang & Olufsen and he reckoned that the Merlins sounded better than all of them.
Something unusual happened with when I started investigating the provenance of the Merlin design. I discovered that although Richter’s floor-standing models are designed by one of Australia’s most famous speaker designers, Martin Gosnell, the smaller bookshelf models are designed by none other than Brad Serhan, also one of Australia’s most famous speaker designers, who’s not only designed speakers for Duntech, Axis, Acoustic3D, Moos Audio, and Brigadier’s Audio, but was also the founder of Orpheus Loudspeakers. Hiring two of Australia’s best speaker designers was an inspired decision by Richter’s owner, John Cornell, but it must be a costly way to do business! Although Richter has made many updates over the years, the speakers in its new Series V incarnation have changes that are by far the most dramatic in Richter’s 30-year history. By way of example, both drivers in the Merlin Series V are new for Richter: a proprietary 25mm soft-dome tweeter with a neodymium magnet, and a 105-mm composite paper-cone bass/midrange driver. The crossover is also totally newly designed, though it uses the same massive air-cored inductors and Bennic polypropylene (and bipolar electrolytic) capacitors for which Richter is renowned. Even the cabinet design has been modernised so that it’s now styled in the same manner as small two-way designs hailing from Italy and France, with a much more sophisticated exterior finish than I’ve seen on Richter speakers in the past.
Although the bass/midrange driver is new, it still has a rubber roll surround suspension, which is good news in Australia, because the foam suspensions found in many imported loudspeakers will fail after a fairly short number of years, primarily due to the high levels of ultra-violet radiation in Australia, plus our mostly hot and humid atmospheric conditions. Rubber suspensions are far more durable.