Accurate human voice reproduction

SHL5 is a very interesting speaker. In my room they are the most dynamic speakers I have heard. With music, they are able to pressurize my room giving me the "wall of sound." However, if I am watching a movie, I don't want to be pressurized by dialogue so I prefer other speakers for speech.

All speakers are different. That's want makes this hobby great.

Rather than an indictment of Harbeth, it may be an indictment of playing NPR through your main system. I never do, so can't say. NPR sets the standard for human voice from the radio, but I expect they have it tuned for table radios, car stereo and the like, rather than playback through full-range systems.

Also the Harbeth P3ESR...

Tonian Labs. Ask my neighbors.

All the best,
Nonoise

Harbeth P3ESR is voiced for the human voice! No other speaker I have owned comes close!

IME, Auditorium-23 Solovox (which I am fortunate to own) and the Shindo Latours (which sadly I will never own). Both are excellent for both singing and speech.

dc10audio Berlin has best female vocals I've heard and Leonard Cohen is spooky real.

My guess is paper cone drivers do a much better job than all the ceramic, plastic, and aluminum speaker cones out there I think Vanderseen has a balsa wood pulp cone my guess is that would be fantastic too.

To me, that sounds like an indictment of the Harbeth.

IMHO, Harbeth SHL5 are magical for singing across the spectrum of genres but when I put on dialogue / NPR, I switch over to a set of Focal Micro Be in a hurry. The Harbeth sound is too intense for spoken words in my findings. I can also make a loose opposite argument for the Focal Micro Be which excels at speech in my setup but while doing very good vocals, does not stand out - perhaps because everything else sounds so good too.

I think Kr4 makes a good point. The production of a spoken voice recording may be completely different than for singing. Singing is done (hopefully), for good sound, and spoken voice for communication. Going on that assumption, its only natural that there's a gap in sound quality.

Can you give us an example of a speaker and situation where a speaker can sound good with singing but not with speech that is not recording-dependent?

Vandersteen