I picked up my Super BAM (is this a trademark now Bobby?) back in June when Bobby was just shipping them out the door. I already had the VSM-MX for about 1.5 months. I followed his suggestion of fully charge/fully drain cycle perhaps 10 times. Now I usually unplug the AC and listen in battery mode for one hour and plug it in again and flip the switch back to fully charge. Once a week I do the fully drain/fully charge cycle simply because it does not require much effort.
Bass? Damn straight it does and it does it right. Among others, I have owned a pair of Revel F30 and Gershman Acoustics Avant Garde RX-20 speakers that, in absolute terms, put out more bass in the sub ~150 Hz region. The Merlins, however, put out the right amount of bass the amount that did not call attention to it and was just part of the music. I can understand the comment that this speaker system is somewhat bass shy, but I cannot agree with those opinions whatsoever. If one owns a bass heavy speaker (i.e. there is a bump in that frequency region), the whole spectrum of the music is off and sounds irritating. At least it does for me. As an aside, I had all three speakers mentioned above at the same time for direct comparisons (the Merlins then were the VSM-M with the regular BBAM).
System matching is very important with these speakers. This has been noted many, many times. A couple of years back, I did have a subwoofer for a short period with my VSM-Ms but sold it after replacing my preamp (Sonic Frontier Line 2 SE for a Joule Electra LA 100 MK III). It made the speakers sound fuller not deeper really, just fuller to the extent that a sub was not required.
To the question at hand: What do I think about the Merlins after numerous hours under their belt? They are the cornerstone of my system and I will change my system based upon what I feel is the best match for the speakers.
David
Bass? Damn straight it does and it does it right. Among others, I have owned a pair of Revel F30 and Gershman Acoustics Avant Garde RX-20 speakers that, in absolute terms, put out more bass in the sub ~150 Hz region. The Merlins, however, put out the right amount of bass the amount that did not call attention to it and was just part of the music. I can understand the comment that this speaker system is somewhat bass shy, but I cannot agree with those opinions whatsoever. If one owns a bass heavy speaker (i.e. there is a bump in that frequency region), the whole spectrum of the music is off and sounds irritating. At least it does for me. As an aside, I had all three speakers mentioned above at the same time for direct comparisons (the Merlins then were the VSM-M with the regular BBAM).
System matching is very important with these speakers. This has been noted many, many times. A couple of years back, I did have a subwoofer for a short period with my VSM-Ms but sold it after replacing my preamp (Sonic Frontier Line 2 SE for a Joule Electra LA 100 MK III). It made the speakers sound fuller not deeper really, just fuller to the extent that a sub was not required.
To the question at hand: What do I think about the Merlins after numerous hours under their belt? They are the cornerstone of my system and I will change my system based upon what I feel is the best match for the speakers.
David