#2. Equipment Reviews - Loudspeakers On Pedestals

By Martin DeWulf

. . . The Oldtimers:

Merlin TSM, $2,000. A 2-way pedestal loudspeaker with 6.5" woofer and 1" soft dome tweeter. Acoustic suspension bass loading, with second order crossover filters for woofer and tweeter. Bi-wire Edison Price terminals.****

Putting the Merlins back in the Big Rig after doing duty everywhere else in the house was quite an experience. I feel confident in now asserting that these speakers are fully broken-in after having thousands of hours on them from a number of different sources. Having listened to them for a week in the new and improved Big Rig, I can say two things: That they have never sounded better, and, this is a speaker with character!

On day two of the re-evaluation, I realized that it took substantially more than two months for these speakers to break-in completely. For the last year or so, I've been using the TSM's everywhere except the main system, and because of that, I hadn't come to properly realize that the maturing process for the Merlins (maybe all loudspeakers) is more in line with eight to ten months of heavy use than it is with sixty to ninety days of white noise and music. The speaker has matured as if it were an adolescent now turned into a man. It's a better speaker now, and the recent seven days spent in the Big Rig by the TSM's resulted in enough notes to write a new full review of two pages or more. But as much as I'm tempted not to, I'll distill my new experiences into a few paragraphs for the purposes of this article.

The listening session notes go like this: "Is this the same speaker? Not yet dark, but a moody romantic tonal balance abundant with detail and imagery... Spacious, yet precise, images beautifully behind the loudspeakers... An extremely smooth sound without ever sounding soft, a crushed black velvet background supporting dimensional life-like phantasms - wonderful layers."

I also made the following observations: "Highs are precise, super clean and extended, but speaker doesn't have a halo or aura of air around it as does the VSM... Harmonically abundant below 1000 Hz, less so above that point. Low level resolution is still extremely good, just lacking the last filigree of cymbal mist and snare air... Highs are like lights piercing the air of a dark humid night... Applause sounds clean and transparent, though lacking some crispness, The slightest hint of hollow on male vocals - full on female... Body, wonderful body! Super coherent, no gaps, no discontinuities."

The imaging precision of this speaker is so exact that one can actually hear the microphone fields. By that I mean, with certain recordings there are spheres of sound within the soundstage which can be attributed to specific microphones. The more mics used in the recording the greater the number of spheres or mic fields. Never have I been able to hear that so conclusively before.

The TSM utilizes a 2nd order (12 dB/octave) crossover; part of the superb imaging is certainly due to the quality of the crossover design and the quality of the parts used in the speaker as a whole, nothing second class here. I've heard a number of speakers with 4th order crossovers as of late (active and passive), and while some come reasonably close to this type of imaging (Waveform and Joshua below), none have ever been able to capture the energy spheres of the microphone sound fields in this manner. This was a first, and I am mightily impressed. In the AC supercharged Big Rig, the TSM's were something to behold.

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