Ruark Audio Talisman-R Review

Design

• Satin Charcoal or Fused Walnut finishes
• Slightly, but definitely, trapezoid in shape

Unless you want your loudspeakers to be more about the way they look than the way they sound, there’s not a lot that can be done in terms of design. Form follows function pretty closely, after all. But the Talisman-R does have a point of difference where design is concerned, and it’s strongly related to the original Talisman from all those decades ago.

At 840 x 210 x 255mm (HWD) the speakers are helpfully compact and visually quite discreet. Get up close to them and you’ll see they seem to lean back slightly on their plinth – and when you see them in profile you realise they have an extruded front baffle that’s somewhat larger than the main body of the cabinet behind it.

This is, in fact, a double baffle layout that’s designed to minimise the transfer of vibration from the drivers into the cabinet and to keep resonance to a minimum at the same time. So for once in loudspeaker design, established acoustic principles = interesting industrial design.

The main cabinet is in a Satin Charcoal finish, and for my review sample the front baffle is the same – but you can have the baffle in a Fused Walnut finish if you prefer. Both finishes are supplied with grey full-length grilles that attach magnetically and fit snugly inside the baffle edges – the colour of the acoustic cloth contrasts nicely with the area of walnut slat at the bottom of the cabinet fascia.

There are bi-wire cable terminals towards the bottom of the rear of each cabinet – they’ll accept bare wire, spade connectors or banana plugs. And the speakers arrive on silicone feet (handy for use on a hard floor), with floor spikes (handy for use on a carpeted floor) provided in the packaging.

Specification

• 27mm silk dome tweeter, 170mm natural fibre mid/bass driver
• Forward-firing bass reflex port
• 35Hz – 20kHz frequency response

Behind each magnetically attached grille there’s a driver array consisting of a 27mm silk dome tweeter (driven by a neodymium motor) and a 170mm natural fibre mid/bass natural fibre cone (backed by a long-throw motor).

Below these two, roughly halfway down the baffle, there’s a bass reflex port – the fact it faces forwards helps make the Talisman-R a little easier to position happily in a room than a cabinet with a rear-firing port.  

Crossover between the two drivers is at a very reasonable 2.2kHz, while nominal impedance of 6 ohms and sensitivity of 87dB/W indicates the Ruark Audio are not especially tricky to drive. Frequency response is quoted at 25Hz – 20kHz.

Sound Quality

• Eloquent, detailed and balanced sound
• Control and entertainment in equal measure
• Soundstage is well-defined but not the biggest

In the same way that this sort of money spent elsewhere will buy you a loudspeaker with a more extensive driver array, it might also buy you a physically larger cabinet with greater internal volume. It may even buy both.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that for all the many ways in which the Talisman-R is straightforwardly commendable (and I’ll get to them soon enough), it’s not the biggest-sounding speaker you ever heard. If you have an especially large room you intend to fill with sound, this should probably not be your default choice of loudspeaker.

That’s not the same as saying it sounds notably small, you understand. And the soundstage the Ruark Audio can generate is organised, well-defined and coherent even if you’re listening to something as borderline-chaotic as Kamasi Washington’s audacious take on Clair de Lune. The layout is easy to understand, each element gets the space it needs, and the attention the speakers pay to the gaps and absences makes the actual occurrences even more vivid.

The tonality is poised and neutral, and the frequency response is equally even-handed – the Talisman-R don’t favour any particular part of the frequency range any more than they understate any part of it. Low-frequency activity is controlled well, so rhythmic expression is assured, and the combination of punchy attack and detail regarding tone and texture makes for an entertaining presentation.

The top of the frequency range has a fair amount of bite and edge to it, but it’s just as well-controlled as the rest of the frequency range and so never gets out of hand even at big volumes. And the midrange communicates in a manner easily described as torrential – the speakers’ facility with detail retrieval and contextualisation is especially apparent here, and it makes for a direct and articulate representation of voices of all kinds. 

The insistence on neutrality also has the happy effect of helping the overall presentation seem very together and of a single piece – there’s a unity to the way the Talisman-R deliver a recording of Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You that makes the notion of performance rather more than just a notion. Crossover between the drivers is flawless, the bass reflex port is managed impeccably, and the overall attention to the timing of the presentation is hard not to admire.

All of the above applies no matter the volume level at which you’re listening – the Ruark Audio are not difficult to drive, and consequently are capable of significant volume if the amplifier to which they’re attached is capable enough.

They’re unperturbed by bigger volumes and never sound hard-working or in any way stressed – and their dynamic headroom is such that there always seems to be another level available when shifts in the intensity or attack of a recording occur.

Should you buy it?