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Are the Harbeth P3s only for near field listening?

kristoffer

kristoffer

Danish Hi Fi NERD
Something I find a little curious is the fact that the Harbeth P3s are often mentioned as near field speakers. Can they work in a normal living room sitting 13 - 15 feet away?
 
Generally speaking I'd say yes, they work fine in my listening room, but I guess it will depend in part on your room acoustics and you need to try them first.

I use mine with a subwoofer.
 
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Depends on definition of near field, they don't need to be on a desk for example. I think they can work well further away in a smallish room providing you can set them up in the traditional triangle formation, caveat would be as they are low sensitivity and only handle upto 50 watts (from memory) there is a limit to that distance.
 
Those BBC based speaker have a lovely midrange and take up little place.
IME they are not useful as main speaker, limited output and frequency makes them a nice choice for smaller ensembles etc.
Small room necessary.

LS3/5a speakers of every kind has gone crazy in prices, makes decision to own even more difficult.
 
Or subwoofer with a high pass! Can be difficult to get right and expensive but in theory could get nice mid range and highs via the harbeth and low frequency via the sub.
 
Allaboutmusic said:
Or subwoofer with a high pass! Can be difficult to get right and expensive but in theory could get nice mid range and highs via the harbeth and low frequency via the sub.
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Exactly what I concluded as well.
Small room : good enough if you don’t need to rock the place but in medium size room, I would pair the with two subs and results can be outstanding.
 
They sounded nice in my mid-size lounge but just not enough scale and bottom end, personally. Too limiting.

This sounds totally weird but they made me think of a sausage machine. As in everything that went in to them was turned into a very nice sausage of music (size/seasoning). I'll get me coat.
 
Gervais Cote said:
Exactly what I concluded as well.
Small room : good enough if you don’t need to rock the place but in medium size room, I would pair the with two subs and results can be outstanding.
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I have my P3ESRXDs set up with a pair of REL t5x in a small room and for me these sound superb. However, getting the subs tuned with the P3s was a real pain. Having tried all the REL and YouTube methods, I added a minidsp for the subs. Using measurement from REL to prepare dsp settings proved the only way to get it right. Not the easiest, or maybe the cheapest route but it's been worth it.
 
Never understood the following for the P3ESR, I couldn't get on with them at all. Tried them with a 30 Watt Sugden A21SE and a 200 Watt Modwright KWI200 but they just sounded flat and dull. Not really surprising with a 4.5 inch driver and little bass below 70 Hz.

For the same money I'd buy the Audio Note AN-K/SPe for a smallish room.
 
vacuum_tubes said:
Never understood the following for the P3ESR, I couldn't get on with them at all. Tried them with a 30 Watt Sugden A21SE and a 200 Watt Modwright KWI200 but they just sounded flat and dull. Not really surprising with a 4.5 inch driver and little bass below 70 Hz.



For the same money I'd buy the Audio Note AN-K/SPe for a smallish room.
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This is what l did ( LX version) :),....however if you like what the P3's do, nowt comes close.
 
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