Spendor, Harbeth...why so hot ?


I never had chance to listen them and compaire. But it appear that these speakers have very vocal crowd praising them. What are the advantages of these speakers versus equvalent B&W or Dynaudio? How they sound?
tinfoil26929

Showing 4 responses by prof

It's a thread bump, but what the heck...

I always greatly enjoyed Spendors and my friend's S100s were one of my introductions to high end audio (along with his Quad ESL 63s, which I later bought).

I've had a pair of the small, classic 3/5s doing duty for my plasma TV set up for many years.  Sometimes I still take them out and place them on stands to listen on my major 2 channel rig and every time I'm blown away!   So smooth, so coherent, so organic yet lucid and clear.  They make music like few other speakers.  Every time I listen to them I start thinking "wait, maybe this is all I actually need."  But then after a while I start to miss some of the sheer realism and detail my other speakers can supply, and also start missing some bass.  Still...I'm so glad I still have these speakers around to re-visit whenever I want.

As for Harbeths:  I recently went on a fairly large speaker shopping binge to see if I could find something smaller to replace my Thiel 3.7s.  I got good and hyped on the Harbeths from reviews and user reports.  It's very common to hear them referred to as a "last speaker I'll own" and "get off the merry-go-round" purchase.  And I was quite impressed by the various models I'd heard at shows and dealers.  The Super HL5plus fit my bill the best: retaining the Harbeth midrange beauty, while being more open and realistic in the high end, tight in the low end, good extension.  And light!  I liked that I would be able to move them around easily (which I do a lot in my system for various reasons).

After buying a gorgeous rosewood pair, they lasted about month or so in my system.   They definitely displayed much of the Harbeth magic - the mids were beautiful, and voices had a special organic, round, soft quality that was almost unique.    They were also beautifully clear and detailed, with a realistic, precise top end, rich mids, and decently deep, always well in control bottom end.

So what's not to like? Well, very little not to like.  One thing I never quite got on with was a fore-shortening of image depth compared to what I'm used to from my Thiels and others speakers I own and have owned.  I always achieve amazing soundstaging in my room, but I couldn't get the Harbeths to "disappear" quite as much, and there was the sense the sound sort of stopped several feet behind the speaker, so rather than the sense of looking into the distance at an orchestra, it tended to give me the impression of an orchestra shrunk to fit behind the speakers in my room.  Still sounded great...but it's something I missed.

Aside from that, there was little to actually criticize except for the fact that my Thiels just did everything better to my ears:  bigger midrange,  just as organic or more, and just over all a more believable, less speaker-like presentation.  As good as the Harbeths were, I found them easy to let go.

If you've been in this hobby for a long time, especially reading forums like these, one should always be suspicious of claims "these will be the last speaker you own" or "this is a 'last speaker'."   Criteria varies too much, and it's too subjective, to infer someone else's satisfaction will equate to your own.  There have been a number of "what speaker got you off the high end merry-go round" threads and people are all over the map - some say lowther designs, or horn designs, or electrostatics, or any number of utterly disparate designs, have been where they landed.

 
soundsrealaudio,

I have to disagree: nothing in audio, especially speakers, is that simple.
Any end result for a speaker is about execution, and no one simple approach predicts one will be more successful than the other.

I've had several speakers that used the "singing cabinets" or thin walled approach.   I've had speakers with the opposite approach.  Both can work very well.

I recently owned the Harbeth Super HL5plus, while also owning Thiel 3.7 speakers.  The Thiels are built exactly the opposite: damping spurious resonance at every opportunity to remove the speaker signature.
One may predict on your theory that the Harbeths would be the speaker with "life" and the Thiels would be the more "dead" sounding speaker.

Just the opposite:  I sold the Harbeths because they could not IMO produce the sense of life - of aliveness and immediacy and dynamics - the Thiels gave me. 

I recently also purchased smaller Thiel 2.7s.   Those speakers are damped just like the big ones, and have just as complex a crossover, and are in fact significantly less sensitive.  One may have presumed they *should* be harder to drive and it would take more to get them to sound lively.  Just the opposite: hooked up to the same system the 2.7s sound even more life-like in dynamics than the bigger 3.7s.  And certainly far more dynamic, in terms of producing the enthusiasm of recorded musicians, than I ever got from my Harbeths (or any other Harbeths I've heard, including the 40.1s).

Nothing is simple in high end audio.  Surprises abound.
avanti,

Given I really enjoy speakers that disappear and soundstage (though I’m first concerned with tonality), I’m experienced in getting the best soundstaging out of speakers in my room.

I did indeed listen in nearfield, as that is my preferred set-up, because most speakers disappear more that way.. I have a treated room with great acoustics (done with an acoustician) and I’m used to getting world-class soundstaging from all manner of speakers. The Thiel 3.7s are mind-blowing in that regard, bettered only (if at all) by my MBL omnis. (And to head off the idea that I'm used to false spaciousness with the MBLs, again, the Thiels do realistic soundstage depth, as do my Waveform speakers, Hales speakers, even my Spendor 3/5s, and every other speaker I've owned in the past).

I played with all sorts of positions with the Harbeths including further away than usual, and closer, narrow, wide, perfect triangle and everything in between (they were often about 5 feet from the rear wall, and between 5 and 7 feet from my listening position depending on the set up I chose). I’m not saying there were bad and didn’t do a decent disappearing act, especially given their looks wouldn’t imply they would disappear like more modern, slim designs. But as I said, I never really got a convincingly real depth out of them and they never disappeared in terms of "speaker sound" to the degree I’ve experienced with many other brands.

My hunch is that the lively cabinet approach, though chosen mostly to try and make the speaker invisible, may nonetheless have had an effect on the character of the sound. There was of course a nice fullness. But also what I’d describe as a subtle "thickness" - almost as if even the ambience between instruments had it’s own level of texture. It was pleasant in many ways. But when you set up something like the Thiels right after, a design that has reduced cabinet and other speaker colorations to amazingly low levels, it reveals that added cabinet-type bloom heard with the Harbeths - everything just cleans up and to my ears it really adds another level of believably. The speakers disappear more, and there is discernibly less ’speaker sound.’ I wouldn’t give a damn about a speaker that only disappeared and sounded low coloration if it meant the sound as clinical or anti-septic. However, the Thiels in my set up using Conrad Johnson gear sound anything but clinical - it reveals more about the tonal character of instruments.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure not slagging the Harbeths. I enjoyed them enough to buy a pair and maybe would still be listening to them if I didn’t have other speakers to compare. The Harbeths really do a superb job of sounding crystal clear while not too fatiguing. And they have that special way with vocals: on the Harbeths I was often aware of the actual singer singing, a fleshy presence, where I could sense the actual small efforts of a singer. No matter how music was produced, pop, metal, jazz, the Harbeths always managed to find a human being in there singing.






yashu,

I'm curious if you ever tried tube amplification with your Thiels.  That's my preference.  I could see Thiels being a bit more relentless with SS amps, especially if one's room isn't very damped.  But for me in a well controlled room, with CJ tube amps, the Thiels have proven about the least fatiguing speaker I've owned in decades (and I have very sensitive ears, including Tinnitus that gets aggravated by the slightest brightness/shoutiness/distortion in the upper registers).   My reviewer friend always had the "Thiels are bright and fatiguing" bias until he heard my set up, after which he did a 180 degree about face, feeling they were super smooth to listen to.

Back to the Harbeths, I really admired the great sense of balance and control through the whole frequency range.  They were powered by my CJ premier 12 monoblocks and sounded great.