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.
