Best Loudspeakers for Rich Timbre?

Legacy Audio. They tend to make more recordings listenable, don’t break the bank, and surely fall into the rich sound camp of speakers.

Brilliant responses, really impressed. Audio Note (Hemp?), Harbeth and DeVore are names that often come up. Joseph Audio sounds like one to watch out for. Tannoy, I'm quite familiar with.

By rich timbre I guess I mean that you can clearly hear the harmonics in a voice or in an instrument as as you can hear the pitch, loudness or edge detail. Many speakers can do the start of a note well but not it's body - all attack and little decay. All frequencies of sound including Bass can have beautiful harmonics (I find that the ones around 4-8kHz can be particularly delightful).

Perhaps it's not strictly accuracy I'm after - I'd much sooner have exaggerated tonal colour than slightly muted. For some like me it serves as a drug when it comes to listening. Of all the critiques trying to explain the lasting popularity of the Beatles music, the best ones for me focus on their diverse use of timbre and tonal colour. Compared to many who followed their recordings (admittedly in an age of analogue recording and valve/ tube desks) do seem to exhibit 'a greater "rainbow" of timbres and tonal colors' especially from Rubber Soul onwards.

I find that Classical music and Jazz really become captivating when it's easy to distinguish the sound of the instruments rather than just the notes they are playing. Wood sounds like wood, metal has it's natural sheen, wind instruments sound different again. Piano can either sound plain and two dimensional, or it comes alive as you get to hear all the tones and micro tones. A real sense of someone at work.

Tonal colour is not merely edge detail, it's infinitely more than that. Plenty of speakers can do leading edge detail well, and seem lightning fast whilst they do it, but few seem to handle the body and decay of the notes as well. 

It is difficult to speak about tonal colour without also speaking about warmth, especially in the midrange (Bose anybody?), but I don't think it's necessarily dependent upon warmth. It's just that cold sounding systems can often expose their monochromatic nature far more readily. 

KEF reference, diapasón, 

cd318,

I find that Classical music and Jazz really become captivating when it’s easy to distinguish the sound of the instruments rather than just the notes they are playing.

That describes exactly what the Joseph speakers are great at. Pretty much every review of the JA speakers (look up the Pulsar reviews) makes a point about how easily separate and distinct the timbral qualities of instruments remain, even as a mix gets more complex.

You’ll see Michael Fremer describing that quality here:

https://www.stereophile.com/content/joseph-audio-pulsar-loudspeaker

Or from the absolute sound review:


http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/joseph-audio-pulsar-tas-203/

"The first thing I noticed about the Pulsars was their midrange purity and lack of grain."
..................

"Of all the Pulsar’s sonic attributes, the one that impressed me the most was the high level of discernability. What I mean by discernability is, how easy is it to listen into the mix and pick out exactly what parts you want to concentrate on? The higher the level of discernability, the easier it is to do this. The Pulsars made it easy to recognize the essential banjoness of a banjo on Paul Curreri’s “Once Up Upon a Rooftop” [California Tin Angel Records]. Even when a harmonica is added to the mix, it’s easy to tell where the banjo stops and the harmonica starts."

I found this particularly intriguing when I played various mono recordings on the Joseph speakers - Chet Baker, etc.  When you have various voices and instruments "lining up" behind one another in the center, rather than spread out discernibly in the soundstage in stereo,  a less pure-sounding speaker can make it harder to untangle one instrument from another.  But on the Joseph speakers it seemed every instrument was effortlessly separate timbrally, making it more realistic and "easier" to listen to one particular instrument over another even in a really tight mono mix. 

One word. ProAc.