Sunflower Sutra
Active Member
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/harbeth-monitor-30-speaker-review.11108/
*grabs popcorn and waits for Alan shaw*
*grabs popcorn and waits for Alan shaw*
Harbeth Monitor 30 Speaker measured by Amir of ASR
- Thread starter Sunflower Sutra
- Start date
Stunsworth
pfm Member
Interesting that he couldn't be bothered to listen to them.
irb
pfm Member
To be fair:
1. he says he hasn't had time yet. That's not quite the same as not being bothered.
2. there are plenty of people of people posting on the internet about how speakers sound (to them, in their room, in their system, on the music they like ...). There aren't many people doing the kind of testing Amir is now doing, and putting the results online.
Rockmeister
pfm Member
Probably because, if you tell someone OMG there's a DIP!!!!! then they'll hear a dip. Otherwise they'd just listen and enjoy the sound.
tuga
Legal Alien
Regarding M30 vs LSR305mk2:
- the Harbeth has a much narrower directivity which is far more adequate to untreated domestic rooms
- the JBL shows loads of peaks in the frequency response around/above the crossover frequency region which could be caused by the kevlar cone's break-up resonances
- the JBL is a bright-sounding speaker as can be seen by the estimated in-room response plot which should be tilting downwards from bass to treble but is a horizontal line
- the estimated in-room is similarly flat on both speakers, but the Harbeth has a fuller upperbass-midrange which will sound (psychoacoustically) a lot better balanced tone-wise
A few comments:
He seems to be confusing narrower directivity at the crossover frequency with room issues.
He doesn't seem to have noticed that Stereophile's measurements are an averaged combination of plots made over a very wide listening window.
There's no CSD which would help find traces of cone break-up resonances.
The dimentions of the graphs are different making comparisons difficult.
Stereophile uses 6dB/octave smoothing; it would help to know what ASR uses.
Stereophile and Soundstage use a 50dB-wide range in the vertical scale; ASR should use this as standard.
The M30.2 measured by Sphile is flatter on-axis than the M30, as can be seen in the measurements below:
Harbeth M30, averaged listening window (Soundstage, anechoic)
Harbeth M30, on-axis, 15°, 30° (Soundstage, anechoic)
Harbeth M30.2, averaged listening window (Stereophile)
Harbeth M30.2, on-axis (HiFi germany)
- the Harbeth has a much narrower directivity which is far more adequate to untreated domestic rooms
- the JBL shows loads of peaks in the frequency response around/above the crossover frequency region which could be caused by the kevlar cone's break-up resonances
- the JBL is a bright-sounding speaker as can be seen by the estimated in-room response plot which should be tilting downwards from bass to treble but is a horizontal line
- the estimated in-room is similarly flat on both speakers, but the Harbeth has a fuller upperbass-midrange which will sound (psychoacoustically) a lot better balanced tone-wise
A few comments:
He seems to be confusing narrower directivity at the crossover frequency with room issues.
He doesn't seem to have noticed that Stereophile's measurements are an averaged combination of plots made over a very wide listening window.
There's no CSD which would help find traces of cone break-up resonances.
The dimentions of the graphs are different making comparisons difficult.
Stereophile uses 6dB/octave smoothing; it would help to know what ASR uses.
Stereophile and Soundstage use a 50dB-wide range in the vertical scale; ASR should use this as standard.
The M30.2 measured by Sphile is flatter on-axis than the M30, as can be seen in the measurements below:
Harbeth M30, averaged listening window (Soundstage, anechoic)
Harbeth M30, on-axis, 15°, 30° (Soundstage, anechoic)
Harbeth M30.2, averaged listening window (Stereophile)
Harbeth M30.2, on-axis (HiFi germany)
irb
pfm Member
Yes, but Amir can only test products that he has access to, which generally means what his forum member are willing to send him.
And the current M30.2 (retailing in the UK at almost £4K) is very much an evolution of the older M30. Also the key problem that Amir's test highlight, the power response dip, is a result of handing over from an 8" woofer to a 1" tweeter. That hasn't changed.
(PS I've owned M30s, and other Harbeths, and can imagine owning them again in the future.)
tuga
Legal Alien
Indeed.
The M30.1 lost the BBC dip, and the M30.2 is flatter in the treble (though there seems to be a bit of shelving in the top octaves):
irb
pfm Member
Sorry, dIdn't realise the M30.2 was only a limited edition. (Slightly strange marketing strategy from Harbeth, I'd have thought, leaving the 30.1 looking like it's been superceeded.)
Yes, the measurements will have improved in more recent versions - in some respects. The laws of physics haven't changed though. (Apologies for channeling Scotty). The directivity of an 8" driver and a 1" driver are always going to be very different.
I loved the Harbeths I owned, but I've moved away from them, and the speakers I use at the moment (Martin Logans and Pentachord/Bandor, each with their own set of compromises) use a single driver/diaphragm to cover the whole mid/treble from a few hundred hertz upwards. With hindsight, I'm pretty sure it was the discontinuity in directivity that led me away from Harbeths towards what I now use.
Having said that, I can imagine going back to Harbeths - they are superb speakers. And I accept that Amir's report on them doesn't really do them justice. But equally his tests don't lie, and they do reveal the effects of the key compromise at the heart of the M30 design - and every other speaker that hands over from an 8" woofer to a 1" tweeter (as so many classic British speakers, from the Spendor BC1 onwards, do).
Clearly the format of the reviews needs developing with a standard set of measurements included in all reviews to enable comparisons plus a supporting set of measurements to show whatever of interest was thrown up during the review. This is likely to happen as Amir becomes more familiar with the hardware.
Until he has started to learn how to translate what the measurements show into what is heard within his listening environment he is perhaps wise to keep away from discussing subjective impressions. If and when he does start I hope he sticks to technical terminology and wholly rejects audiophile terminology. We will see.
Amir himself lacks basic technical knowledge about speakers which is fixable if he wants and is able to learn which is uncertain. For example, he seems to have eventually picked up that waterfall plots are not particularly useful but a year or two ago when I was active someone he banned made this point giving the reasoning but he did not seem to pick it up at the time. Nonetheless this is progress albeit slow. Likewise he doesn't understand the dip on axis above the crossover but someone later in the thread posted clearly and simply what it does. So far this seems to have been ignored by Amir and other posters. It will be picked up eventually because it is a fact and won't go away but how quickly will be interesting. He also doesn't seem to understand the details of how Stereophile and SoundStage take measurements and hence what can and cannot be read across and how. Some of the posters do seem to and so this should improve with time. Early days.
The measurements themselves show that given the major constraints of a 2 way speaker on a flat baffle the performance looks to be close to the best one could reasonably expect. A deeper waveguide on the tweeter would almost certainly help but I suspect that is not something those willing to pay a high price for ye olde worlde speakers would want. The cabinet may be audible but again a BBC type cabinet is almost certainly a significant part of what customers value. Although incomplete as a review it contains useful and interesting information. Within the context of a modern implementation of 50 year old BBC speaker it seems well implemented and I would lean towards being a bit more positive.
Until he has started to learn how to translate what the measurements show into what is heard within his listening environment he is perhaps wise to keep away from discussing subjective impressions. If and when he does start I hope he sticks to technical terminology and wholly rejects audiophile terminology. We will see.
Amir himself lacks basic technical knowledge about speakers which is fixable if he wants and is able to learn which is uncertain. For example, he seems to have eventually picked up that waterfall plots are not particularly useful but a year or two ago when I was active someone he banned made this point giving the reasoning but he did not seem to pick it up at the time. Nonetheless this is progress albeit slow. Likewise he doesn't understand the dip on axis above the crossover but someone later in the thread posted clearly and simply what it does. So far this seems to have been ignored by Amir and other posters. It will be picked up eventually because it is a fact and won't go away but how quickly will be interesting. He also doesn't seem to understand the details of how Stereophile and SoundStage take measurements and hence what can and cannot be read across and how. Some of the posters do seem to and so this should improve with time. Early days.
The measurements themselves show that given the major constraints of a 2 way speaker on a flat baffle the performance looks to be close to the best one could reasonably expect. A deeper waveguide on the tweeter would almost certainly help but I suspect that is not something those willing to pay a high price for ye olde worlde speakers would want. The cabinet may be audible but again a BBC type cabinet is almost certainly a significant part of what customers value. Although incomplete as a review it contains useful and interesting information. Within the context of a modern implementation of 50 year old BBC speaker it seems well implemented and I would lean towards being a bit more positive.
ToTo Man
the band not the dog
Care to give an example of each? I'm curious, for example, how one would convey a speaker's ability (or inability) to image in a way that casts a "convincing and seamless soundstage with appreciable width and depth" using purely technical terminology, or at least technical terminology that would make sense to the reader.
Purité Audio
Trade: Purite Audio
A précis of the measurement parameters and their meanings can be found in the first loudspeaker measurement Amir performed,
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...mkii-and-control-1-pro-monitors-review.10811/
A loudspeakers imaging would depend upon many factors, including accurate channel matching , symmetrical placement, etc.
Keith
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...mkii-and-control-1-pro-monitors-review.10811/
A loudspeakers imaging would depend upon many factors, including accurate channel matching , symmetrical placement, etc.
Keith
An interesting question. Imaging is probably best not considered a direct independent property of a speaker in the manner of distortion or frequency response because of the major role played by reflections in stereo image perception. The most useful measures to compare speakers are likely to involve the speaker in standard rooms (lively, dead, good acoustics, bad acoustics,...). There are a bunch of existing objective measures for apparent source location, envelopment, spaciousness, apparent source width, etc... available in the psychoacoustics literature but I am not sufficiently familiar to make recommendations.
Objectively quantifying the quality of the stereo effect in a meaningful way with a set of values that differ over a set of standard rooms is going to require anyone wishing to make sense of them to possess a basic understanding of how we perceive sound in rooms. What is then considered optimum is going to vary between people that consider the stereo imaging of headphones good/bad and how strongly they weight things that require trading like pinpoint imaging and spaciousness/envelopment. Not sure it would be embraced by the more subjective audiophiles.
tuga
Legal Alien
There aspects of performance that affect "soundstage" which can be measured.
The aforementioned BBC dip is one of them – by artificialy exaggerationg or attenuating the presence region the phanton sources appear subjectively closer or more distant –, another is dispersion width and smoothness and the way it interacts with the room boundaries, etc.
But as mentioned by @h.g. the "soundstage effect" is significantly affected/enhanced by the acoustic properties and topographic characteristics of the room.
And because sharper image focus is achieved by toe-ing the speakers towards the listener, "imaging" and "soundstageing" tend not to go well together.
Just to make clear what I mean by "imaging" and "soundstage" (from Stereophile's Glossary):
imaging The measure of a system's ability to float stable and specific phantom images, reproducing the original sizes and locations of the instruments across the soundstage. See "stereo imaging."
stereo imaging The production of stable, specific phantom images of correct localization and width. See "soundstaging," "vagueness," "wander."
soundstaging, soundstage presentation The accuracy with which a reproducing system conveys audible information about the size, shape, and acoustical characteristics of the original recording space and the placement of the performers within it.