Without wanting to spoil the party, I am one of the people who "moved on from Harbeth".
Let me quickly add that they are great speakers, and the speakers I am replacing them with are slightly more than twice as expensive - in other words, if you want to better you Harbeth, you really need to spend a lot of money (IMO - Tony L might disagree).
I wanted a speaker which is floorstanding and goes deeper than any Harbeth (except the M40, which, however, is way out my price range), and I found the Dynaudio Contour S 3.4, which, if all goes well, arrives coming Saturday. Why floorstanding? I always found the stands had a big influence on the sound - sometimes bad, sometimes good, sometimes just different - I am glad that with floorstanding speakers, this factor is now out of the equation.
Furthermore, with room correction I am now able to have speakers going down low without the problems usually associated with (lots of) bass in not so big / not so perfect rooms.
In comparison, the Dynaudios had more bass (hardly surprising), they sounded smoother and more detailed - but as mentioned before, they cost more than twice as much than the Harbeths, so yes, I can (and should) expect a better performance; however the law of diminishing returns also holds true for speakers (but probably to a lesser degree than for mains cables
), and I probably won't ever be spending more on conventional passive speakers than what I have spent for the Dynaudios.
In closing, the Harbeths are great speakers, and I if I hadn't discovered the whole room correction thing, I probably would have held on to them, or perhaps considered SHL5s - however here in Switzerland, I think Harbeth don't even have a distributor, which would make auditions very difficult - in the end, you always have to work with what you can realistically audition and buy. What is the point if someone on a forum tells you about the best speakers in the world, but they are only being sold in 2 shops in Outer Mongolia?
Samuel.
PS:
Alan Shaw is a great guy to deal with and he has certainly the right attitude towards HiFi