Harbeth Monitor 30 Speaker Review

[Christoph-ASR]

View attachment 353466

zing zing!

 

[Floyd Toole]

Had you the feeling hat Harwood knows about this relations, or simple designing speaker with the ears, Yoshimoto?

Harbeth and the BBC believed in measurements, and they designed loudspeakers for use in their broadcast studios which, as I said, were generally rather dead acoustically if not deliberately designed to attenuate early reflections. This means that their engineers heard dominant direct (on-axis) sound. Although in their publications they showed that they paid attention to off-axis response, it was not a big factor in what was heard in their studios. However, when those same loudspeakers are taken into domestic, somewhat reflective rooms the results are different. In that context those designs are not as good as many found today. Times have changed.

In my experiences with some of the BBC designs I found a lot of variation. I have measured three versions of the LS3-5A and they were all different. Other measurements I have seen from other sources show similar variations. The BBC licensed different manufacturers and not all of them followed the specification, or they had terrible quality control - I believe that end-of-line testing was mandatory. They might just have been capitalizing on the BBC name. A sample of the expensive LS5-8 was clearly faulty. So-o-o-o.

 

[MattHooper]

However, when those same loudspeakers are taken into domestic, somewhat reflective rooms the results are different.

I wonder if that accounts for my subjective perception of the Harbeth speakers I briefly owned.

The speakers seemed to have essentially the same qualities I heard in the store when I audition them extensively with one big exception: I was never able to get a satisfying sense of sound stage depth and layering. It felt like the sound stage was always shortened, and the musicians were pulled up closer to the speakers, which was different from every other loudspeaker I’ve had in my room (all of which produced very satisfying sound stage depth).

The main difference between my room and the store in which I demoed the speakers was that the store had a massive open demonstration room. There were no side walls anywhere near the loudspeakers when I auditioned them there. And my room is 15 foot deep by 13 foot wide. Perhaps the speaker response was just interacting with my room in an unfortunate way,