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ON TEST

Loudspeakers

Richter Harlequin Series V

baffles and rear panels and also the use of non-parallel side walls, plus the inside walls of the cabinet are damped with a new high-density absorbent material.

The equipmenTFor those unfamiliar with the Richter range (which would prompt me to ask where you’ve been for the past 29 years, during which time the company has been the

The long-lived Harlequin is the latest model in Richter’s Legend Series to benefit from a total make-over, bringing it up to Series V status to

join the Dragon, Wizard, Mentor, Merlin and Griffin. All were designed not by J. K. Rowl-ing, as the model names might imply, but by a design team that included physicist Dr Martin Gosnell B.E.(Hons) PhD, acoustician Brad Serhan (one of the designers behind Duntech and Orpheus), industrial designer Russell Hobbs and Richter’s new owner, John Cornell. I say ‘total makeover’ because it’s not really the same speaker as the previous Harlequin, because this new version has an upgraded tweeter, totally new bass/midrange drivers, a totally new crossover network and a totally new cabinet whose design brief includes the use of double-thickness front

recipient of 26 industry and government awards, including being named ‘Australian Manufacturer of the Year’ not just the once, but twice) the Harlequin is the smallest floor-standing model in the Legend Series V, and is positioned in the range immediately below the famous Wizard which, according to none other than the Sydney Morning Herald’s Rod Easdown, is ‘the biggest-selling Australian speaker in history.’

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richter Harlequin series V Loudspeakers ON TEST

there is no comb filtering. Dispersion is also improved and subjectively, listeners usually report hearing a more spacious soundstage than if the same two drivers were simply electrically paralleled.

The deep bass of the Harlequin is augmented by a reflex port located low down on the rear panel. It has flared entry and exit points and is 72mm in length and 65mm in diameter. It’s located immediately above the Harlequin’s dual gold-plated multi-way speaker terminals (so you can bi-wire or bi-amp or dual-amp), which are configured in a ‘V-shaped’ lay-out that looks strange until you realise it makes it super-easy to access all the terminals. Although the terminals are colour-coded for polarity (red for positive, black for negative) there is no written info on the terminal plate about polarity, nor any indication of which terminals go to the high-pass section of the crossover and which go to the low-pass section… though, as you’d logically imagine, the uppermost terminals go to the high-pass section.

in use and LisTening sessionsTheir modest size (they’re only 900mm high, 190mm wide and 280mm deep) means the Harlequins won’t take up much real estate on your floor, nor will they tower over your other furniture items, which will help render them all but invisible even in small home units and bed-sitters, and also make them easy to position. But it would be best to position them a little out of the way, since the centre-of-gravity (COG) of the cabinets is quite high, due to all the drivers (with their heavy magnets) being mounted towards the top, which in turn makes them moderately easy to tip over… but nothing that couldn’t be fixed by adding an after-market base with a larger footprint.

I found the excellent dispersion from all the drivers means you don’t have to toe the speakers in to face the listening position, so they can be pushed back close to a rear wall if you like… but I’d recommend leav-ing plenty of centimetres for that rear-facing bass reflex port to do its stuff!

RichteR haRlequin SeRieS VLoudspeakers

Brand: richterModel: Harlequin series Vcategory: Floor standing LoudspeakersRRP: $1,399Warranty: Five YearsDistributor: richter acoustics pty Ltdaddress: po Box 578 Hamilton NsW 2303

(02) 4962 1594 info@richter.com.au www.richteracoustics.com.au

readers interested in a full technical appraisal of the performance of the richter Harlequin series V Loudspeakers should continue on and read the LaBoraTorY reporT published on page 38. readers should note that the results mentioned in the report, tabulated in performance charts and/

or displayed using graphs and/or photographs should be construed as applying only to the specific sample tested.

Lab Report on page 38

• small, attractive• excellent sound• depthy bass

• Terminal identification

• High centre-of-gravity

LaB reporT

Although the drivers are new for the Harlequin, they are already fixtures in Richter’s driver inventory. The neodymium-powered 25mm soft-dome tweeter, for example, is used in both the top-line Dragon and the Wizard, as well as in Richter’s lower-priced models. The two bass/midrange drivers are also used in Richter’s stand-mount/bookshelf Merlin design and in the Griffin centre-channel. Both drivers are identical and have sealed composite paper/fibre cones with an inverted dust cap. The inverted cap gives the cone a very smooth, dish-shaped appearance. Richter gives two different measurements for driver diameter, stating that it’s ‘5 inches’ in its brochures, and ‘105mm’ in its specifications. The disparity stems from the fact that the specification is for the ‘EPD’ or effective piston diameter, but I wasn’t sure what the ‘5 inches’ (127mm) refers to, as I measured each driver’s overall diameter at 145mm, the mounting hole diameter at 138mm and the moving diameter at 114mm. Maybe it’s just a typographical error. The ‘EPD’ (which Australian Hi-Fi Magazine usually refers to as the Thiele/Small diameter… though technically, it should be referred to as ‘Sd’) is 145mm… exactly as per Richter’s spec.

Although the cone drivers are identical, they don’t reproduce identical frequency ranges, because the Harlequin is a ‘quasi’ three-way design (sometimes called a 2½-way design) where both drivers deliver the deepest bass, but the response of the lower-most of the two drivers is deliberately rolled off at higher frequencies, leaving only the upper driver to deliver the midrange. Put another way, the Harlequin is a hybrid between a two-way (bass/mid and tweeter) and a three-way (woofer-midrange-tweeter). The crossover inside a 2½-way design has three distinct sections, similar to a true three-way network. The ‘high’ woofer is crossed to the tweeter like a regular two-way, but the ‘0.5’ low woofer is rolled off at a much lower frequency. This arrangement has lots of advantages, including that acoustically the two woofers sum similar to a first-order crossover and since only the upper woofer reproduces the upper midrange/low treble,

First impressions are always important, and the Harlequins certainly made a great first impression on me: the moment the laser reached the intro track the room was instantly filled with great sound—and there was no impression that that sound was coming only from the speakers… the Harlequins’ ability to create a soundstage across the front plane of the speakers, plus vertically—and with stage depth—was spooky. And this from the get-go, before I’d even run them in (I was loaned a brand new pair). In my case, this meant an amazed walk back to my listening chair to get my ears back down close to tweeter level and

First impressions are always important, and the Harlequins certainly made a great first impression on me!

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ON TEST richter Harlequin series V Loudspeakers

described as ‘husky, powerful and tragic’, any justice at all.

The midrange transitions nicely to the tweeter, so there’s no image shift, nor any tonal imbalance—even if you listen carefully!—and the tweeter’s sound itself is as sweet as I’ve heard from its ilk… though when playing material rich in higher-frequency harmonics it sometimes seemed to me to be ever-so-slightly forward in highest octave.

ConCLusionThe Harlequin design was so close in size and price… and sound quality… to the legendary Wizard that when it was first released, many in the audio industry—including Richter’s

own dealers—wondered if it would succeed. Melbourne’s Au-dio Trends posted on its website: ‘the Wizards and Dragons were sell-ing their socks off and we doubted whether there was a market for a slimline and compact floor-standing speaker,’ before going on to say: ‘We admit, we got it totally wrong!’

In hindsight, no-one in the industry should have been surprised. Richter has always been big on market research (its founder, Ralph Waters, was a psychologist as well as a speaker designer) and that research obviously showed a consumer demand for a quality loudspeaker at a certain size and price-point that the Richter obviously specifically designed the Harlequin to address.

That said, I confess to being in two minds about how to crystallise my thinking about the Harlequins, because as well as the consumer demand I described in the foregoing paragraph, there are also two further speaker choice criteria: those who are looking to buy only a single pair of speakers, and those who are shopping for speakers in order to assemble a full 5.1-channel home theatre system. Let me advise the first type of buyer first: If you want

only a single pair of speakers (that is, you’re putting together an exclusively two-channel hi-fi system) I would suggest that unless you specifically want a pair of small floor-standing speakers you should instead stretch your budget upwards and invest in a pair of Richter’s Wizards (or, even better, a pair of Dragons). But if small is what you want, buy the Harlequins, because they’re truly great loudspeakers.

However, if you are putting together a 5.1-channel home theatre system, the Harlequins would absolutely be your best choice as your front left/right pair (indeed a better choice than the Wizards in this application) but you would need to make sure you match them with Richter’s Griffin centre, and Merlin surrounds, because these models use the same drivers as the Harlequin, which will consequently result in the most balanced in-room soundfield. Then, although you could add any good sub to deliver the low bass, it would make most sense to add Richter’s own excellent Thor Series V subwoofer. greg borrowman

exactly midway between the speakers… where I discovered the soundfield was fabulous: central images were firmly fixed, performers were positioned where they should be across the stage and I was also able to perceive a realistic facsimile of height. A good test of image height is to do as I did: listen to a solo singer/acoustic guitarist. You should be able to hear that the vocal is issuing from a point in space above the sound coming from the guitar.

Bass response was firm, forceful and more than adequately tight, with the drivers proving to have a tenacious grip on the lower musical octaves. I found the bass a tad on the weighty side, but nothing I couldn’t live with… and even a cursory audition will reveal the superiority of the bass issuing from these small floor-standing speakers compared to that coming from two-way stand-mount/bookshelf speaker designs. Just listen to the intro on The Love Junkies’ Hurt You, (from the album Maybelene) where Robbie Rumble does lovely things with his bass guitar that are made to sound even lovelier by the Harlequins… and the same goes for Black Sheep Blues on the same album (which also takes the prize for world’s most pointless track, which is Ashtray).

Also impressive was the delivery of the midrange. Perhaps the midrange was not quite the equal of a true three-way design with a dedicated midrange driver (such as the slightly higher-priced Wizard) but it was close… very close. Vocalists were clearly delineated in the overall mix, and the ‘recognisability’ of their voices was instant, showing that the Harlequins were correctly delivering balanced harmonic structure across the audio spectrum, and so that when listening to ‘7 Axes’, Diesel’s homage to seven musicians who have inspired him, for example, I really didn’t need to be told who was singing on what. I was also impressed by the way the Harlequins delivered the sophisticated, ‘younger-than-she-sounds’ voice of Melbourne singer/songwriter Rita Satch, though the sound on her latest self-titled EP has been recorded in such a way that it often doesn’t do her voice, which has been CoNTINued oN paGe 38

If small is what you want, buy the Harlequins, because they are truly great loudspeakers

38 Australian

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richter Harlequin series V LoudspeakersLAB REPORT

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LaboraTory TesT resuLTsGraph 1 shows the frequency response of the Richter Harlequin that Newport Test Labs measured using band-limited pink noise as the stimulus. Overall, the trace shows the Harlequin’s response extends from 35Hz to 20kHz ±3.0dB… obviously an excellent result, but if you look at the extreme right of this graph, it stops at 20kHz, whereas the Harle-quin’s response doesn’t—it extends out to be 3dB down at 25kHz (shown on Graphs 2 and 5), so the Harlequin’s frequency response

was measured (using two techniques) by Newport Test Labs as 35Hz to 25kHz ±3.0dB. This is an excellent result. However, rather than the ±3.0dB variations being distributed evenly across the audio band, you can see the bass and treble regions are both up at around +3dB, whereas across a broad region from around 200Hz to 4kHz, the response sits at around –3dB. I suspect this has been done partly to extend low-frequency and high-frequency extension (which certainly worked) but it does mean an experienced

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Graph 5. Spliced frequency response. Trace below 1kHz is the averaged result of nine individual frequency sweeps measured at three metres, with the central grid point on-axis with the tweeter using pink noise test stimulus with capture unsmoothed. This has been manually spliced (at 1kHz) to the gated high-frequency response, an expanded view of which is shown in Graph 2. [Richter Harlequin Series V Loudspeaker]

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Graph 6. Composite response plot. Red trace is output of bass reflex port. Dark blue trace is anechoic response of lower bass/mid driver. Green trace is anechoic response of upper bass/mid driver. Pink trace is gated (simulated anechoic) response above 1kHz. Black trace is averaged in-room pink noise response (from Graph 1). [Richter Harlequin Series V]

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Graph 3. Low frequency response of front-firing bass reflex port (red trace), upper bass/midrange driver (black trace) and lower bass/midrange driver (blue trace). Nearfield acquisition. Port/woofer levels not comp. for diff. radiating areas. [Richter Harlequin V]

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Graph 4. Impedance modulus of left (red trace) and right (yellow trace) speakers plus phase (blue trace). High-pass section of x/o (green trace) vs low-pass (pink trace). Black trace under is reference 4 ohm precision calibration resistor. [Richter Harlequin Series V]

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Graph 1. Averaged frequency response using pink noise test stimulus with capture unsmoothed. Trace is the averaged result of nine individual frequency sweeps measured at three metres, with the central grid point on-axis with the tweeter. [Richter Harlequin V]

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Graph 2. High-frequency response, expanded view. Test stimulus gated sine. Microphone placed at three metres on-axis with dome tweeter. Grille On (red trace) vs Grille Off(black trace). Lower measurement limit 700Hz. [Richter Harlequin Series V Loudspeaker]

listener might hear increased loudness in these regions.

High-frequency response, shown in Graph 2, is very flat and remarkably similar irrespective of whether the Harlequin is operated with or without its grille, though you can see that fitting the grille introduces a very small, very narrow suck-out at 5.7kHz and another one that’s less deep, but rather broader, centred at 8.8kHz. Neither would be audible, even with material specifically intended to highlight them, so my advice

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richter Harlequin series V LoudspeakersLAB REPORT

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pink noise) to the anechoic high-frequency response (with the splice at 1kHz), which enables an overall ‘view’ of the response that extends from 20Hz to 40kHz. Graph 6 is another ‘post-processed’ graph that superimposes the various different traces to show how the three drivers and port interact with each other.

As for the Harlequin’s measured sensitivity, Newport Test Labs uses a very stringent test methodology for this particular performance parameter, under which the Harlequin Series V returned a test result of 85.5dBSPL which is a little lower than I’d

would be to operate the Harlequins with their grilles in place at all times.

Graph 3, which shows the performance in the bass region using the standard near-field technique that simulates what would be measured in an anechoic chamber, shows the Harlequin’s bass reflex port is working very hard, and delivering maximum output at 46Hz. However there’s another peak in its output at around 160Hz, which is likely the result of an organ-pipe resonance in the tall and thin enclosure.

This same resonance also affects the output of the upper bass/midrange driver, and is also visible as an artefact on the impedance trace shown in Graph 4. Two other even smaller resonances are visible just below 300Hz and a bit above 600Hz, but they’re very minor.

The impedance modulus (shown in Graph 4) of the Harlequin rises above 4Ω at 15Hz then stays comfortably above 4Ω right up to 40kHz. The phase angle across the same frequency range is also comfortably under control, so this Richter will be an easy load for any amplifier, including AV receivers. Particularly notable is the fact that the impedance traces of the left (the red trace) and the right (yellow trace) speakers are almost identical—so close it’s difficult to tell them apart. This suggests that the quality control on the drivers and crossover components is at a high standard, and means in practise that stereo imaging will be excellent. The traces of the separate sections of the crossover show that the electrical crossover point is around 4.2kHz, though the acoustic crossover would be slightly different (Richter doesn’t state either, so I can’t comment further). You can see the resonances mentioned previously at around 160Hz, 300Hz and 600Hz on both impedance traces. Richter specifies the nominal impedance of the Harlequin as being 4Ω, but according to the IEC 628-5.16.1 standard, it should be 5Ω, which means Richter is leaving a bit of wriggle ‘room’… but it’s a better (and more honest) option than allocating a rating of 6Ω, which would be too high.

In Graph 5, Newport Test Labs has used post-processing to ‘splice’ the averaged low-frequency response of the Richter Harlequin V (measured in-room using band-limited

expect from a two-way bookshelf design… so not particularly low then… but certainly lower than I’d expect from a three-way floor standing design. As a result, I’d recommend using a well-designed amplifier that is capable of delivering at least 50-watts per channel into 8Ω in order to extract maximum performance.

Richter’s Harlequin has been very cleverly designed in such a way that it truly delivers a level of performance that’s more than the sum of its parts. Well done! Steve Holding

Truly delivers a level of performance that’s more than the sum of its parts

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