@cd318
I do find the SLH5+ to be quite neutral sounding to my ear. By that I mostly mean sounding smooth, without obvious frequency deviations, that kind of thing. I did find the smaller 30s, though seductive, to be just a bit too rolled off and darkish in tone for my own long term enjoyment.
I really do enjoy the lushness of the Harbeth midrange, where so many speakers tend to sound too thin to my errs. As you know the Harbeths of of the thin-wall cabinet design, tuning the cabinet to allow for vibrations but in a way that are supposed to be invisible to the ear.
I think they are remarkably competent in that regard. Just given their looks and construction the actual lack of boxy sound is impressive.
That said, it seems to me the brute-force school of cabinet making, where cabinets are made to be as inert as possible, seem to ultimately hold the day in terms of achieving more realistic sound in most regards.At least in the case of the Thiels. Though they are not made of aluminum or granite, the overriding design of the Thiel cabinet is to be inert and not sing with the music. And I heard those benefits when comparing the Harbeth and Thiel 3.7. With the Harbeth there was a sense of the sound sort of filling all the space in between the instruments, almost as if the space/reverb between the instruments itself had density and was tactile.
On the Thiels, the tone was just as organic (though not as perfectly soft and organic with voices as with the Harbeth), but the sound seemed to clear up in and around the instruments, as if a spurious form of "ringing" had been removed and all the energy cleaned and organized to come only from where it was coming, the instrument itself.
So for instance, playing a classical guitar quartet, the guitars became less produced by a speaker, more cleaned up, organized, precise, free of the speakers, and just sounding less "of a speaker" than and more like real guitars playing in free space. More believable.
The Harbeths certainly got the tone and gestalt right of the guitars, but the Thiels got the tone, gestalt right and also moved the sound towards greater realism and accuracy. If the Thiels had sounded "boringly accurate" with a bleached tone, I’d never own them, but they really are fantastic at portraying an organically correct sounding timbre on voices and instruments. So I found the Super5HL+ with it's more neutral extended presentation to actually sound fairly similar to the Thiels, but I found the Thiels actually took that sound further down the road in believability of timbre, realism.
But for capturing something essential about the roundness, softness and humanness of the human voice, the Harbeths are almost peerless. Until recently a store near me sold Harbeths and when I’d stop in to buy vinyl inevitably a Harbeth model would be playing. Every time I would be seduced by the sound and want to just sit and listen. If I could I’d own them too, but I already have too many speakers on the go.
