Merlin vsm question

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.

VSM with BBAM gives satisfying extension and wallop to mid 30hz range, and if you need more, integrates well with a sub set up with a benignly low crossover point around 30hz. This is a unique & effective combo: fast, seamless midrange and bass from 2200hz to 30hz from a single 6.5" driver, underpinned by a fast sub. Be aware that the sub needs to be driven by preamp line-level outputs, as speaker-level connections from amp to sub will not work properly with the BBAM's LF filter.

Coming up on 5 years with the VSM-MM's with a variety of amps.Unfortunately an OTL [atmasphere] isn't one of them.Agree with all the above posts regarding full-range and more.They are special though I haven't heard the vr3's for comparision[sp].Good luck,Bob......nice post Ralph.

I'll pipe in here. I had the Merlin VSM-M for 6 years. I used them with Melos, Karan and a high powered class D mono amps. They never did it for me. I did have a balanced battery BAM. I used a tube preamp in all cases except with the Karan integrated. I do not think they are full bodied. My opinion is they are leaner sounding, but do put out good bass. I had ProAc speakers before the Merlins and went back to ProAc speakers after the Merlins.

Stereo, FWIW Merlins are designed for tube gear. The result is that some of the characteristics of transistors will cause a lean sound in the speaker simply because the speaker design does not anticipate that the amplifier used will double power as the impedance is halved. for more info see:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html