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REVIEW: Harbeth Monitor 40 Speakers Review by Bob Neill at Audio Asylum

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This is not a new review, but I did not originally include it among
the category of "reviews," and so adding it now will cause it to
reappear under current postings. Sorry about that.

My Monitor 40's are on 12-inch Sound Anchor stands - with Blue Tak. My room is 5000 cubic feet. My ancillary equipment includes a Naim CDX/XPS, Blue Circle BC 3, and Blue Circle AG 8000 monoblocks. The AG 8000's are easily the best amps I've ever heard and will get their own review at a later date. (150 watts, hybrid (two 6922's per channel), high-biased A/B, balanced.) They are a superb match for the Harbeths. In the system with the M40's, they are the first amps to excite me since the single-ended, Class A Blue Circle BC 2.1's, which I've sold because their 75 watts aren't really enough for these 6 ohm/84 dB speakers. My interconnects are Nordost SPM and my speaker cable is Straightwire Virtuoso, bi-wired. I used Electraglide power cords. I have Blue Circle Isolation Cones under all of my electronic equipment.


When I hooked the AG 8000's to the Monitor 40's, I was initially a little puzzled. There was none of that special Blue Circle single-ended in your lap spatial magic I had grown to love in the BC 2.1's paired with mini-monitors. Then, about five minutes into the recording, as the amps and I warmed up a little, something began to happen. I became aware of what was going on in front of me rather than what was not. Spread out between and behind the Harbeths, I heard something startlingly like live music. The spatial immediacy was there but out in the orchestra where it belongs. The music sounded the way it does in a live event when it has just begun to float out into the hall and away from the performing space. And there was poignantly accurate tonality detail (I wanted to run away with the clarinet); breathtakingly natural clarity, separation of instruments, and low level detail; a gradual decay of notes I hadn't heard since my LP 12 days and the sense of a spaciously deep venue it reinforces; firm and realistic bass, weight, scale, and foundation; and confidence. Confidence? A uncanny sense that what I was hearing was absolutely what went on before the recording microphones. A sense that no tricks were being played. A sense that no one aspect of the performance or its reproduction was being 'featured' - that everything I was hearing was part of an integral, natural, totally honest whole. And the music-making was absolutely wonderful. This is clearly the way it's supposed to be but, at least in my experience, has never quite been.

For me, this 'package' is an education. I am used to a more solicitous presentation that curls around your feet like a cat. "Emotional" is the word often used for this. I'm used to having the music set forward a little so that its presence before me becomes the most notable characteristic. The BC 2.1's did this with my B&W Matrix 805's and I've heard them do it bewitchingly with Spendor SP 1/2's too. With the AG 8000's and Harbeth 40's, there was no particular characteristic. There was just this large, splendid, detailed, rich, smooth, palpably full array of seemingly live music. I could isolate aspects of what I was hearing if I focussed hard
enough -- the highs are celestial -- but because it all felt so integrated, after a while I felt foolish doing it. In a word, I felt like my former priorities had been trumped.

The Spendor/Harbeth debate will go on, and it's a useful one, I think. The differences between Spendor SP 1/2's and Harbeth Compact 7's are extremely interesting and preferences there come down to matters of taste. So too with the smaller Spendors and Harbeths. But when you reach the level of the Monitor 40's, I think the conversation stops. These speakers strike me now, in this system, in my large room, driven by these extraordinary amplifiers, as a definitive answer to the question that all Spendor and Harbeth speakers pose: how can we get it all, with neither truth nor beauty compromised.


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Topic - REVIEW: Harbeth Monitor 40 Speakers Review by Bob Neill at Audio Asylum - Bob Neill 17:31:07 06/26/01 ( 6)