Morel Ultimo 12
Designed as an overgrown version of the lovely midbass driver of the Ultimo component speakers, the Ultimo 12 is a very new product for Morel. It has a construction quite unlike most other subwoofers around in that its voice coil is described as an external design and actually fits outside its magnet. Morel call this EVC for External Voice Coil. This coil has an amazingly wide five and one tenths inch (175mm) diameter and is made of Hexatech Aluminium wire (less space and more wire in the gap) and is wound on an Aluminium former. The cone is an interesting composite of paper and carbon fibre and is said to offer the benefits of both materials. The lovely snap and attack of paper and the sheer power and control of Carbon fibre. It has bright plated squeeze terminals that will take a nice fat 12 gauge wire.
It comes with a serious heavy duty ‘Octopus’ design open style pressed coated steel grille, a good manual with colour print diagrams and two little extras. One is a thick window sticker, the other is a small piece of polarised plastic. You hold this over the verification sticker on the bottom of the woofer and if it isn’t counterfeit (How’s that for a truly sincere compliment, though? So good that evil-doers want to counterfeit it like money.) then the word ‘Genuine’ will be seen through the piece of plastic. You even have to hold the bit of polarised stuff up the right way. Dead Secret Squirrel and yet typical of the way these guys work. Got a problem with counterfeiting?. Smash it with a second’s application of our sledgehammer. An engineer. Our one.
The woofer has even been constructed so that if you do harm it, it can be reconed with ease, as after all, this is also happily aimed at the crankers in the Morel blurb. This is done via their own ‘Accucenter’ system and involves bolts rather than an expert and a turntable. You undo the Allen headed bolts on the sub’s base, then remove whole magnet assembly and replace the broken bits.
The woofer is not going to cripple your suspension and has an amazing sound to mass ratio.
– Frequency response: 10Hz to 900Hz
– Power Handling: 1,000w RMS (3kw max)
– Hybrid Carbon fibre/laminated paper composite cone
– ‘Uniflow’ die cast Aluminium chassis
– 3.7 Ohm two-layer Hexatech Aluminium wire coil on Aluminium former
– Bright plated 4mm squeeze post terminals
– Voice Coil Diameter: 5.1 inch (130mm)
– Mounting depth 141mm
– Double vented magnet
– Efficiency: 85dB 1w/1M
– Fms: 20Hz
– Qes: 0.46
– Qms: 1.372
– Qts: 0.345
– Vas: 105 Litres
Review by Adam Rayner
First off, let me say this speaker driver is a bloody awesome piece of engineering that sounds brilliant. Then let me explain a basic tenet of how our reviews work and why this speaker doesn’t seem to have scored ‘enough’ to get a ‘State of The Art’ flag.
Ever play Top Trumps cards as a kid? They are themed playing cards and you choose which parameter of the thing on the card, be it a selection of cars or whatever, to use against your opponent. (Keeping the right to choose which one you compare versus your opponent’s if you win that trick.) In our speaker tests we deliberately included efficiency in the mix of parameters to judge by. You can get plenty more volume for each watt with very efficient speakers, which matters like hell if all you have is headunit power.
However, it is very hard to make a woofer handle monster power and yet be highly efficient, (some do get close) and it is largely to do with the basic design approach of your speaker’s motor and cone/suspension. In this case we find a huge wide voice coil which means it can handle vast power but at the same time be made to close-engineering tolerances so as to create this stupendous sonic precision and that’ what Morel wanted I feel.
An old Lamborghini Countach would do 200mph. It had a deeply rubbish coefficient of drag. It just pushed a lot of air out of the way to do 200mph. This subwoofer is perfectly analogous to a Lamborghini. (well, except that I’m on about an old Lambo and this speaker is a new design!) It’s beautifully built and made to be as good as it can be, even if that might cost a bit or take some serious horsepower.
In this case, it’s acoustic horsepower as this subwoofer is truly mighty. The driver itself seems relatively lightweight and then you cop an eyeful of the huge voice coil. I don’t think I have ever heard of a speaker with a five inch voice coil before. It’s a Morel design characteristic and is even trademarked EVC or external voice coil. What it means here is that the sexy looking carbon fibre cone Is gripped like a vice.
The paper part of the composite is not on view from the front but offers some real structural benefits by having some properties that the carbon does not. Like wise the impulse rigidity of carbon fibre can be biblical.
What it meant was that I could play any music at all and just love it. I played some Yello and some of the dB Drag Vol 3 disc and then as we write I recall that fabulous bit of Soca on the Focal disc. (Sorry, stuff this – I must go have a listen to that – normal service will be restored in a moment.) Except I forgot about the Afro funk track and the other one that was better than a coffee break. The point is, I just had to go hear it some more.
I did the test using a high end deck from Kenwood to drive a set of reference satellites and ran the sub on the scary PowerBass XA3000D. This makes well over an easy kilowatt at four ohms and both vaporised a fuse on the Kenwood sub and gave me a pukka and very startling electrical shock as I did close to criminally stupid things to see which coil was dead on the Kenny. There were enough volts coming down the speaker wires to really be dangerous. I now have a healthier respect for the thing (I think PowerBass can drive nails. Let alone low loads.) and have been using more care.
Yes, it was possible to find the speaker’s power limit as if severely over-muscled it will be induced to flap and rattle. I only did this a tiny bit, found the limit, cranked back the gain on the amp and found a level it liked. Headroom is still huge even when running hard and the subwoofer’s ability to track fine bass detail was impressive. This is a true SQL subwoofer. It has fabulous control and beauty and yet just one will throw up to 130dB happily into your car. This is the same loudness as a handgun going off.
Even at six hundred smackers, this woofer represents a pretty cool way to spend your pennies. The low efficiency kept it out of the ‘State of the Art’ flag zone but that’s a technical casualty of the ‘Top Trumps’-deisgned review tree parameters and thus my fault as this is as good as it gets.
This is the best around, a truly excellent speaker fully deserving of the prestigious badge it wears. Another awesome slice of Israeli engineering. Rrrrespect!
Sound Quality 10.0
Build Quality 10.0
Power Handling 10.0
Efficiency 6.0
Value For Money 8.0
Overall rating 8.8 