What Is So Special About Harbeth?

Alan Shaw is obsessed about accurately reproducing the human voice, and he brings up the topic regularly on Harbeth's forum. Shaw's reasoning is that our hearing developed from millions of years of evolution to be hyper sensitive at picking up subtle nuances in the human voice. Therefore speaker performance is especially critical in the human vocal range where our hearing is most discerning. He has talked about using recordings of spoken speech during their engineering development and how it highlights qualities that may not be apparent from music.

This focus explains the strengths and weaknesses of Harbeth speakers. If you can get the human voice right, a lot of things come along with it. It is the reason for the famed Harbeth midrange and why it is particularly good at reproducing unamplified acoustic instruments. However, they haven't given the same attention to reproducing electronic sounds and dynamics such as in rock music.

It is obvious these folks are hurting.

On the Harbeth forum, Alan Shaw said they were careful about negotiating Brexit and the pandemic, and he says the company remained financially solid. Actually one of their biggest problems is meeting demand (already presold for half of this year). Like other businesses they are having problems in the supply chain. They lost one of their local cabinet makers and had trouble finding a replacement that meets their standards.

Harbeth is becoming the Bose of British speakers -- they’re such a powerhouse in marketing that you can tell folks that there are better alternatives until you’re blue in the face -- doesn’t matter, they’re going to sell droves of them regardless.

Putting it in perspective, Harbeth is a tiny company with 15 employees. Here is their UK business filing (link). Their budget is shockingly small to me (but I work in the tech industry). Hardly what I would call a "powerhouse in marketing".

I think it's the marketing prowess of the distributors more than Harbeth as a company, but effective marketing doesn't require an army of marketing majors. It really only takes one person who understands the market and what drives sales. 

I hardly see any commercial marketing of Harbeth. I think it is the influence of the fanbase more than anything else (e.g. look at discussions here on Audiogon).

For myself, Harbeth is excellent for my listening (mostly classical music), and I do consider myself a fan. However I can see that Harbeth isn't ideal for all types of music.

@acdvd, the big improvement for the shl5 was going from the non-plus to plus model. The subsequent models (40th Anniversary and XD) only had small incremental updates. If you have a good deal on the plus, I would go for it.