SF Guarneri Homage vs Harbeth 7ES3

Thank you all for your input. I have been close to buying a pair of Guarneri's but eventually ended up buying a pair of Harbeth's Super HL-5. Unfortunately I did not have a chance to test the Guarneri's and relied on some trusted friends' mixed feelings about them -- stunningly beautiful speaker, but probably overrated in terms of its musicality and acoustic performance. Let's put it this way. I have two close friends who are professional reviewers for Italian sound magazines. Both of them recommended enthusiastically the Harbeth's I bought -- just go ahead and get them, especially if you're used to Quads ESL 57. Both of them recommended that I take a good listening to the Guarneri's before buying them...I followed their advice.

Just to clarify: I listened to the speakers but at dealers, therefore with different electronics, which makes it hard to make a real comparison. So, my hope was to find people who tried them both with comparable electronics.

This afternoon I looked for Ken Kessler's 1993 of the Guarneri Homage. At some point he talks about the Guarneri's lack of bass, which didn't bother him much because he thought whatever bass they have is so good that you do not need more...and found this passage fairly amusing:
"So, before I go any further, I want to qualify my remarks with a reminder: I do not give a damn about deep, thunderous bass. I find the obsession with sub-70Hz sonics to be not just juvenile but anal. And I can think of no lower life form than the kind of mutant who puts twin 15 inchers in the boot of his Escort, driving along with 125dB's worth of 40Hz grunge in each lughole."

I am not sure I fully agree, but I think he has a point here...

Daveyf, I tried both GH's and HL-5's at dealers but I tend to discount these tests because the room configuration and the electronics and the cables used are always different than mine. For me it's hard to judge how good a speaker is without trying it out in my system or in a system that is similar to mine. That is why I think that our opinions can be so different about speakers or components in general. In addition to having different ears and tastes, little changes in one's system can have big changes in how appealing a component it...at least in my experience. So, when I ask for advice I tend to trust people whom I know well, and who tried components for long periods of time in systems that are similar to mine. The reason I got interested in Guarneri's is that I've always been in tune with Ken Kessler advice. On the other hand, the fact that two reliable people who have similar tastes and similar systems to yours basically tell you to lean toward the HL-5's...well, that tells me something. The problem might be that they (and therefor me) might not have the right equipment to make the GH's sing as they should.