I’ve said so elsewhere, but let me add my rave review. Boxy, counterintuitive, little anomalies, they are. Looking at them I expected a Rogers or KLH kind of sound, familiar from many decades ago. But they sound *nothing* like that.
I have the Super HL5+ 40th Anniversary in Tamo Ash,a bit of a rarity. They’ve been in my system for about a month. They are driven by an Adcom 5802 (199x, re-capped, Pass-designed beast of an amp) and a brand new Cambridge Audio Edge NQ streamer/DAC/pre, as well as an iFi iDSD pro once or twice. Also (if you must) - Analysis Plus speaker wire, Mogami balanced interconnects, a plain old Monster Cable Power Supply/voltage stabilizer, QNAP NAS running minimserver with lots of hi-res recordings streaming over CAT 5&6 Ethernet cable.
I’m befuddled in the best possible way. I listen to a lot of live (mostly classical and Jazz) music, sometimes in the same room as my system, and I had always felt mine and other systems didn’t reproduce the warmth and timbre of strings adequately, and, even worse for real life, many speakers just sounded too flat at lower volumes. I tried turntables and tubes (I still own some huge VTL 225s but sold my Conrad-Johnson preamp), and found the artifacts of both to overwhelm any alleged gains in warmth -poor substitutes for the lushness of live music. Tubes seemed to lose detail and timbre accuracy when audibly different, and LPs imparted a pleasant, more live, feeling, yet not an accurate one. LPs have other distracting dynamic range and pitch consistency problems with, for instance, piano. I recently auditioned some very expensive systems that were viscerally impressive and detailed but where they gained timbral accuracy the seemed to lose some of the smoothness, becoming "etched" or, at least in one case, dramatically tipped-up in the treble.
Yet I get the Harbeths into my apartment and symphonic music sounds concert-hall lush. I can hear the woody timbre of individual string instruments. It’s everything the tubes and LPs were promising me, only without the trade offs. There’s more detail along with the warmth. Close your eyes and you’d swear they were huge floorstanders, spreading a large image. I’m less of a voice connoisseur, but voices sound like they are in the room with me. I’m not missing any bass that bothers me ( I don’t listen to Organ music, but I want those string basses, tympanis to be present and authoritative). Far from fatigue, I’m putting off going to bed to listen to one...more...movement.
As a bonus lot of recordings I had written off as poor, are now pretty enjoyable. Not as good as the good ones, but I can get carried away in the music rather than the distractions. This was a problem with my previous Thiels which are, by experience and reputation, accurate in timbre but sometimes lean-sounding. Never fatiguing,though, which I really liked.
How is this possible? It doesn’t comport with what I thought I knew. By measurement, these speakers have as flat a frequency response above 40Hz as most anything else. It seems they aren’t *adding* any undue emphasis. Why do they sound so different, so much better? Why am I rushing home to listen every night? Is this all in my head? Is it really accurate, or just more pleasurable? Is there really extra detail at low volume, as I perceive?
I’m as bad as the next guy at separating subjective from objective, and possibly in a honeymoon phase, so don’t take my descriptions too seriously (as if you would). But give them an audition and think about the sound that you will *lean into* in the long term. These boxy, counter-intuitive, little anomalies seem to do it, and the cult following suggests others feel the same way.
The Thiels will go. Rather than put them in my other system, I’ll get another pair of Harbeths. Someday.
