August 2010
Everyone wants something different from a loudspeaker. Some people value midrange neutrality above all, while others will sacrifice some of that accuracy to get extended lows or a speaker that will play immensely loud with only a few watts of power. Some want stereo imaging that is sufficiently delicate, stable, and accurate that the speakers open a transparent window on the recording's original performing space. Some will sacrifice all of the above to get a speaker whose "jump factor" can jerk zombies out of their stupor. And there are those who are prepared to lose just a little bit of everything in order to have a speaker that may not excel in any of these areas, but communicates what they want from their music in the most effective overall manner.
Ultimately, of course, and provided that you a) have very deep pockets and b) are prepared to reach to the very bottom of those pockets, you can have everything. But each of us who lives in the real world of car payments, mortgages, and college-age children must decide what is most important to us. You can't, therefore, say that real-world speakers with more extended lows are inherently better than those that excel at soundstaging, or that both are inferior to those with zero midrange coloration. All that can be said is that one of those choices will fit your needs better than it fits others' needs. That's why so many companies offer so many different speaker models at so many prices.
Which brings me to Harbeth's P3ESR. At just 12" tall, this is not a speaker that will succeed at playing pipe-organ recordings. And with a single woofer just 5" in diameter, it's not going to play super-loud or fill large rooms with sound. But because the earlier versions of this sealed-box, two-way minimonitor excelled at reproducing the all-important midrange, and were champs at re-creating a believable soundstage, I have patiently awaited review samples ever since I auditioned an early prototype at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show.
The original HL-P3 was designed by Harbeth's Alan Shaw to replace the venerable BBC LS3/5A location monitor, of which Harbeth had been a licensee. (For the full history of this classic design, click here.) I reviewed the HL-P3 in December 1993; John Marks enthused over the ES-2 version in the October 2005 installment of his column, "The Fifth Element," and I followed with a full review in April 2007. (You can find all this coverage, which includes the full backgrounds of both the design and Harbeth Audio Ltd., starting here.)
The fundamental design of the P3ESR remains unchanged from its predecessor: a 0.75" (19mm) ferrofluid-cooled aluminum-dome tweeter, protected by a mesh screen (in this version, black instead of gold), is coupled to a 5" plastic-cone woofer, mounted on the front baffle from behind. The baffle is veneered, and the cutout for the woofer has radiused edges. The woofer (made in the UK according to its label) is constructed on a diecast chassis, and at the end of its pole-piece has a half-roll rubber surround and a moving dustcap rather than the currently fashionable stationary phase plug. The crossover is complex, with five inductors, ten capacitors, and three resistors.
The new speaker has a single pair of gold-plated terminal posts on its rear panel, compared with the earlier version's two pairs, for biwiring. The most important change is the use of Harbeth's proprietary and patented Radial2 material for the woofer cone. Used by Harbeth in its more expensive designs, Radial2 is said to be a thermally stable, low-mass, low–energy-storage composite polymer that offers more clarity and better low-level resolution than polypropylene.
The 1993 version of the 'P3 sold for $1199/pair; in 2007, 14 years of inflation later, the price of the 'P3ES-2 was $1850–$2150/pair. Now, in 2010, the P3ESR costs $2195–$2395/pair, depending on the finish chosen. This might be thought expensive for a minimonitor, but I don't think it unreasonable for such a beautifully finished, high-performance speaker manufactured in a high-wage country. As Michael Fremer's mother used to say, "You pay, you get."
Listening
I set up the P3ESRs on 24"-tall Celestion stands, the latters' center pillars filled with dry sand and bird shot. The speakers were toed-in to the listening position and placed well away from room boundaries, and I did quite a lot of experimenting with position to get the transition from the upper bass through the midrange balanced as smoothly as possible. Harbeth recommends that the P3ESR be used with its grille in place. This consists of black cloth stretched over a thin metal frame that fits into a rectangular slot around the edge of the front baffle. With the grille in place, there is thus no additional acoustic obstruction anywhere near the drive-units. However, I felt the balance was a little too smooth with the grilles, and did most of my listening without them.
The three speakers that preceded the little Harbeths in my listening room were all large, expensive, full-range floorstanders: the Revel Ultima Salon2 ($22,000/pair, reviewed in June 2008), the Aerial Acoustics 20T V2 ($32,000/pair, reviewed in November 2009), and the Focal Maestro Utopia ($49,995/pair, reviewed in July 2010). When I began my auditioning of the P3ESRs, I expected to be made well aware of what I was giving up in quantity of sound.
Well, yes. Low bass was missing in action, as was most of the midbass. Listening to the low-frequency warble tones on Editor's Choice (CD, Stereophile STPH016-2), there was useful bass output down to the 63Hz band, but not much of anything below that. And the speakers were obviously compressing the sound when I asked them to go louder than about 100dB. But having said that, what surprised me about the little Harbeths was how little I missed what the big speakers had been giving me.
Of course, the adage that your choice of loudspeaker dictates your choice of music still applies. What you tend to choose from your collection to play through a specific speaker will be those recordings that bring out that speaker's best and hide its shortcomings.
Rather than reaching for Mahler symphonies, I found myself listening to recordings of small numbers of instruments and with a fairly restricted dynamic range—such as our December 2009 "Recording of the Month," Anouar Brahem's The Astounding Eyes of Rita (CD, ECM 2075). Even so, the grumbly bottom-octave notes of the double bass in the middle of the slow movement of Brahms' Symphony 4, in the recording by Carlos Kleiber and the Vienna Philharmonic (SACD, Deutsche Grammophon/Esoteric ESSG90018) were satisfyingly audible, if somewhat miniature in scale. Similarly, while the softly struck bass drum in the title track of Daniel Lanois's Shine (CD, Anti- 86661-2) didn't have its full weight, the Harbeths reproduced enough of it to carry the musical load. The opener on Shine, "I Love You," with Emmylou Harris, begins with a synth bass line that rocks between two notes an octave apart. While these notes weren't as well differentiated as they are with full-range speakers, they still had a sufficiently satisfying "phat" quality through the Harbeth, even if the distinction between the octaves was a little blurred.
In this respect the P3ESRs benefited from the tighter low-frequency control of the Classé CTM-600 monoblocks, the Simaudio Moon Evolution W-7 sounding less well defined. But the Harbeth's upper bass retained its definition even with the tubed Balanced Audio Technology VK-55SE. By comparison, my 1978 pair of original Rogers LS3/5As sounded overripe even with the Classés. Those vintage speakers also sounded significantly more nasal in the upper mids, and more spitty and coarse-grained in the treble than the Harbeths. My review samples of the earlier HL-P3ES-2 have long since been returned to the distributor, but I did note in my 2007 review that that model's presence region was "a touch exaggerated, and its lower midrange was not quite as transparent as it was at higher frequencies."
I didn't get that impression with this new Harbeth. Even without the grille, the highs were smoothly balanced, with no region sticking out. The balance was a touch on the warm side, but without any obvious midrange coloration; both the male voices on my 2008 Cantus recording, While You Are Alive (CD, Cantus CTS-1208), and Mary Chapin Carpenter's contralto on her new album, The Age of Miracles (CD, Zoë 01143-01133-2PE), sounded superbly natural. And the characters of the bass clarinet and bass guitar, when the two instruments were played in similar registers, were well differentiated on The Astounding Eyes of Rita.
Stereo imaging was stable and accurate. Ysaÿe-Kreisler-Bach, Arturo Delmoni's 1989 excursion into music for unaccompanied violin (John Marks JMR14, available as a premium gold CD from our e-commerce page), was reproduced with the violin placed within a warm, supportive, expansive acoustic. Changing from the solid-state Simaudio W-7 to the tubed BAT VK-55SE amplifier gave even more space behind and around the violin, but the top octaves now tilted up a little, which actually worked better with naturally made recordings such as this.
The obvious rival to the Harbeth is the almost identically sized and priced Spendor SA1, which I reviewed in August 2009. I no longer had these speakers to hand, but from my listening notes I would venture that they are somewhat more mellow-balanced than the Harbeths, within a similar performance envelope. The SA1's low frequencies also had a little less weight. A system that is somewhat on the bright side, or that doesn't allow the speakers to be placed well away from room boundaries, might work better with the Spendor.
I used my high-priced reference system for much of the preliminary auditioning of the Harbeths—it's important, when introducing something new, to change no other components. But eventually, when I'd gotten a handle on the P3ESR's balance, I switched to a more real-world rig. This comprised Peachtree's iDecco 50Wpc integrated amplifier ($999; review underway) hooked up to the speakers with Cardas Neutral Reference cables, and with my 160GB iPod Classic sitting in its dock.
This is the system I'm listening to as I write this review, with Richie Havens performing The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" in his inimitable fashion, via an Apple Lossless file ripped from his Nobody Left to Crown (CD, Verve Forecast B0011631-02). Yes, indeed! Haven's slightly lispy delivery, frantic, bar-chorded strumming, and the obbligato cello are all reproduced in full measure, forcing home the point of Pete Townsend's lyrics. Harbeth's P3ESR is one those speakers that gets the overall balance of what it does very right. If this system were to be placed behind an acoustically transparent curtain, few who heard it would believe that they were listening to a system costing less than $5000, or to speakers as small as these. Those listeners definitely would get fooled again—and to the benefit of their enjoyment of their music collections.
Oops
Saturn must be ascendant or something: Of late, Stereophile has had reliability problems with several review samples, and the Harbeth was no exception. Toward the end of the review period, I was giving the speaker a workout with some high-level rock when the soundstage lurched to the right and the balance became bright and brassy. "What the . . . ?"
I turned down the volume, checked all the wiring, and played the track again. All was again as it should be. Again I turned the volume up, and again it all went wrong. "What the . . . ?"
I remeasured the quasi-anechoic response of both samples on their tweeter axes. At continuous levels below about 7V RMS (equivalent to 8W into the Harbeth's 6 ohm impedance), the responses of both speakers were the same as they'd been when I'd performed the formal measurements. But at sustained levels above that, the right-hand speaker (serial no. 0472R) developed a severe peak in its low-treble region. This peak disappeared when I backed off the level. I described this in an e-mail to John Marks, who had auditioned these samples before shipping them to me, but he had heard nothing such as this amiss with them.
All I could conclude was that, at the high power level, a crossover component had either opened or shorted, detuning the speaker's balance. Reducing the level apparently brought things back to normal, both with listening and measuring, but this problem suggests that the crossover may be inadequately specified.
Summing up
The Harbeth P3ESR is one of those rare audio components that, within its obvious limitations, gives no other indication that it has been compromised. Yes, I did much of my auditioning with the budget-priced Peachtree iDecco integrated amplifier, but before the accident happened with the right speaker, I was using the Harbeths with the dCS Puccini SACD player and DAC ($22,000), the Simaudio Moon Evolution P-8 preamp ($12,000), and Classé CTM-600 monoblocks ($16,000/pair), all connected with expensive AudioQuest Wild cables. The P3ESRs did not sound outclassed in this system, merely restricted in loudness and bass extension.
I love the Harbeth P3ESR. I think it's the best iteration yet from any manufacturer of the BBC LS3/5A minimonitor concept.
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