It is written that Richter speakers from Australia are legendary in hi-fi history, offering such sonic quality and value for money that highly regarded global brands have been left standing. The winning of no less than 17 industry awards attests to the acoustic engineering coupled with discriminating human-ear testing marking Richter the producer of the largest-selling Australian made speakers of all time.
From a low-key launch in 1986, Richter Acoustics has steadily grown to become Australia’s favourite home-grown speaker brand.
In eighteen years of manufacturing speakers renowned for performance and value for money, the company has garnered no less than twenty-one industry awards for excellence.
The model which undoubtedly put Richter on the map was the Wizard which still ranks as the largest selling Australian loudspeaker of all time, with many thousands of pairs finding an appreciative home, the length and breadth of the country. The Wizard is universally acknowledged as the product that, single handed, legitimized the entire Australian loudspeaker manufacturing industry, offering as it did, some very serious competition to the imports and embarrassing many highly respected brands from the U.S.A. and U.K. The kudos associated with the Wizard drove the success of Richter, which in turn, spawned a plethora of look-a-likes and competitors, very few of which survive today.
In more recent times Richter management has closely monitored the emergence of visually attractive, slim line home theatre speaker systems from the likes of Sony, JVC and Philips. Unfortunately these (predominantly silver finish) products are plastic with poor sound reproduction capabilities. Richter is acclaimed for its traditional speaker manufacturing skills and is philosophically opposed to the concept of injection moulded products. The dilemma was that these new styles looked appealing and were visually complementary when matched and displayed with the latest in TV, LCD and Plasma chassis, 99% of which are also in silver finish.
The challenge was therefore to design a range which had Richter’s signature dynamic sound, looked as good as the “plastic fantastics”, were presented in silver finish and had some strong Australian theme. Australia is the world’s largest source of Bauxite and extruded aluminium provided an obvious solution as it is inert, relatively light and can be structured to provide rigidity combined with resonance damping characteristics.
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