Harbeth again…or other speakers for acoustic music?

@jdal 

please remember that GR research video has an agenda.  the crossover parts are low cost but are well regarded capacitors and resistors that have tight tolerances.  they are low cost because they are sold in high volume.  

as far as the parts content understand that to achieve the sound the designers are after a crossover may need many parts to achieve the best sound.  the main goals are absolute coherence between the drivers, a perfect phase response, an easy to drive impedance curve, and keeping drivers well out of their breakup modes.

to do this to perfection requires parts- e.g. higher order slopes require more parts per low pass/ and high pass filter than simple shallow slope design.  you may also need circuits for impedance flattening (zoebel), notch filtering for supressing peaks and distortion as well as baffle step compensation to flatten the response from higher reflected frequencies.  

The secret sauce of any speaker are the voicing and crossovers, often a simple one does not yield the best results.

you should see the crossovers for the well regarded Joseph Audio Pulsars, which are a patented "infinite slope" design.  

I auditioned the SHL5+ extensively at a well-known Seattle dealer, in what appeared to be a solid brick-walled room with a suite of high-end Naim electronics.  I was surprised by how bright they sounded to me, and I--ill-advisedly--nearly wrote off the brand.  Then at Deja Vu in DC I heard the 40.2s, and everything changed.  I don't know how many "house sounds" Harbeth has, but it's more than one.

The SHL5+ are sensitive to toe in and break in hours.  

They are counter intuitive in that more toe in reduces brightness. Also they should have grilles on to smooth the upper midrange.  

Lastly mine took many many hours to reach their final forgiving less bright initial sound.  

A couple of guys asked how its going with my SVS Micro 3000sub and Harbeth m30.1 setup/integration.

First just a little context so you know my particular situation. I retired about 6 years ago and have moved 4 times since then. Always a 1 or 2 br. apt., from NY to Florida, then back to NY 2 years ago to a rental apartment in Long Beach, NY. I bought a 1 bedroom apartment on the Long Beach boardwalk last year at about this time. I mention this as monitor speakers like the Harbeth’s (in my case the 30.1’s) are relatively portable and easy to pack. So size factored into my personal equation.

Now that I’ve put down roots, I’m able to flesh out my system. To me, that meant I’d either buy a larger Harbeth like the SHL5+ or simply add a fast, small sub to my present system. I decided to just augment the 30.1’s with a sub and see how that goes over the winter. I’ve been an audiophile for the past 30 years or so and have heard hundreds of systems so I have a pretty good understanding of what to expect.

So far so good. I had to work with Pass Labs to understand how to connect this particular sub to my Pass INT-25 speaker outputs (ain’t no line out). So I thank Kent English from Pass for helping me to come up with a solution over the past few weeks.

The SVS Micro 3000 is "tiny". About 22.5 lbs. That makes it easy to move around the room. The remote android app (I’m sure its the same for apple) is easy to use and works fast and well. That makes it easy to tweak from my couch. I hear what i wanted to hear and that makes me happy. Sure it might take some time to integrate "seamlessly" but it’s doing what I expected right now. I don’t understand all the controls on the app but I’ll learn, no biggie. I’m concentrating on the Low Pass Filter on the SVS app now and have set that close to 50hz which is where the Harbeth really loses its bottom end. I’m looking for "space" not "bass".

Personally I think the SVS / Harbeth combo is the cats meow. Sort of a no brainer for under $1k all in. I hope this information helps someone else. Sure it’s going to take a while for me to futz around to get perfect sound but that’s what winter is about. Don’t be daunted!!

I went from falcon ls3/leben to harbeth 30.1 with croft/tron and now tannoy /luxman each time  it got better...