My existing speakers sound thin when I turn down the volume - can Harbeth help me?"
You probably could guess - there would be plenty of choice: the horrible 'modern sound' is bright, thin, reedy, cold, analytical, soulless, peaky, harsh and 'pushed' onto the listener. But the public - who attend very few acoustic concerts - have bit by bit, reprogrammed themselves into thinking that that is the norm. Of course, as they don't hear live unamplified music, why would they think otherwise?
OK, to answer the question. Where do we start? I can't design PA or rock and roll speakers because I have no interest in them and I don't know enough about how they would be used (or misused) and what expectations their users have of them. But in the case of a Harbeth, I have a very clear understanding of how our users will use our speakers, how loud they will play them, how far away they'll sit and what type of music; and above all, what would sound
right to that user in that room, with that music at that listening level.
How can you be so sure that Harbeth's designer can read the user's mind? Some psychic powers perhaps?
No! I know how you'll use a Harbeth because I have you, in your room right at the front of my mind when I design because you and I listen the same way, the same distance, the same loudness. The sort of music you'd like I would too.
Does Harbeth design for a big room? Or perhaps for a UK-size listening room?
Harbeth's R&D centre is a cottage deep in the woods, not a building on an industrial estate. I do not design for big rooms because I don't live in a big house, all the rooms are multi-functional and have to double-up as bedrooms, lounges, studies or whatever. And The Cottage, the main listening room, is a perfectly normal domestic environment. So the rooms I have to listen in and work in is on the smaller side of ideal, and the acoustics are real-world acoustics, not million-dollar acoustically perfect environments. Those foam lined, quasi-anechoic expensive purpose-built listening rooms with text book acoustics can seriously delude the designer. Not one customer will listen in that or similar environment.
Does that mean that the Harbeth design/listening room different from other speaker brands?
Yes, I believe it does. Most speaker companies have large, purpose-built (and very impressive) listening rooms which they proudly invite journalists to. And that's where the manufacturers design review panel would sit as a group, X-factor-like, judging the loudspeakers presented to them. But, the problem is that if you design for a large damped room, by definition the speakers are far away, and by definition played quite loud, those speaker will be fundamentally unsuitable for a smaller room.
Why wouldn't they sound right in a smaller room?
Because, by definition, you would sit nearer to them and play them quieter in a smaller room. Those two factors have disastrous acoustic consequences.
Harbeth was founded by a BBC engineer -- why is that significant?
If you understand the importance of Harbeth's BBC foundation you'll really understand the Harbeth sound. The BBC is a broadcast organisation and produces thousands of hours of speech every year. All of that speech has to be carefully monitored and edited and made to fit the available broadcast time. This means trimming needless words and even the intake and exhalation of breath so that what we hear at home, even if heavily edited, sounds natural. In a multi-studio organisation like the BBC there are few studios that are dedicated to just one type of programme so that any one studio in any given week may be used for talks, drama, music recording, voice overs, trailers; the monitor speakers must be capable of revealing difficulties with the source material that allows the studio manager (sound engineer in BBC speak) to make adjustments at his mixing desk for computer workstation. Now the problem in a multi-studio complex is that in one studio there may be a quartet being recorded for an arts programme whilst next door -- through the relatively thin wall -- an obituary may be being read, the next studio along a serious political interrogation and next door to that a pop music programme being prepped.
The uniqueness of the Harbeth monitor concept is that it recognizes that to the sound editing staff in all four of these studios are obliged to monitor
at a far lower level than they would ideally like. Now contrast with music recording studios, which are often located in remote and quiet areas in the countryside, where one artist will book the studio and work on his recording in isolation. There is no concern about neighbours and no worry about his performance in the studio or on playback monitors in the control room bleeding through to other artists because there aren't any. This is a wholly different situation to that which a studio manager would find in a broadcast organisation. In the recording studio the monitoring level will be
as high or higher than on the artists side of the glass (which is why so many commercial recording engineers have significant hearing damage). Conversely in a broadcast organisation the monitoring level is
far below that considered normal in the recording world, may be lower than on the artists side of the glass and is about the level that a hi-fi listener would experience at home.
A feature of the BBC monitor therefore has been to design it such that it has a
full warm bodied sound when used at a low to moderate listening. It's optimised for sounding right in the 80 to 100dB range. Conversely a loudspeaker designed for recording studio use and/or one which was optimised for use in a
large listening room far from the listener would sound right in the deafening (even frightening) 100 to 120dB range. But swap these speakers over and things don't sound right at all: the BBC monitor will sound rather rich and the high-level optimised speaker will sound very bass shy.
It's all about psychoacoustics. That's a fancy way of saying that the ear is very non-linear and perceived bass in a strange, but completely predictable way that is linked to how LOUD the sound is. This has been extensively researched for well over fifty years and it's very well understood. Read
ISO-226
In short then, Harbeth speakers are designed to sound right at home at a normal level because they take into account the psychoacoustics of the ear. I have no idea what psychoacoustic model other speaker philosophies use, but I'd be surprised if their designers had given much thought to the reality of the ear as opposed to their test equipment. Why not phone their sales office and ask what hearing model underpins their design? If they can't point to ISO-226 or the earlier Equal Loudness Contours then I'd say that there is no possibility that their speakers could sound natural at home at a moderate listening level. Try it!
