Thought My Harbeth M40.1's Were Forever Speakers - Guess Not
cd318, interesting as usual. I've been reading some old papers on the evolution of BBC monitors from the 50's through the 80's. The designers and engineers had to argue with the top dogs trying to build state of the art and best sounding speakers they could. The accountants saying it didn't matter since 90% of the public used garbage speakers anyway and they argued their's needed to be better than the 10% who didn't. Interesting that Shaw used his daughter's voice as some monitors were not designed for music but voice and effect work. Some for use in those old small broadcast vans. |
@djones51, When I first read about the BBC research it was like a breath of fresh air. Especially after years of reading about ’musicality’, P.R.A.T. and the flat earth approach. The theory goes that untold millennia of evolution our hearing has been optimised for speech far more so than music which must have obviously arrived much later. Furthermore, unprocessed speech has a sonic immediacy that many designers (esp those BBC influenced ones such as Harbeth, Spendor and PMC etc) use speech as the key reference point in all of their designs. They argue that if a design works well on speech it’s likely to do well elsewhere, which naturally enough implies that if a design doesn’t reproduce speech very well - then what’s the point! This idea seems to have stood the test of time as even after half a century later it’s very difficult to argue against this reasoning. Alas, those were the days when the BBC had a far larger research facility and seemed far more concerned about consistency and conformity over its worldwide broadcasting endeavours. Nevertheless it is to their credit that they are willing to openly share the results of their research in such a matter of fact way. https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/search?query=Loudspeaker&submit= @twoleftears, My experiences of break-in is based upon various speakers that I have owned and I can see no reason why Harbeth M40s would be much different from any other speaker. Since this a public forum you are at complete liberty to disregard my opinion at leisure (and casually talk about 100 hours for tweeter break-in??). However I would have hoped you would give more consideration to the opinions of the loudspeaker’s designer. Someone who has worked on the design of the M40 for over 20 years. No problem, it’s your choice, as unlike yourself I have no vested financial interest in any of this. In any case I would hope I have explained well enough for you to understand why I might prefer Alan Shaw’s opinion over yours. |
