Merlin vsm question

Atmasphere, did not say it, and I have used my Merlins MXes with QSV4s and they are very fine amps indeed, but the Atma-sphere M-60s are the best I have heard with the Merlins, at least for my taste. Since you use the word refined, I have no doubt that is what you think you are getting when you make the move to Merlin. They are among these most well sorted speakers on the market, continuous refinement of a basic design. You will be surprised at the quality of bass from what is essentially a two-way mini-monitor on a very substantial sand filled stand. MM or MX? Could you tell the difference? I don't know - they are both excellent speakers.

That is a very difficult question to answer. A lot of perceived bass is really above 50Hz, and some impressive bass is often exgerated bass with an artificial bass bump. Now some people like that and associate it with powerful bass. On acoustic instruments, I mostly listen to jazz, I find the bass very natural and balanced with the mids and highs on the Merlins. I'm not sure there is much music with 25Hz, but maybe on some synthesizer and organ music. I don't know the VR3 well enough to say whether the Merlins will give you the type of bass the VR3s give you, I can only say that with most music I listen to I never feel like I'm wanting for more bass, but I might feel differently if I listened to orchestral music in large halls that have alot of low bass giving ambient cues of the halls size and scale. But you know, Juan, "full body" is a difficult thing to talk about between folks with different musical tastes, rooms, and preferred volume levels. I just think the Merlins are very, very balanced across the spectrum and can play plenty loud and be room filling in fairly large spaces, but they are not large, multidriver speakers that may excel in some filling in large spaces with loud music.

Indeed the Merlins are intended for tubes. So much so that at one point Bobby had a "tube" version and and "ss" version of the speaker. To me, the Merlins are unforgiving in the sense that they will let you hear your amp and it doesn't candy-coat (maybe to strong a word), put a great tube amp in front of the Merlin and you will get balanced sound. SS has always been a bit problematic for some listeners. Besides the impedance issues with SS versus tubes, the Merlin speakers do not need very much dampening from an amplifier, again, ideally suited for tube amplifiers that most users will us with the Merlins. Love ProAcs too. But that's why there are different products on the market. For me the Merlin is the speaker of choice for two-way speakers and the coherency of that, with enough bass to feel like you are getting a three-way level of bass for most music.