PC's Harbeth 30.1 mini-review

[Puma Cat]

Last night I attended a demo of the Harbeth 30.1 loudspeaker presented by Tim Nguyen's Tone of Music in San Francisco.

We arranged to meet last night after work, a buddy and I showed up around 7 PM. Tim carries Conrad-Johnson, so I was going to be able to get an excellent comparison to my current C-J system.

Amplification was a teflon-capped C-J ET3SE preamp and Classic 60SE amplifier. Digital source was an Ayre QB-9 DAC, and Nottingham turntable with a Shelter 501 cartridge amplified with an EAR 834P Deluxe phono stage. This was perfect for me, because I've owned lived with the Shelter 501 and EAR 834 for a couple years, and knew that combination extremely well. Obviously, the C-J gear would be very very similar in character to my own system. Tim even uses the very same speaker cable I use, DNM Cable. I couldn't have gotten a more accurate representation of a system that I know very well without taking all my own gear over there, so we were set for a great demo!

The Harbeths were situated about 6 feet out from the back wall and about 4-5 feet from the side walls, with a slight toe-in, the inside edge of the speaker cabinet just disappearing when viewing from the hot seat.

We listened to some interesting digital source music Tim played us, including Norah Jones doing a cover of a Stones song. I was immediately hooked; there was the magic I had heard with Ritmo at RMAF....a transparent but sweet and superbly musical presentation. I knew what I heard at RMAF was not an aberration, but representative of what this speaker is truly capable of.

Tim started pulling LPs from his personal collection, a Grant Green deep-groove Blue Note mono, a Decca classical recording, the incomparable Getz/Gilberto Impulse and a selection of classical ranging from full orchestral to Beethoven string quartets and Bach solo violin partitas.

Overall, I would characterize the 30.1 as very clean and exceptionally transparent, more transparent than my Dyn Contour S3.4s, with impressive speed for a dynamic driver loudspeaker, literally very close to Quad electrostatics speed in reproducing leading edge of transients, and the delicate inner decay of notes as they trailed off. Highs were very sweet and extended, extremely natural, and the upper "trailing edges" of the highs disappeared into thin air as they do in real music, not as they do in "high-end" speakers that go on to produce frequencies only dogs can hear. Bass, upper bass, and mid-bass were defined, beautifully articulated and textured in the way that actual musical instruments produce bass. The 30.1s don't reproduce the lowest of the bass octaves, they cleanly roll off around 50 Hz, and it's clear that Alan Shaw of Harbeth did not try to make the bass of the Harbeths do something that really can't be done with a compact two-way monitor, which is to produce high bass pressures at frequencies below 50 Hz. Nor did he play any tricks, e.g. putting in a mid-bass bump to give the impression of more bass than is actually there. They just roll smoothly off to 50 Hz, and that's it...and that actually works because of the very tight "system integration" of this speaker. It's very clear that the driver design, cabinet dimensions relative to one another (aspect ratio, as it were), the cabinet thickness, the "voicing" of the cabinet, and the tuning of the crossover all together produce a whole that is greater than the sum of the individual parts. These speakers have a transparency, coherance, and "wholeness" from top to bottom to the musical presentation that I find it is exceedlingly similar to Quads, which are exemplary in this regard. With both Quads and the 30.1s, there is no change in overall character from the highs to the lows, the essential voice of the speaker remains accurate and consistent from top to bottom. The difference is that you get the dynamics, snap and punch from a dynamic speaker as well as the Quad-like transparency, coherency, and top to bottom uniformity in character.

And then there is that midrange.... I can only describe it as ravishingly beautiful. But I don't mean beautiful as in a rose or amber-glasses coloration, or "overly saturated", like Velvia film. The beauty comes through in a profoundly accurate yet musical way. Instrumental textures, tone colors, timbral fundamentals, harmonics and overtones, and the distinctions of vocal or instrumental timbres are absolutely accurate, but sweet and delicious the way they are on real instruments playing live music. Yet this sweetness and musicality does not come from an overly rich presentation, they come from an extremely natural and accurate reproduction. The sound is like MUSIC, not hi-fi. Solo violins produce very high frequencies, but they really shouldn't sound bright, they should produce a sweet, delicately articulated rosiny-sheen that really sounds like a violin. And on the 30.1s, they do. This is something that the vast majority of speakers cannot do, even those that are orders of magnitude more expensive. On a Beethoven string quartet, I could clearly the vibrato in the wood of the body of a cello, and it sounded RIGHT, it didn't sound high-fi or high-end. The human voice on this speaker is also ravishing, you simply cannot pull yourself away from full engagement into the music. When you hear Astrud Gilberto sing "Corcovado" or "The Girl from Ipanema" on Getz/Gilberto, or Melody Gardot singng "Worrisome Heart", there's a real, wet, human fleshiness from the throat and voice that provides the nuance and beauty that only the human voice can provide.

In reproducing classical music, the 30.1 image exceptionally well, especially considering they are a box with a fairly wide front baffle, relatively speaking. They created a deep and wide soundstage, with clear and distinct image placement and articulation, though, depending on the instruments being imaged may not be "life-size" in sound. Regardless, they are distinctly and clearly rendered, with a spaciousness and air that makes you feel like you could get up and wander around the physical space between the musicians in the orchestra for an hour or so. Importantly, a piano on the 30.1 sounds like a real piano, something that is exceedingly difficult for many lousdpeakers to reproduce correctly. In this sense, they remind me of the Sony SS-AR1s, which are also and extremely accurate but extremely natural-sounding speaker (and one of the finest I've ever heard).

For full-on, big and dynamic orchestral music, the 30.1 are going to get all the essentials, transients, and dynamics correct, but they won't produce the magnitude of the punch, snap, power and visceral impact one would get from a true full-range speaker like the Dynaduio Confidence C4s or the YG Sonjas or even my Dyn Contour S3.4s, for example. But what they do give is exceptionally accurate, beautiful, and most importantly engaging presentation of that orchestra, and they will play quieter with more transparency at lower listening levels than my Dyns will. Again, very much like Quads in this respect.

After a while, we stopped playing the audiophile game of "listening to gear", but simply opened a bottle of beer, sat back and listened to music as we pulled LPs out of his personal collection. We listened to everything from Grant Green to Helen Merrill to Henryk Szering to Karrin Allyson and more, and there wasn't an "audiophile-y" recording in the bunch.

In conclusion, my overall impression of the 30.1 is exactly concordant with the excellent review in TAS in April 2013 by Paul Seydor, and that is the 30.1, on the whole, is a ravishingly beautiful transducer of recordings, one that sounds like MUSIC, and not Hi-Fi. in his review, Seydor put it this way, Alan Shaw’s Harbeth Monitor 30.1, which has been released in time to celebrate the company’s thirty-fifth anniversary as a manufacturer of high-quality loudspeakers, is the best compact two-way speaker system I have ever heard, regardless of type, cost, or complexity. By this I mean, of course, that it does a better job of doing the things that are most important to me when it comes to the reproduction of music in the home: tonal neutrality, timbral accuracy, cohesiveness, low distortion, and that elusive impression of vitality which makes recorded music come alive.

I completely and wholeheartedly agree.

I'd like to thank Tim for the time and effort in setting up and providing the Harbeth 30.1 demo for us.

[Jerome W]

Stephen,

Thanks a lot for the excellent review !
Seems that you're trully in love !

Sent from my iPad using A.Aficionado

[Ritmo]

Very nice write up Stephen! Glad you enjoyed them again. I think this is a wonderful speaker. Yes, there are better speakers in the market but this is a gem at its price point.

So, are you getting a pair?

[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by Ritmo

Very nice write up Stephen! Glad you enjoyed them again. I think this is a wonderful speaker. Yes, there are better speakers in the market but this is a gem at its price point.

So, are you getting a pair?

Really would like to. However, we're still waiting for that big merger at work to formally close and for "Day 1"....and things are taking longer than anticipated. Want to be absolutely sure I'm not going to be laid off before plunking down $6K for speakers.

[Jerome W]

Originally Posted by Puma Cat

Really would like to. However, we're still waiting for that big merger at work to formally close and for "Day 1"....and things are taking longer than anticipated. Want to be absolutely sure I'm not going to be laid off before plunking down $6K for speakers.

Wow ! 6k !
They cost around 3k euros here, taxes included !

[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by Jerome W

Wow ! 6k !
They cost around 3k euros here, taxes included !

Distributor markup plus retailer markup....the audio retail paradigm.

[Jerome W]

Originally Posted by Puma Cat

Distributor markup plus retailer markup....the audio retail paradigm.

There is a distributor and a retailer here too Stephen.
The only difference is shipping.

[Jerome W]

And customs of course....

[bgiliberti]

@ Puma

Great review. I own the original 30, and while the 30.1 is a good refresh, the sound is quite alike. You've really nailed it. The 30 series most surely does have it's limitations in terms of extension and bass, but in what it does well, especially making the human voice sound "human," it is miraculous. For big symphonies, not the best, for hard rock, maybe not, but if the emotional content of the human voice, as conveyed by a great vocalist is what moves you, this is it. For me, it's a gift.

[-E-]

Wait a tick... no pics!?