Harbeth Monitor 30 Speaker Review

[Liya]

Seems to me that Amirm's judgement of the measurement of a speaker is "how close does it come to overall flat response, low distortion and even directivity" - this is the criteria for a neutral speaker, such as might be used as a tool in a recording or mastering studio to judge what's been captured in the recording. Seems to me that such "linear" speakers can often sound quite good in domestic listening situations, but not everyone wants this kind of sound. Harbeth, the BBC, and many other classic British speakers offer a different "tuning" - which is to say different colorations. Rather than try to achieve perfect linearity (which is impossible anyway) they opted for characteristics that suited their purpose. These classic British speakers all evolved out of research done by the BBC which was carried out in order to find speakers that suited the BBC's purpose- which is to say RADIO BROADCASTING. Since in radio we don't see the speaker's face / lips, we need a little acoustic help in order to ensure intelligibility. Hence the reason it's always said that voices on these speakers sound better than voices on other speakers - these speakers act as filters to improve intelligibility, to emphasize the voice so the guys at the mixing desk can get the settings right for the radio audience. And so on top of favoring the vocal range the BBC wanted to have a decent overall response, so monitoring classical music would be OK too.

I had a pair of Rogers LS3/5a's and they have a pleasant sound on vocals, folk, small ensemble jazz, and quite a lot of classical except maybe bombastic large-scale orchestral pieces. But not that great for modern IDM, rock-n-roll etc. And forget about hip hop or reggae- not nearly enough bass performance.

Sorry, but your post looks like copy/paste from Harbeth promo material.
Anyway, I have Harbeth and Neumann KH150 here, playing side by side, and I can tell you that speech/voice is definitely more intelligible thru Neumanns. No doubt about it.
Also, everything sounds better on them, regardless of the genre.

 

[mSpot]

I have Harbeth and Neumann KH150 here, playing side by side, and I can tell you that speech/voice is definitely more intelligible thru Neumanns.

What vintage is your Harbeth? That style of Harbeth logo is quite old and I would guess it is a C7ES-2 from at least 15 years ago. Drivers and crossovers in the C7 model have been updated twice since that time.

 

[Liya]

What vintage is your Harbeth? That style of Harbeth logo is quite old and I would guess it is a C7ES-2 from at least 15 years ago. Drivers and crossovers in the C7 model have been updated twice since that time.

It is C7ES-2, so I guess from the same era as the one reviewed here.

 

[spamilton]

I briefly had the P3ESR XD. Vocals (female in particular) did sound pretty nice on them, but the overall fidelity was very bad for a speaker of that price. That was the speaker that finally converted me to using real monitors.

 

[DSJR]

It is C7ES-2, so I guess from the same era as the one reviewed here.

NOOOOO - The C7-ES2 is NOTHING REMOTELY like the C7-XD which if my experiences over the C7-ES3 are concerned, may as well be a totally different speaker by a totally different manufacturer despite looking the same!!! The ES3 is a bloated over dominant tubby lush mid-basss mess with veiled mids as a result, but they sold exceptionally well in some markets with more bass-absorbent rooms than typical UK ones. The 7XD is a light toned (but with lower bass clearly heard now), delicate and clear sounding speaker with sparkle if it's there in the recording. Harbeth newbies at this 'level' these days tend to go for the slightly tubbier 30.2XD which has a touch more in the mid bass but less lf extension subjectively. Having said that, this is only in direct comparison as the 20.2XD 'sounds' fine if heard in isolation as I discovered in another session. The 30.2 costs slightly more (tweeter costs?) and I reckon dealers would make a little more on promoting these (it still goes on, even with often snooty Harbeth dealers it seems)

I'm not suggesting that Neumanns wouldn't be better at all, quite the opposite and Harbeth will be showing their 'interpretation' of a bang up to date active-with-DSP at the forthcoming Bristol HiFi show where they've taken five rooms this year to spread the word and show an unaccepting (of active in principle) customer and dealer base what can be achieved these days with some well thought out and developed technology and carefully optimised drivers.

Thankfully, the current XD series while being a lot 'flatter' in response than before (or at least not downtilted as these M30's were designed to be) don't have a kind of 'astringent' subjective quality I've heard occasionally in 'neutral' speakers and a pair of floor standing mid-caste Revels and many Dynaudios in particular. Getting a speaker to communicate music well is still an art form I believe in crossover tuning and the end results aren't simply one measurement in particular and a combination of factors, not least how a tweeter integrates and works at the lower end of its passband. I'm no designer and it's difficult to put into words, but I'm sure Genelec and Neumann would know what I'm banging on about.

 

[Liya]

NOOOOO - The C7-ES2 is NOTHING REMOTELY like the C7-XD which if my experiences over the C7-ES3 are concerned, may as well be a totally different speaker by a totally different manufacturer despite looking the same!!! The ES3 is a bloated over dominant tubby lush mid-basss mess with veiled mids as a result, but they sold exceptionally well in some markets with more bass-absorbent rooms than typical UK ones. The 7XD is a light toned (but with lower bass clearly heard now), delicate and clear sounding speaker with sparkle if it's there in the recording. Harbeth newbies at this 'level' these days tend to go for the slightly tubbier 30.2XD which has a touch more in the mid bass but less lf extension subjectively. Having said that, this is only in direct comparison as the 20.2XD 'sounds' fine if heard in isolation as I discovered in another session. The 30.2 costs slightly more (tweeter costs?) and I reckon dealers would make a little more on promoting these (it still goes on, even with often snooty Harbeth dealers it seems)

I'm not suggesting that Neumanns wouldn't be better at all, quite the opposite and Harbeth will be showing their 'interpretation' of a bang up to date active-with-DSP at the forthcoming Bristol HiFi show where they've taken five rooms this year to spread the word and show an unaccepting (of active in principle) customer and dealer base what can be achieved these days with some well thought out and developed technology and carefully optimised drivers.

Thankfully, the current XD series while being a lot 'flatter' in response than before (or at least not downtilted as these M30's were designed to be) don't have a kind of 'astringent' subjective quality I've heard occasionally in 'neutral' speakers and a pair of floor standing mid-caste Revels and many Dynaudios in particular. Getting a speaker to communicate music well is still an art form I believe in crossover tuning and the end results aren't simply one measurement in particular and a combination of factors, not least how a tweeter integrates and works at the lower end of its passband. I'm no designer and it's difficult to put into words, but I'm sure Genelec and Neumann would know what I'm banging on about.

I don't understand this: "NOOOOO - The C7-ES2 is NOTHING REMOTELY like the C7-X", as a response to my: "It is C7ES-2, so I guess from the same era as the one reviewed here". I am saying that the C7ES2 is from the same ear as the speaker of this review, the Monitor 30.

 

[DSJR]

I don't understand this: "NOOOOO - The C7-ES2 is NOTHING REMOTELY like the C7-X", as a response to my: "It is C7ES-2, so I guess from the same era as the one reviewed here". I am saying that the C7ES2 is from the same ear as the speaker of this review, the Monitor 30.

I misunderstood - apologies, but like the M30, your ES2's are way removed from current production despite looking the same. I'd still say with respect that at the time, the M30 would have been the better box despite deliberate response tailoring. My SHL5s are also from this era (2007 in my case)

 

[Liya]

Oh, I see. Mine are from 1999. It's a safe sound. Many people would probably like it and can live with it forever. However, when you play KH150 side by side, the 'Compacts' are nowhere near as clear. Clarity is the word that comes first to mind with Neumanns; Bass goes deeper and it's stronger too. Harbeths are apparently good at low volumes, but Neumanns are better again (combination of clarity and bass), unlike some ATC's which are only good when loud.

 

[DSJR]

Oh, I see. Mine are from 1999. It's a safe sound. Many people would probably like it and can live with it forever. However, when you play KH150 side by side, the 'Compacts' are nowhere near as clear. Clarity is the word that comes first to mind with Neumanns; Bass goes deeper and it's stronger too. Harbeths are apparently good at low volumes, but Neumanns are better again (combination of clarity and bass), unlike some ATC's which are only good when loud.

I absolutely agree. No idea if I'll ever get to hear the production Harbeth D series as they're currently called while in development, but to their user-base I suspect it'll be something of a shock To the likes of your good self, it'll be par for the course I suspect

I look forward to trying some Neumanns at some point but I have a shedload of sh*t to get rid of first to make room for a pair! (that's emotional as well as physical and financial!)

 

[Christoph-ASR]

 

[makarisma]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Harbeth Monitor 30 25th anniversary speaker. It is on kind loan from a local member. This specific speaker came out around 2002 I think and cost US $3,200 around that time. Being patterned after the famous BBC LS 5/9 speakers, I imagine the design is still the same to this day. The latest model seems to go by 30.1 designation.

The Harbeth logo was in danger of coming off so the owner pulled it off. Here is what it looks like (I know, very bland):

View attachment 47512​

It barely fit in my little photo booth so not very large. The grill is tricky to remove so I did not attempt to do so. I am told the recommendation is to use it with the grill so that is how I measured it.

The back panel shows ability for bi-wiring:

View attachment 47513​

Love the bit about the speaker being in their log book. Well, its measurements are now in our log book as well.

Let's get into measurements. Since this is a passive monitor, I followed the CEA 2034 recommendation of feeding it 2.83 volts. Temperature was a balmy 57 degrees. Altitude was 13 feet above sea level. Acoustic center of the speaker was determined following ITC-2025 Part B standard (I used my Mitutoyo micrometer). Any wind in the lab was self-generated due to previous meal.

CEA-2034 Spinorama Measurements
As usual we start with our master dashboard of the speaker which is its "spin" data:
View attachment 47514

I have gotten requests for "clean" versions of this picture so I have avoided making notations on it. Let me know if that is a good or bad idea.

There is a lot of controversy around the so called "BBC dip" where around the crossover frequency the on-axis response drops fair bit. Tom Holman of the T in THX recommended that the same dip be implemented in Audessey Room EQ! A mistake in my opinion. Anyway, we see the dip starting around 3 kHz. Getting a 3-D plot of that region gives us this complex sound intensity:

View attachment 47515​

I don't think this is what you want in a speaker. Put another way, it is the classic engineering work of calling a defect a feature. We can see the havoc it plays on our early window (and sound power) directivity:
View attachment 47516

Why would I want to have a suck out in that region of audible spectrum? I let you google forever to read the fights back and forth.

Taking into account the direct and early window reflections to predict the in-room response, we get:

View attachment 47517

The dip is there of course around the crossover frequency. And general unevenness. The overall tilt is quite exaggerated so perhaps good for people with high sensitivity to high frequencies, it would tame the harshness in that region in the recording.

Basic Speaker Measurements
Let's start with impedance and phase measurements:
View attachment 47519

Specification is 6 ohms. Standard requires staying about 80% (?) of this value which would be 4.8 ohm. If you cheat a bit it gets there. Worst case phase is around 100 Hz which impedance around 9 ohms. This make the effect load to be much lower (i.e. the difficulty that the amplifier sees).

Sensitivity ("efficiency") is almost always given as a single number by the manufacturer but it varies based on frequency:

View attachment 47520

In most of the frequency range the actual sensitivity is better than specified 85 dB which is good.

You all seem to like colorful 3-D graphs so here is the so called "waterfall:"

View attachment 47521

I don't trust this graph much. For one thing, these graphs can be manipulated to show any and all things. More importantly though, the Klippel NFS system I use is great for measuring frequency response but on tests like this, its structure can resonate with the speaker, which would show up as its own slices above. Maybe after I test more speakers I get confidence on reliability of this (rather useless) measurement.

Finally, step function seems to be a popular item so here it is, zoomed properly now to show the step response of each driver:

View attachment 47522

The tweeter is always "faster" so it generates a response first. It is swinging negative which means it is out of phase with the woofer which takes its time to generate its response to the right of it at opposite phase. There is discontinuity between the two (around 2.8 milliseconds).

Advanced Speaker Measurements
Here is the rest of the bits for those interested:
View attachment 47524


View attachment 47525

View attachment 47526

View attachment 47592

View attachment 47593
Full spin data is enclosed.

Correlation With Other Measurements
Stereophile measured a much more recent version and reported this for frequency response:

Focus on the black line only. It looks a heck of a lot better than our graph. Almost flat and smooth on Axis! Well, that is not what is really going on.

First the easy part, it has the same bass hump as we do (although their measurements usually exaggerates this due to their close-in measurement technique):

View attachment 47514

We show a dip post our peak in low frequency but they don't. The reason is that they are using gated measurements to eliminate echos and that hugely reduces resolution in a few hundred hertz (to one or two data points). Past that, they do have the dip but they show such a low resolution compressed graph that it is not nearly as visible. We both show the couple of peaks close to 10 kHz.

Overall, given the radically different measurement setups, I say the correlation is very good. Our data is much higher resolution than theirs.

Listening Tests
No time or setup yet for listening tests. Will do some and report back later.

Conclusions
It is interesting to measure these "classic" speakers to finally put some hard data behind their objective performance. As expected the halo is more positive than the objective data indicates. The cost of these speakers is way up there. I appreciate being built in England and needing to have good supply of bear for works after hours but it is a lot of money for this kind of measured performance.


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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Had some great sushi at my favorite spot when I went to pick this and other speakers. It was over US $60 for lunch! While I feel satisfied, I also feel poor. So please help lift my spirits by donating using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

Thank-you very much for such an indepth review. This helps me considerably to decide whether to buy a pair or not.

 

[Willem]

Thank-you very much for such an indepth review. This helps me considerably to decide whether to buy a pair or not.

I think you should realize that the speaker that was tested does not have that much to do with the model you would buy now, let alone the active model that you should expect in the near future.

 

[Liya]

I think you should realize that the speaker that was tested does not have that much to do with the model you would buy now.

Maybe he wanted to buy the model reviewed here? Who knows.

 

[DSJR]

View attachment 353466

Why post that forty year old photo? Alan and I are the same age within a few months and I promise you we've both changed in appearance since 1990, me rather more than him as he still has all his own hair (his 'tache went well before I first knew him in the late 80's)

 

[makarisma]

I think you should realize that the speaker that was tested does not have that much to do with the model you would buy now, let alone the active model that you should expect in the near future.

Good point. Thank-you

 

[regtas43]

Tweeter is playing higher frequencies so its rise time is naturally much faster.

How embarrassing. This is about as wrong as wrong can be. The displacement comes from the crossover. If one uses first order crossovers, one can get the impulse response to look all but perfect and ditto the step response(of course) . Look at some measurements on Dunlavys for instance.

 

[ahofer]

If you've ever sat and listened to them, well set up in a good system, you will know that they are very satisfying. Your measurements, while useful, don't pickup the subtler stuff..

Showbox jiofi.local.html tplinklogin​

Speaking as the happy owner of a pair of Harbeths*-what exactly are these unmeasurable subtle things?

*SHL5+AE, much newer and better-measuring model than the one tested here.

 

[sktn77a]

"I have Harbeth and Neumann KH150 here, playing side by side, and I can tell you that speech/voice is definitely more intelligible thru Neumanns."

My Amazon firestick has a "Dialog Enhance" option that does the same thing by boosting 1-2kHz frequencies by about 6dB!
The one certainty about speakers is that everybody's opinion is different. What I like, you may not and vice-versa. That doesn't make me right and you wrong.

 

[ahofer]

The one certainty about speakers is that everybody's opinion is different.

Toole, Olive, and Klippel's research demonstrated that there are significant groupings/concurrences of preference, so I don't really agree with that, particularly when listening is unsighted. See Chapter 20 of Toole's Book for a summary ('Closing the Loop: Predicting Listener Preferences from Measurements').