@prof Thank you for the lead. I forgot about this head to head speaker comparison. I heard the Joseph’s and the Harbeth 40.1s and Herb’s description is right on target. I prefer the Harbeth sound (possibly because I have over 10,000 opera/classical vocal LPs/CDs and 78s) for voice.
Yes, the Harbeths still haunt me with how well they did voices (I had the Super HL5plus for a while and have heard the whole line).
Did you decide on the Devore O/96 because it was an amalgam of those two speakers that you previously owned? I only heard Devores (O/93 or O/96) under audio show conditions and while it was pleasant, it didn’t excite me (the room was very wide and I have no recollection of the other equipment). Your description makes me want to hear them again in a better setting. All 3 speakers you own/owned are also moderately priced and as two ways, maintain excellent coherence and imaging.
I didn’t choose the Devores but ended up with Joseph Audio Perspectives instead. I liked the sound of both but the JA speakers fit my room better - they have to flank the sides of a big projection screen and the wider Devores would cause more problems. Plus I usually listen closer than 8 feet and the Devores need at least that IMO to sound right in terms of coherence and tone.
Impressions of the Devore O-series speakers can be all over the map because they are pretty finicky to set up, and finicky about listening distance, toe in etc. They can sound bland or too aggressive if done wrong. Get them right, and they do a superb balance between exciting and smooth.
I have under 100 bongo jazz and pop LPs/CDs and 1000+ jazz recordings commonly featuring drums . As my equipment got better, I could also relate to hearing the skins and feeling the snap plus the shimmering of cymbals. Very exciting. I know what you’re feeling.
I still haven’t heard a speaker that did those sounds as convincingly as the Devores. That sense of a bongo skin being hit "right there," not as a recording but real, and with weight and palpability.
My Joseph speakers are more refined and pure sounding, more free of grain, so the rendering of things like cymbals and bells is exquisitely pure and gorgeous. However, the Joseph speakers are like the vast majority of speakers I’ve heard: there is a certain pear shape to the size of the sound. Instruments with bass and lower midrange frequencies sound rich and dense and amazingly large. But as you go up to the higher frequencies things sound tinier and tinier, so now drum cymbals sound very clear and clean, but fairly weightless and much smaller than the real thing. Again this isn’t just a Joseph Audio thing: it’s what I hear with virtually all conventional speakers - as if all those instruments in the treble are being squeezed through those tiny tweeters making for a miniaturized presence.
I found the Devor O/96 does better than most speakers in maintaining a sense of thickness, heft and size from the bottom to the top frequencies, so even drum cymbals and bells seem to have more life-sized weight and presence. That’s one thing that blew me away listening to the drum solo track I often use as a test. The MBL omni speakers (which I’ve owned) also can have a similar quality - drum cymbals sound more like the large resonating discs they are rather than the small bits of bright spots lighting up in a soundstage of most speakers.
IMO.
:-)
