Castle says that its widely lauded standmount speaker, the Richmond 3i, has set new standards not only for Castle but the industry as a whole, and that the all-new Richmond 7i - under consideration here - is set to do the same for the floorstanding market.

At first glance, there's nothing exceptional about the Castle 7i; it's a modest-looking, smartly finished floorstander that does little to attract attention to itself.

This, considering the amount of time one spends listening to a loudspeaker compared to the amount of time it sits mute in the room being a piece of furniture, is no bad thing.

In fact, it is a consideration whose importance escapes many people; until, that is, their aesthetically sensitive significant other quietly, or otherwise, brings it to their notice.

Similarly, its construction seems outwardly unremarkable. However, its apparent simplicity barely hints at the amount of effort that went into its voicing and fine-tuning: in particular, the attention that was paid in order to elicit from it a bass performance that is especially engaging and a top end delivery that, while detailed and assertive, doesn't threaten to scrape the enamel off the listener's teeth.

The Richmond 7i is a three-unit, two-way design that employs a pair of Castle-designed, 130mm, carbon-fibre coned bass units, developed from those used in the popular 3i, alongside a 25mm, fabric-domed Vifa tweeter.

Detailed treble

The drivers are integrated by a bi-wirable, third-order, Linkwitz-Riley crossover that uses carefully-selected components including Silicon Iron inductors, which Castle contends are the best for bass speed and tunefulness, and polypropylene capacitors to give detailed, naturalistic treble.

These all sit in a discrete chamber within the base of the cabinet to avoid compression and vibration effects.

The cabinet itself is formed from 18mm, matched veneer MDF, which is braced and ported to offer the sort of bass performance one would perhaps expect from a more expensive loudspeaker, along with an overall sense of naturalness and rightness about the rest of the spectrum.

Particular care was taken over the internal damping to maintain this balance: too much was felt to give a sound that appeared over-damped and too dry while too little allowed the cabinet to contribute too much to the sound, which gave results that were too 'noisy'.