Gramophone Dreams

After lifelike timbres and speed-train momentum, how a loudspeaker projects its energy into my room is the main thing that determines how my sound system feels as I listen to it. When I review loudspeakers, I try to notice the unique tone and force of their "voice" as they speak into my room. Do they stand too close, stick out their chests, and brag loudly in third harmonics? Or do they have small voices that force me to lean in to make out what they're saying?

With a miniature box speaker like my reference Falcon Gold Badge LS3/5as or the similarly sized Harbeth P3ESR XDs, which I'm auditioning this month, I have to sit very close to experience any of their direct, "off-the-cone" energy. If my listening position gets too far away or the speakers are positioned too far apart or too far from the wall behind them, the sound thins and loses body.

I didn't need to sit close to those 1947 Altec A5 Voice of the Theatre horns I used to use. Their energy came out straight ahead and touched every corner of even a big room. Like they did in a movie theater.

In maximum contrast, each of my 83dB/W/m–sensitive LS3/5a's piston about 15 square inches of air. The 100+dB–sensitive A5 Altecs projected sound from about 1500 square inches of driver area. That's a sandbox shovel vs a snowplow.

To check that metaphor, consider that the soundboard of a Steinway A piano—a small grand—measures 2129 square inches (footnote 1); the whole piano might be emitting sound energy from 5000 square inches or more (footnote 2). When I think about squeezing all that energy through a 4.3" woofer and a 0.75" tweeter, I laugh at the impossibility, then quickly remember that the purpose of home audio is not to create realism per se but to present recordings in a manner that allows users to access the main pleasures the music and recording have to offer in a format suitable for domestic consumption.

With the perfectly undomesticated Altecs, the best part was not how much energy they put into the room or how believably they could materialize a piano, but how well their projected energy communicated the spirit of recorded performances. In dramatic contrast, my Falcon Gold Badge LS3/5a's and Harbeth P3ESR XDs present recordings in a perfectly domesticated manner: precisely articulated, fantastic to view, and conspicuously miniaturized. They were designed to work at close range in a small space like mine.

For me, the magic of mini speakers is that they present an endlessly fascinating spectacle, one that treats every music genre equally while giving me the engineer's view of what the microphones captured and how the album tracks were mixed—exactly what the BBC's LS3/5a was created to do: show engineers what the microphones were capturing.

Unlike the Voice of the Theatre, which made everything cinema-scaled, the LS3/5a shows off its location-monitor talents by depicting vocal recitals, large orchestras, and grand movie soundtracks in reduced size and loudness but in their original proportions! For me, this is key: The BBC's smallest monitor achieves its believability with proportionality and strict tone-truthfulness. And that makes for good long-term relationships.

I am recounting these observations in the hope that this notion of how speakers project energy will prepare your mind to grasp, first, Harbeth's latest version of their P3 minimonitor—the $3290/pair P3ESR XD—and, second, how the feel of that speaker's soundfield changed when I added Harbeth's new Nelson "bass extender + stand" (footnote 3).

Harbeth P3ESR XD
I used, studied, and enjoyed Harbeth's P3ESR 40th Anniversary Edition from the time of my review in 2018 (footnote 4) until it was replaced by the $3290/pair XD edition in 2022. Because I hadn't used the P3ESR in a couple of years, I took a few days to get a feel and see if I could notice what changed in the XD version.

I asked Harbeth's importer, Walter Swanbon of Fidelis Distribution, what the physical and design differences were between the P3ESR I reviewed and the latest XD version. "The difference is that Alan Shaw"—Harbeth's CEO and chief engineer—"reworked the crossover, ... and the result is greater resolution and transparency," Swanbon replied.

My initial impressions support that claim. The previous P3ESR was always a touch warmer than my LS3/5a, and if I remember right, better balanced but thicker than my 5a in the upper bass/lower midrange. This XD version is outstandingly clean in that region.

More than the physical difference between their tweeters and bass-mid cone materials, the most important difference between the Falcon Gold Badge LS3/5a and Harbeth's P3ESR XD is in their impedance characteristics. Both loudspeakers have nominal impedances higher than average; the Falcon is rated at 15 ohms, and the P3 is specified as "6 ohms, easy to drive." Both speakers stay above 5 ohms, allowing users to experiment with low-power tube amplifiers. In my studio, both versions cruised effortlessly with single-ended 300Bs, and both clipped easily with 2W 2A3s. Beyond that simple test, my experiments suggest Harbeth's 6 ohm P3ESR will make its best music with a wider range of solid state amplifiers than my Falcons; their very high impedance baffles some class-D amps.

Harbeth's P3ESR XDs produced their sharpest-focused detail and showcased their most solid piano realism using just a few watts from the 300Wpc (into 8 ohms) Parasound Halo A 21+ stereo amplifier, which drove the P3s with a clean, sweet-toned authority that, compared to my tube amps, put more push behind the sound. In daily use, the P3ESR XD–A 21+ pairing made recordings sound naturally reconstituted with no solid state grain, bite, or soullessness. A five-star combo.

Powered by Rogue Audio's 100W, tube-input/class-D output V3 Sphinx integrated, the P3ESRs came across as relaxed and naturally toned. The sound was rich and full, but jump and vigor were less than they had been with the A 21+. A three-point-five-star combo.

Most days during these auditions, I used my beloved Elekit 300B workhorse, the TU-8900. I never noticed any clipping or compression, and I enjoyed how its singular transparency made the P3s glow and sparkle. A four-star combo.

For more details about the P3ESR's history and construction and amplifier pairings, I'll refer you to my November 2018 review of Harbeth's 40th Anniversary Edition. Everything I wrote there still applies, including this quote: "I shall not forget the first time ... I played Harbeth's standard-edition P3ESR in my own system. ... it took me only 30 seconds to realize that the ... P3ESR ... was delivering more useful information in the 75–300Hz octaves than either my Rogers or Falcon Acoustics LS3/5a."

The P3ESR XD alone
Lately, I've been under the spell of German pianist/composer/record producer Nils Frahm's 2011 recording Felt, featuring his home piano with the strings covered in felt to keep the piano quiet when he played late at night (Erased Tapes LP ERATP033LP). "Originally, I wanted to do my neighbors a favor by damping the sound of my piano. If I want to play piano during the quiet of the night, the only respectful way is by layering thick felt in front of the strings and using very gentle fingers. It was then that I discovered that my piano sounds beautiful with the damper installed."

Captivated by his discovery, Frahm placed microphones inside the piano, almost touching the lightly damped strings. This radical close miking resulted in a recording that presents listeners with a brightly lit view inside Frahm's instrument, a view of an exceedingly corporeal landscape of steel, wood, and felt wherein I saw felt-on-wood hammers hitting piano strings. Because the P3ESR XD was so exceedingly clean and clear of tone, I could leisurely watch notes decay and feel dampers coming down. What I saw was bright, sharp-focused, and totally Alice in Wonderland.

In Autochrome color: Felt's sonic thrills come from the vibrancy of its reverb tails, so to bring out as much "'verb tail" as possible, and to see how the P3 XD would handle this symphony of energy, I used Dynavector's XX2 moving coil cartridge feeding Sculpture A's €790 "Mini Nano" nanocrystalline-core step-up transformer. This copper-wired SUT was designed by Zsolt Bognár for François Saint-Gérand, founder of Sculpture A and Ana Mighty Sound (footnote 5). More than cores of mu-metal or amorphous cobalt, the Mini Nano's nanocrystalline core plumps and juices music signals impressed on its primary. The XX2 + Mini Nano presented recordings with supersaturated tones that made Nils Frahm's Felt into a trippy, inside-the-piano adventure.

The rest of this "leans toward sensual" sound system consisted of Prima Luna's EVO 100 phono stage, HoloAudio's Serene preamp, and Elekit's TU-8900 amplifier with Brimar ECC82s and Cossor 300Bs. Wires were by Triode Wire Labs.

"Dear beloved listener": The liner notes for Felt are in the form of a personal letter from Frahm to record buyers, printed on an album-sized sheet of rag paper tucked inside the album sleeve. In it, Frahm explains how his next-to-the-strings miking technique brought "a host of external sounds into the recordings which most producers would try to hide: I hear myself breathing and panting, the scraping sound of the piano's action and the creaking of my wooden floorboards—all equally as loud as the music. The music becomes a contingency, a chance, an accident within all this rustling. My heart opens and I wonder what exactly it is that makes me feel so happy. Felt creates its own personal microcosm, offering a refuge of tender and honest beauty."

The P3ESR XDs presented Frahm's audio verité with a pristine clarity that exposed the high-tactility sound of wood hammers tapping steel strings veiled in felt, backed by screeching piano-hammer action and the world's longest reverb tails. In my system, this ability to peer deep into recordings was the P3ESR XD's defining trait.

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Footnote 1: See bit.ly/SteinwayMason.

Footnote 2: See my discussion of the difference between sound pressure level and sound intensity in the March 2010 As We See It.—John Atkinson

Footnote 3: Harbeth Audio Ltd. US distributor: Fidelis 460 Amherst St. Nashua, NH 03063. Tel: (603) 880-4434. Web: fidelisav.com.

Footnote 4: Also see John Atkinson's review of the original P3ESR. At the bottom of that article, you'll find links to follow-ups by JA himself and by Brian Damkroger.

Footnote 5: Ana Mighty Sound. Web: anamightysound.com.