What Is So Special About Harbeth?

My C7ES3’s are a very nice second system speaker option to my Shindo/Altec’s. They get the all important (to me) tone correct, and are engaging at low/moderate listening levels. When fed properly, they do not get lost in my med/large listening area. That is a 23 X 12 ft room with 8 ft ceilings, with a large opening to the dining room. If I do part with my C7’s, the low-ish efficiency/impedance will be the main reason. I am planning on a return to tubes after a short run with the Luxman 550, and prior to that, a Croft phono int amp. The latter was actually quite good, but lacked the depth of tubes.

to me, the stark reality of the matter is that all speakers have a sound, and of course, any speaker in a room then has even more of a sound -- this truism is absolute and unavoidable

people like to say xyz is ’accurate’ - but no one really knows what 'accurate' it is... it is subjective, not objective... it is what we hear, as what we can measure to be ’accurate’ is woefully incomplete in explaining what we hear, how we feel a sounds different than b

that said, all experienced folks in this pursuit understand that speakers by far, by far, produce the greatest distortion (i.e. variation) from input to output, than any other part of the signal chain -- even based on rudimentary measurements of frequency and phase response -- so speaker choice is naturally the most intensely personal

what we can do (and should do), though, is hear real things (human voice, piano, acoustic guitar, drum set, cymbal shimmer, bowed bass, cello) and ideally hear them in the same or a similar room, then try to remember that sound, and compare to what similar reproduced sound/music of the same sounds like, and judge how close, how truthful it is to the real thing

when done in this way, many who judge harbeths feel they do quite well, and better than most

@jjss49 Well said.

 weakest things of harbeths are these.Far away from natural

drum set, cymbal shimmer, bowed bass

I remeber a few years back I visited an old friend of mine in Philadephia and he had a set of the largest Harbeths, a Linn Sondek deck with Vandehul cartridge and Ayre electronics from phono to preamp to power amp. It was one of the nicest systems I have heard. The evening after dinner he played everything from classical symphonies to Daft Punk to Steely Dan to Nora Jones and it was very realistic powerful and also not too sharp or edgy like many big deal hifis are.  I just remember being very impressed.