Someone once said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness (and no, it wasn’t Oscar Wilde; the derivation is uncertain). And in this regard we’d note that Richter’s most successful model, the ‘Wizard’, may be the only Australian loudspeaker design that has ever been outrightly copied. The ‘knock-offs’ were marketed under the name ‘Lizard’, though the only thing that the real Wizard and the copy Lizard had in common was their general appearance (the drivers and crossover were completely different) and their one-letter-changed model name.
But it was ‘imitated’ because Richter’s Wizard design was not only the best-selling Australian speaker on the market, but also the best-selling loudspeaker in its price category. When we reviewed the latest iteration of the Wizard earlier this year (the Wizard Series 6Plus, so yes, a design still going strong), we suggested that there were so many significant changes over the previous Series 6 version that Richter could have called it a ‘Series 7’ model. Well here we go again.
The same could be said of these new speakers from the Sydney-based company, which update the company’s classic Merlin bookshelf design from Series 6 to ‘S6plus’ status. Design & drivers As anyone acquainted with the Merlin model will see from the images accompanying this review, the Merlin S6plus are two-way bookshelf designs that look so similar to the previous Merlin S6 that it would be very.