Warm romantic & detailed

@jeffinnh76  There are significant differences between the .1 and the .2/.3.  The crossover in the 40.2 was changed to make it more living-room friendly.  The 40.1 could boom in too small rooms or when not carefully positioned.  The differences between the 40.2 regular, 40.2 Anniversary, and 40.3 XD are insignificant, and have more to do with marketing than performance.  A NOS/NIB/demo 40.2 is the purchaser's sweet spot.

I heard the 40.2 at the New York Audio Show and they had them pulled well out into the room...literally in the middle of the room. 

I owned 40.1's for 8 years and currently own 40.2 Anni's.  The 40.1's are considerably warmer and more full bodied / organic sounding than the 40.2's.   The 40.2's are more neutral and detailed.   
If you prefer warm and romantic, go with 40.1's.   If you want detailed and exciting go with 40.2's. 

They sounded pretty good playing Tusk.

i would agree with other posters that older revisions of harbeths had more meaningful tonality changes - for 40.1 to 40.2 - for c7-ii to c7-iii - for super 5 to plus version - all dialed back the mid bass boominess that could overwhelm rooms and other frequencies in the range

if you had a room and a system dialed in to make the prior versions sound right, inserting the newer versions tended to lean out the sound and accentuated other frequencies, up the range especially - for a perception of greater ’transparency’ - what makes harbeths special imho is their fullness of tone married to sufficient detail/insight into the music, so it makes sense long time harbeth lovers often feel negativity towards changes in more revised models

this being said, in more recent years, with anniversary models, 40.2 to 40.3, xd versions, the change in tonal character is quite minimal... as i have said in other threads, alan shaw/harbeth seems to have adopted the ’bcg consulting’ school of product revisions... mostly for marketing schtick with price increases, get unsuspecting buyers to trade up, empty their wallets to have the ’best and latest’ for fear of missing out ... these are very marginal differences in actual performance - thus, much $ paid for little substantive value increase