To go alongside its wildly successful R Series line-up of home audio products is a new offering from Ruark Audio: the 100 Series. Offering new designs and implementing new technologies, the 100 Series is meant to take the brand’s ‘designed to be seen, engineered to be heard’ ethos to a new level.
The 100 Series debut is the R410 Integrated Music System. A bookshelf-sized two-speaker 120W setup, it boasts a wide range of features and connectivity that makes it a one-stop shop for home audio. Aside from Bluetooth, wi-fi and ethernet, Spotify and TIDAL Connect are built-in, and it also supports Amazon Music and many other services. Apple AirPlay and Google Chromecast will cover any streaming requirements, and will allow linking to other speakers for multi-room setups. There is even a USB port to allow the connection of external devices such as CD players and turntables. The brand’s highly intuitive RotoDial control system is carried over—it is said that the majority of Ruark Audio’s customers never need to read the manual.
The 20mm silk dome tweeters are taken from the brand’s award-winning MR1 speakers, while the newly engineered 100mm bass-mid drivers have a performance that gives the relatively compact R410 a surprisingly wide soundstage and room-filling sound to go with the brand’s characteristic warmth and organic aural signature. While the R Series has aesthetics inspired from the 1950s, the R410 leans towards a sharp-cornered 1970s look. The front grille consists of slats of wood, broken up only by a 4-inch full-colour display. The wood is sourced from fully sustainable, managed sources, and the slats have a subtle concave profile that was shaped by hand.
