Any monitors clearly better than Pulsars?

The Pulsar appears to be using the Seas 5.5 magnesium woofer and 1in. Millennium tweeter, both of which are some of the best off-the-shelf drivers in the world. The only woofers that offer better detail than the magnesium are probably Seas new Graphene or Accuton ceramic.  I've used the magnesium in my own speakers and they have a lot of details and lots of bass for its size.

At low frequency, our hearing may not be that sensitive to distortion since the wavelength is so long.  At low frequency, what's more important is how well the bass is properly damped - otherwise the bass will be lose or flabby.  Two most important variables that determine the quality of the bass is first the driver QTS, and the internal volume of the cabinet.  As for how low the driver can go determined by first the size of the driver surface area, secondly the material (such as paper, aluminum, ceramic ...), and thirdly the Xmax (or how much excursion can the driver move back and forth).  In general, everything else being equal, the harder the cone material, the more bass extension.  Hence materials such as aluminum, kevlar or magnesium will have more bass than paper cone.

I think the Harbeth 30 woofer is made of paper or paper that has been coated with some sort of material.  The Pulsar woofer is magnesium, so most likely it will have more bass extension vs. the Harbeth.  I personally have used the Seas 5.5in magnesium, and I would crank up the volume and that thing would just play on.  I did the same thing on a lesser paper cone driver it broke on me.

The challenge in designing small monitor such as the Pulsar is that you need some sizable internal volume to able to control or dampen the bass.  But most people want small monitors so that they look pretty in their living rooms.  If the internal volume is too small, you have a midbass hump.  For the magnesium woofer on the Pulsar, you probably need about 13 - 15 liter of volume to properly damp the bass output.  I've read the Stereophile review and it seems like the Pulsars do have a bit of a midbass hump.  The midbass hump sometimes can be mistaken for having deeper bass.  And to be fair, most monitors in the same size category as the Pulsars probably don't have much deep bass to speak of so it's more like a game of millimeter.  

I haven't heard all the competing speakers that are about the same size as the Pulsar but it's very hard to beat the bass on the Seas 5.5in magnesium woofer.  I could think a couple of drivers from ScanSpeak such as either the 5.5in Revelator or the Illuminator or the Accuton ceramic, but other than that, I can't think of any.  But even then, they would be very close in term of bass output.

My only beef with the Pulsars is that, given all the praises, after reading the Stereophile review of the Pulsars, the designer advertised that he uses something called "Asymmetrical Infinite Slope circuit" for his xover.  OK, there is no such thing.  There is no "Infinite slope".  Cross over technology has been around since Edison invented the light bulb.  There is nothing new.  There is no need for the designer to resort to these type of marketing sleight of hand.  It cheapens his credibility.  It probably comes down to the woofer uses 2nd order and the tweeter using 3rd order to align the phase of both drivers hence the term "asymmetric" vs. "symmetric" in which the order of both the woofer and tweeter have the same filter order.   Using Asymmetric technique is actually a compromised approach since in order to use "Symmetric", the designer will need to rework the baffle geometry.

And with all due respect to the designer, the woofer and tweeter on the Pulsars are probably top ten drivers in the world.  So 80% of the goodness in the sound probably comes from the drivers by themselves.  He then just slapped on the xover and claimed all the credits :-)