Brings back memories. Purchased a pair of these new way back when. From memory they were quite smooth & full sounding. They were driven tho' by a Rotel receiver. Probably not the best match. The main issue I had with them was the character of the bass. The drive unit was made out of bextrene & lended a honky type sound to the lower registers.
Hmm. As you say, a contemporary Rotel receiver wouldn't really be anywhere near capable of getting the best out of a pair of HB2s.
I probably heard them driven by more amps than any other speaker when I was in the trade, they were kind of our 'go to' first point of call when evaluating electronics or running anything in. In part of course because they were small, quick and easy to set-up, but also because as pointed out up-thread, they were rarely the limiting factor in many systems. Such shortcomings as they had were musically benign, and if we were playing music in the shop for our own pleasure, it was quite frequently the HB2s which were in use. We actually had 2 pairs on the go at all times, the service engineer refused to surrender a pair he'd swapped a driver in, so we needed another pair for the dem room.
If a customer requested a loan pair while something fancy was in for service, it was invariably HB2s we provided. Again, quck, cheap and easy, but I don't remember anyone ever being unhappy with the substitution (apart from the service engineer).
As I said, 'real world' (ie. something somebody might buy) star combo for me was with Albarry, but top of the pile in the 'just plain nuts' category would be hearing them attached to a Tandberg 3000 series pre/power we were warming up with an Oracle/FR64/Koetsu front end. That was definitely a 'guys, you have to come and hear this' moment.
