On the "what is special about Harbeth?" question, here's part of my answer.
Having auditioned an insane amount of speakers - the Harbeth have just stuck out in terms of being able to produce the "gestalt" of the human voice, as well as acoustic instruments. But human voice in particular.
I've long been obsessed with live vs reproduced. Not that I expect a sound system to be able to reproduce sound truly indistinguishable from the real thing. Just the opposite! In paying attention to live vs reproduced it's only highlighted the differences between live vs reproduced. I've done recordings of my family's voices (as well as instruments we own being played) and done direct live vs reproduced comparisons with various speakers I've had (and also used those tracks sometimes when auditioning speakers). The ways some speakers do better in these comparisons than others was always fascinating to me.
Just as when I audition speakers, when I go to audio shows I'm constantly comparing live vs reproduced. How? By comparing the sound of the live human voices talking all around, vs the sound of voices being played through the various sound systems. Inevitably many systems are playing a well recorded vocal that is supposed to impress us as sounding "realistic." Very often these are certainly producing a VERY vivid and clear "something" in between those speakers. But it's not really a human voice. It's usually still electronic sounding, like a voice "reconstructed through hard materials" and often insubstantial, like you can wave your hand through it. Human voices sound "organic," made of "damped flesh" and they have an acoustic density, where eyes closed you sense it has density, it's occupying space in the room. It's this amazing combination of clarity and the organic warmth and density that to me distinguishes the real thing.
So at shows if they are playing a vocal I will close my eyes and listen to the (invetable) sound of someone talking in the room and compare it to the reproduced vocal. "What is it that the sound system isn't getting about the real thing?" It always shows up the artificiality of reproduced voices.
EXCEPT....to some degree...the Harbeth speakers for which I've done this "test."
I remember a full day at the last show doing this eyes-closed "live vs reproduced voice" comparison and in a Harbeth room I was simply astonished to finally hear a speaker that came that close to the real thing. I'd listen to the real voices in the room, the voice coming through the Harbeth, and the "gestalt" in how it was reproducing the human voice was amazingly close. No other system had quite done that, to my ears.
I owned some Harbeth speakers for a while and to this day the thing they did better than any other speaker I've owned, was to find the "human quality" in voices.
Which is a pretty damned impressive thing, and something the designer should rightly be proud of. I certainly get why the brand is coveted by many.
