Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

Thus supported, the Harbeths best suited my 19' by 12' listening room when toed-in slightly but not fully toward the center of the listening area, and when each was approximately 41" from its sidewall and 56" from the wall behind it (all dimensions measured from a central point on the front baffle). My 25Wpc Shindo Corton-Charlemagne monoblocks, their use preapproved by Harbeth's US distributor, sounded super with the Supers—but so did the 45Wpc Croft Phono Integrated, which I used to drive the Harbeths in my considerably larger living room (ca 23' by 27').

A final note: The Super HL5plus is supplied with a removable fabric grille, the slender frame of which can be pressed into a groove at the perimeter of the front baffle, just inside the front molding. As one who has mild doubts about the advisability of hiding powerful grille-fastening magnets within the front baffles of dynamic loudspeakers, I think the Harbeth approach is fine; that said, I did most of my listening with the grilles removed.

Listening
With both of the amplifiers I used, and in both of my rooms—but especially in the larger—the Harbeth Super HL5plus sounded conspicuously, even startlingly, clear. It wasn't the sort of clarity that comes from a tipped-up treble or an absence of bass—neither of which the Harbeth had—and the speaker's presentation, although a little more forward than those of most other British boxes of my experience, wasn't excessively so. Instead, the Super HL5plus simply emanated a greater amount of sonic detail and musical information, especially in terms of pitch and timing, than I hear from most speakers, and did so with ease, beauty, and an utter lack of artifice or strain.

And for a loudspeaker of sufficient but not generous efficiency, the Harbeth had surprisingly good tactile qualities, in which sense it brought to mind—and exceeded—the ostensibly similar Stirling Broadcast LS3/6. As I listened to "Cortez the Killer," from Neil Young's Zuma (LP, Reprise MS 2242), it was Ralph Molina's snare drum that first caught my attention: spatially set back from the front of the stage, but very impactful and present and crisp, if not as forceful as through my Altec horns. The tone of Young's electric guitar also struck me as just right—the perfect combination of electric snarl and rich sustain—and his voice was texturally realistic and, again, present.

Notably, commendably, the Harbeth's talent for impact extended to its bass range. Tony Garnier's double bass on Bob Dylan's recent Shadows in the Night (LP, Columbia 88875057961) sounded appropriately deep and rich, with good timing when plucked—as in the opening of "The Night We Called It a Day"—and superb texture and tactile qualities when bowed. I noted the same qualities when listening to Ben Tucker's bass playing in "'Round About Midnight," from Grant Green's Green Street (LP, Blue Note/Analogue Productions ST-84071): The Harbeths succeeded at conveying the extra force Tucker put behind each note as the performance wound down. And with Sir Adrian Boult and the New Philharmonia Orchestra's recording of Vaughan Williams's Symphony 6 (LP, EMI ASD 2329), the Harbeths let through a good sense of menace from the bass-drum rumblings in the opening measures, and from the battery of percussion that repeatedly builds to a climax under the three-note trumpet signature of the second movement. The very believable timbre of the solo oboe in the symphony's epilogue was icing on the cake. Again, I'm not talking compression-driver-and-horn levels of impact here—but the Super HL5plus had considerably better touch than I would have expected from a comparatively small and undeniably uncolored loudspeaker.

The Harbeth was a fine, clear communicator of musical timing. Up-tempo music, including the piano-driven "Re-Make/Re-Model" and other favorites from Roxy Music (LP, EG Records EGLP6, footnote 2), had excellent momentum and no signs of soggy tempos. The same could be said for the two takes of "Chance It" from Enigma, a recently released 10" mono LP by Miles Davis (Blue Note B0021528-01). The first version, labeled "take 3," has, in addition to Oscar Pettiford's relentlessly fast bass line, a brief solo by trombonist J.J. Johnson that, via the consistently articulate Harbeths, left me wondering how a mortal could coax from a trombone such inhuman speed. On a calmer wavelength, guitarist John Fahey's fingerstyle performance of "John Henry," from Selections by John Fahey and Blind Joe Death (LP, Takoma K80P-4447/8), lost none of its eerie rhythmic insistence through the Harbeths. And in a new reissue of Sir John Barbirolli and the Berlin Philharmonic's recording of Mahler's Symphony 9 (LP, EMI/Electric Recording Company ASD 596/597), the Harbeths followed tenaciously the intricate changes in tempo occasioned by the shifting, in the first movement, from D major to D minor and back again.

In fact, the Harbeth's exceptionally good musical timing served well Ivo Jansen's flowing, almost imperceptibly elastic performance of the Prelude and Fugue in C from Book I of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (CD, Void Classics 9805-A). And even when Jansen's technique takes a turn toward the mechanical, as it does in portions of the beginning of the Prelude and Fugue in c, the Harbeths kept things musical and human, perhaps by sheer dint of their good, warm tone. Were notes centered around 80Hz very slightly prominent, and their counterparts around 200Hz recessed to a similarly slight degree? I was tempted to dismiss such frequency-response inconsistencies as artifacts of my admittedly wiggy room, but I did hear pretty much the same thing when I tried the Harbeths in my much larger room, with the hybrid Croft Phono Integrated. Even so, piano sounded consistently impressive through the Harbeths, which allowed the more lyrical portions of György Sándor's thoughtful, intense performance of the Bartók Piano Sonata (CD, Sony Classical SK 68278) a good, human sense of flow, while preserving the power and drama of the more decidedly modern passages. The above also applied to the same disc's recording of Bart¢k's more accessible Sonatine, the opening movement of which always reminds me of the fiddle tune "Old Joe Clark." Throughout the Bartók set, I heard great, barking tone, with lots of bass-string purr: There was a whole pet shop in there!

Shortcomings? Although, as moderately sized cone-and-dome speakers go, the Super HL5plus did a better-than-expected job of communicating force, it was nonetheless bested in that regard by my Altec Valencias, or by any number of other vintage speakers built around horns and tautly suspended woofers. Additionally, while listening to big music through the Harbeths, I often wished for a better and altogether larger sense of scale: another illusion better conjured by horns and big woofers. (To the extent that that quality can result from a surplus of unwanted early reflections tricking listeners into thinking that what they're hearing is bigger than it actually is, I suppose you could read that as: I wished for more distortion. So be it.) Even in my bigger room, the Super HL5plus did not reward the larger space with a larger sense of scale: With indifferently recorded piano tracks, such as Chopin's Prélude in D-flat, Op.28 No.15, performed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet (CD, Decca 466 357-2), the instrument sounded decidedly small.

Still, that shortcoming did nothing to detract from the Harbeths' ability to focus my attention on the essentials of music making—perhaps best exemplified by their consistently fine way with well-recorded acoustic music, such as Tony Rice's 58957: The Bluegrass Guitar Collection (CD, Rounder 1166-116622-2). On the instrumental "Monroe's Hornpipe," the Super HL5plus proved its prowess with timbre, touch, and a really good sense of pitch certainty—the latter heard best in Todd Phillips's acoustic bass line. This is one of the more close-up recordings of Rice's steel-string acoustic guitar, and the Harbeths perfectly captured both the instrument's tonal warmth and the timbral and textural variations Rice manages to achieve with his masterful use of slurs, slides, hammer-ons, and subtle bends.

Conclusions
I enjoy writing about classic British boxes. I'd looked forward to my time with the Harbeth Super HL5plus, and I was not disappointed.

Now comes the hard part. First of all, notwithstanding the fact that even the best British box can't provide the extremes of drama and scale to which I have, in recent years, become addicted, I'll miss the Harbeths' easy clarity, and the consistently truthful, present manner with which they reproduce singing voices in particular. Shallow though it may seem, I will also miss the way they look—or, more accurately, I will miss the way my room looks with something like the Harbeths at one end of it. Second, when this review goes up on our website, a few members of the "I prefer to think of my mother's basement as an apartment with a shared entrance" crowd will write in to tell us how much smarter they are than the manufacturers who design and build classic British boxes, and how stupid Stereophile is to write about such things. That may be funny or it may just be sad, depending on what kind of day I've had: I'll have to wait and see.

Far easier is the task of putting the Harbeth Super HL5plus into perspective for the many hobbyists who might be in the market for such a thing. As one who has owned the Spendor SP1/2 (in its late-1990s iteration) and who recently reviewed the Stirling LS3/6, I suggest that most listeners would consider the Harbeth somewhat more modern sounding, in the best way, than either. The Super HL5plus sounds more forward and more realistically vivid than that version of the Spendor SP1/2, and its bass range is clearer and faster than that of the Stirling LS3/6. Comparisons to the latter, however, are complicated by the matter of value: While the Harbeth offers reasonable value for the money ($6695/pair), the Stirling ($4995/pair) goes farther in that regard.

The British box endures, as does the vision of Dudley Harwood and his BBC compatriots: For the listener who wants a loudspeaker that is both explicit and truthfully beautiful, the Harbeth Super HL5plus is an excellent choice.

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Footnote 2: Not the original edition, but a pretty good-sounding UK reissue from the 1990s.