Harbeth Loudspeakers Factory Visit

about a year and a half ago I fell in love I fell in love with an inanimate objects that animated music in a way that I'd never heard before it's a loudspeaker that I bought for my high five since bought three sets of these loudspeakers which is why I've traveled from Edinburgh down to West Sussex today to harbour loudspeakers who have been going for forty years to find out why I think these are the best loudspeakers in the world so it's a real honor to be invited in to see where the magic is made and I'm here today with Alan harbour speakers and what is your role here well for 30 years I've been designing loudspeakers that seem to find a market and a growing market actually amongst people who who care about the subtleties of sound you know it amazes me when I go to hi-fi exhibitions just how hard and harsh so many loudspeakers are these days and it's a kind of rigid sound isn't it that seems to be the connection with the you know how instruments really sound it seems to have been lost and so was harbour 'the part of the BBC part of this consortium how did it all start hmm well what the BBC found was particularly in the area of loudspeakers and mixing consoles and so on that the technical standard of equipment made for the home user just wasn't good enough for the professional user and they decided they'd set about building their own and one of the areas that they became or two of the areas they became expert II experts in were microphones and loudspeakers both transducers one at the front end of the recording process on one at the back end of the process so having developed skills in in particularly loudspeaker area when our founder reached retirement age in the BBC and research department he thought to himself hmm think I'll set up as a loudspeaker manufacturer and that's how Harbert came into existence right absolutely fast knighting so you've been going for 40 years and you've been involved for 30 years incredible and and and what is your you actually design the speakers and it's it goes you know there is a lineage there is yeah that goes back a long way yeah I mean I'm I'm highly respectful of engineers that that came before me because the fundamentals of how to make a natural sounding loudspeaker were perfected the philosophy was perfected at the BBC because they had the enormous advantage that they could create a loudspeaker position it in the control room put performers the other side of the glass and meander between listening to the performer and into the control room listening to the reproduced sound over the loudspeaker and that's not something that you can do in industry because you'd have to find some space you'd have to hire some musicians it's a very complicated and costly business but in in in broadcasting you've got talent kicking around who you can you know for a beer part of hi in a pint you can persuade them to come in and perform and that process of being able to compare the live and reproduced is very much cottle to what we do but you wouldn't find that necessarily in many other extraordinary thing for me is is our I kind of bought a pair of your speakers by mistake it was there I was fulfilling certain specific set of requirements and one was that the tweeters weren't on display because I have young children and it is like you cannot have a young child in the same room as a tweeter and not have that tweet and pushed in by the end of the day so I listened to them I loved them but it wasn't till I got them home and I was listening to quite a lot of classical music and then I put on a Beyonce album and I just went oh what's going on here I just felt there was something very different about them and in a way that I absolutely loved there was a warmth a punch the top end was you know beautiful and it suited the vinyl that I was playing and all of that stuff and I guess that's the reason I'm here is to find out why why they feel so different to others being as well you see most of the artifacts of of loudspeakers that you read about in reviews you know the negative comments such as spitty wiry brittle aggressive sharp zingy and so on these are self-evidently manifestations of of a created product because the human voice box and chest cavity and so on does not produce hard brittle sharp zingy ringi because this is a well damped well nourished system it's elastic and so on so if you hear those artifacts in reproduced sound your subconscious mind your subconscious says to you this is a this is a man-made product I I've never heard in 20 million years of evolutionary development my auditory system has never heard a voice that sounds harsh like that right the problem of the industry has is there's such a disconnection between voice speech and the quality reproduction of it and the fantastic design tools that we have now that designers seem to have gone off in in a peculiar sort of direction and they've lost that that reference back to the original source but it's very easy to prove we agree between between us which one of us is going to be the guinea pig we go outside with a good microphone we record that person under still wind windlass conditions we bring the recording back we sit the person down we put a loudspeaker next to them and we say okay speak and the retail retail their life story in a couple of minutes okay enough now we listen to the reproduce sound you can hear immediately the differences right and we're trying to narrow the differences such that you know the harshness and the wiring us and those sort of artificial you you know artifacts are eliminated so what you're saying is a reference point you you you tend to focus on the voice because it's it's more abstract with the large orchestra well the the oboz kind of pinging out I don't know if that's the recording or that's right right yeah I mean everything in in in the recorded world is post processed right yeah eq'd yeah compressed expanded with width adjusted yeah and we don't know as casual listeners how much of that product post production has gone on so our frame of reference using music as a primary source is already suboptimal yeah but if we use speech we can we can sub select the hundred loudspeakers we've we've lined up we can whittle that down to ten that sound credible you know in an hour right without involving the complexity and the emotion of listening to music then as phase two when we've got the ten subsets we might be very well and wise to listen to music well I guess any punter can tell when you're holding your hand in front of your voice that there's something there's something altering that effect hmm isn't that so I guess that it makes total sense but it's very unusual to find speaker even reviewers who would play speech over their loudspeakers which is a great pity because they would hear things immediately that's not a human level exactly so you've got some very intriguing looking yes I've collected this stuff for 30 years wow these are so these logbooks represent the history of harbor I think we're up to number eight now but if I go back to number one which was the very first time I encountered Dudley Harwood right and and I was looking for this massive corporation because Harwood was such a a world-renowned audio engineer that I assumed that his business Harbor flower speakers would be you know not a garrote not such very and there he was sitting in his office and I came away from there because I was working for Japanese company at the time and when he told me that he was supplying Japan I thought well I know how fussy the Japanese are if this product from this lockup garage is satisfying Japanese consumers Mazin it must have something going for it I was very very lucky in that my first speaker the HL compact became component of the year in Japan in 1988 Wow and that really set us on the path and is that a predecessor with the HL 15 super 8:05 sorry its predecessor was that which in fact was the same dimensions as Harwood's last speaker the mark 4 interesting because I have those as my kind of my secondary habis pair and I'm there I'm there they have a staggering obviously this is the super HL thrives they have a staggering kind of bass response and for the size and you were thinking that but you were saying that the dimension there's something about that in old money we would say 2 cubic foot box you know 12 inches 12 inches 24 inches right there's something about that space acoustic space which which is a bit magical okay yeah with many generations on now but of course we kept the same proportions and it does seem to work that's in fact I've actually got here the the actual original design notebook of what was then called the mark 5 and became the HL 5 so this goes back to 1988 and I'm very careful about documenting on an hour-by-hour basis where I'm at with the design it gives you a it gives you confidence that you have considered everything when arriving at your final your final product and I've kept this up so for example another book is the many years later 2006 this is the 5 inch drive unit for the p3 our smallest now to speak at logbook number 2 and you know it's a lot of very carefully considered small incremental observations about you know how the thing behaves and trying to balance the forces because loudspeakers are all about compromises and tell me about the the manufacturer of the speakers because you make the components many of the components here is that going to do yes we were sort of driven into it actually because we couldn't buy from commercial suppliers drive units of of a high enough quality right and we wanted that kind of liquid clarity in the middle frequencies which you all know about and if you buy box standard woofers and box standard tweeters you can't really expect too much clarity okay so yeah we're driven into it like to have a look yes please absolutely fantastic excuse my migrants but we may have to go back to the beginning and talk about what a driver okay what a driver is in common parlance a woofer is a low frequency sound producing motor system and a tweeter is a high frequency sound producing system what is often forgotten is that the material normally plastic that the woofer cone is made from really defines the sound of the entire speaker the material not not necessarily the shape or whatever but the material I mean an analogy would be imagine making a violin out of chipboard yes in your mind you can hear a dead dull lifeless sort of sound can't you yeah well it's that sort of issue with with loudspeaker cone so the conventional way that speakers are made is to get a sheet of plastic yeah such as this and to drape it over a mould tool such as this very inexpensively made so you drape that over there you put an electric heater this side of it and a vacuum on the bottom side and you suck the film down onto the cone and you end up with something that looks like that okay and then you take a pair of scissors you cut off the surplus and you've got yourself a cone okay incredibly cheap very attractive to the speaker industry because it requires very little technology and it produces a very cheap product the problem is that what you end up with with the polypropylene cone is something that has no stiffness at all right it's it's really the wrong solution what you want is a cone that is injection molded that has actually got rigidity and stiffness to it and to do that you need to do some proper engineering research and we got quite a large government grant to help us to eases into this technology so and is that a unique thing - yes really Wow and I'm very surprised you know you talked about the chipboard violin and stuff how important is the box is it really about the the actual drivers more than that the fundamental sound is that of this material or this material or of this material okay one of the issues with polypropylene it it's very smooth no one would ever complain about that but it's got this slight fogging effect so that it just sounds if I had a tie and I put my tie over my mouth it would just take away the the crispness of sound it's still clearly intelligible and it's still clearly me but it hasn't got that air and the reason is that the molecules in this polypropylene material are in a sort of waxy state where they rub against each other which is why it's so flexible okay and as they do that they convert the very low-level tonal detail into heat and once it's heat it's lost a sound okay so what you need if you want to reproduce those tonal details it's something that's much more rigid so that the molecules can't slide against each other they're held in a matrix together right so is this kind of stage one in a life cycle of a Harpeth it is what you do first is you assemble the voice oil onto the the suspension okay and then you offer the suspension up to the the basket as its called with a centering tool to make sure it's absolutely spot-on and then actually we've got the smaller ones in production today but that's a p3 cone and surround as a sub assembly so that would be fitted out with the voice coil at that stage and then would be offered up and it's all done by hand yeah yeah we can do this because we've been doing it for 30 for 25 years we can do this to a higher standard than we can buy it could buy in part really yeah so our problem is not the control of this process it's making sure the tweeter manufacturers who suppliers actually meet the quality standards that we have internally for woofers right it's quite a challenge I bet and how do you keep that quality the first and most important factor is you keep the staff people here have been working here for 18 years 15 years 12 years I don't think there's anybody less than five or six years so you keep the skill set in the people that you work with right that's the first factor of quality control and secondly we we we have a standard solution that we use in across the product line so we're not making lots of variants and complicated exotic you know adjustment it's a standard you know design which is which is stable and well understood brilliant so what's the next bit well the next bit after we've assembled the complete speaker up is to a complete woofer up is to test it I've never looked it's brilliant I've just had one of those funny feelings it reminds me of a memory I have as a kid that they used to shoot the Muppets in Twickenham studios okay and my mother took us to see the Muppets being shot and then they took us on a tour backstage afterwards and myself and my brother burst into tears because basically the whole place was covered in dead Muppets and Isis it's like this place is full of dead Harbor it's really quite a birthing chair the testing in this area here we have a dual function test system the woofers that we made next door are put into this box here so for example the monitor forty point to reference unit which looks like this mid-range in the monitor forty would be put into that's the one I've got is that that would be put into there hooked up and the system calibrated and all the production from the production department would be passed through here one by one and measurements taken off the screen and then we are completely certain about the strength of the magnet and the frequency short and so on and if there are certain tolerance we don't really like that word taller okay we've got this down to such a fine art now that we can produce these within a tiny fraction of a decibel so in the sense that you have those micro decibels you match things up is that right right yes when we have selected the drive units the woofers we will match them to corresponding tweeters right what we do for the left speaker we also do for the right I see yeah I said that's where you get the kind of the idea of matching yeah so it's not only the veneer it's actually the drive units are matched together in one speaker and as a paired right actually there's four levels of matching because this equipment has two functions it can be switched from testing drive units even to testing crossovers okay and you'll have to explain to me what a crossover okay well it's a circuit board which takes a signal from your high-fly amplifier he divides it up between the woofer and tweeter and super tweeter if it has one and filters out high frequencies from getting to the woofer and low frequencies from getting to the tweeter we choose to test not only the drive units but also the crossovers as well so they're clipped on to this board you like so with a big clamp and wired outs to the connectors and sitting on the screen here in fact actually that is a real that's a real example the yellow dotted line is the reference Wow and the green is the actual specimen the last specimen that was tested yeah so that they're very very closely matched that's incredible I think the thing that I'm finding quite daunting is the minutes say for example with a pair of 40 point two's you've got your three speakers and in your crossovers it's like an almost infinite number of my new tweaks that must happen when you're developing these things how do you do it without just having to build loads of loudspeakers and when you're developing them well actually I was talking to another speaker designer recently really because I you know I'm working alone I'm not there isn't a team here you might it's it's it's it's my responsibility so I don't get a lot of interaction with other speaker designs but when I do and I asked them about their methodology unrealistic are here there are plenty of designers who would sit with a bucket of components and a circuit board and they would reach into the bucket even today 2017 they've reached into the bucket solder it on do a measurement do a bit of listening thing know I'll change that and they go around that iterative process until they get bored I've been using similar simulation CAD software for nearly 30 years and you can be sure that the end product is the result of every conceivable permutation that your creativity will allow it's the best possible outcome of all the variables right and I can't understand why speaker designers don't universally use CAD software because sitting on the beach with a pina colada you know on a lovely sunny day with the laptop you can be sure that you have explored every possible outcome which is not what happens when you have a pile of bits it depends how deep you reach what's in the bucket how bored you get suboptimal I'm gonna have to work this Pina Colada bitch-slapping into into sample development it's a really good way forward it's brilliant so you've got your your manufactured drivers here and then I guess they go into what they're going to speakers do you see that yes please we start with a baffle which is a fancy word for the front board onto which we mount the super tweeter the main tweeter around the woofer they're paired up so that they have complementary characteristics and then they in turn or the baffle is offered to the cabinet right now not only are the drive units matched but the veneers are matched so that that matches that right and how much does the the cabinet affect the sound and the material of the cabinet well clearly it's a factor isn't it the BBC's philosophy which which I absorbs and have yet to disprove is that if we accept that the cabinet is part of the sound let's work with that let's not kid ourselves that we can make or if we do make a cabinet that is so you know the infinitely rigid that it that is somehow going to going to yield a better sound all the cabinet does is store energy if we store energy in part of the spectrum the audio spectrum where it is particularly objectionable then even the tiniest movement in the cabinet is going to ring conversely the BBC said let's move all of the let's make the box is relatively lightweight but very well damped and then we can move all the problems right down in the audio spectrum where they are well away from the mid band and we can have that super clean mid frequency so it's a different philosophy yeah it's absolutely fascinating so I'm familiar with these guys but I've just spotted this yes my colleagues my marketing colleagues said we need to celebrate our 40th year and we need to do it in style yeah and if we're going to do it in style let's do it lavishly so we came up with this series of 40th anniversary loudspeakers and we've created this special limited edition new badges exotic terminals slight improvement in the sound and that went so well we said okay let's do let's do something else and there's something else became the silvered eucalyptus monitor certain tattoos Wow we have a name for this divorce where it's all my fault I already have three sets of harbors and I don't think I can constrict appeal challenge [Music] something that I've been kind of touting about being visiting a lot of students and I bet it's our 10th anniversary year this year and so we've been all around the world meeting users and making new friends and and stuff and something that I talk about with where musics concerned is 50% of what we do is sound Sonics and 50% of what we do is feeling and you know when people talk about you know comparing this speaker to that speaker this sound to that sound this unit to that unit the one thing I say is obviously listen to it and hear you know understand what your ears are telling you but for me I just say to people how does it make you feel does that resonate at all with you we're we're manufacturing speakers concerned I I have to try and remove the emotional element from from from from the design process because you can you can get seduced by your own creation and that's very small turis I mean for example I'll if I'm really uncertain about some something and I'm past the the speech testing and at the music stage I'll actually play music backwards over the speakers because it breaks the emotional connection so I have to really guard against getting getting you know emotionally involved with the design I'm trying I'm leaving for that for you all that you know pleasure is passed on to the customer you know you start that process that journey but I guess what I'm trying to decode is why someone like me gets on a plane from Edinburgh to come down to feel so much passion and I understand and I get a sense that you have passionate users are really we all care yeah well maybe the passion that you have in its manufacture is translated into a feeling people I think so yeah I mean this is a this is a lifetime commitment to producing products that that endure and we have customers using 40 year old habits we know yeah it's also it's also environmentally right it you know these products are built to last we're cutting down the tree yeah that's the end of that trees existence as a as a natural thing and we're converting it into another another product it's right that that product should last for 4050 years whatever and and therefore I design with longevity in mind we've want these products to out livers you know because they're expensive yeah if you're going to make an investment in them you deserve to get you know a decent lifetime's use out of them well if I was a tree and thank you so much Santa Rosa thank you very much

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 426,982

Rating: 4.6681309 out of 5

Keywords: Spitfire Audio, Harbeth LoudSpeakers, Loudspeaker Factory, Factory Visit, Speakers, High Quality Speaker, Studio, Sound System, Audio, Mastering

Id: Ja9BJn0lMxI

Length: 28min 39sec (1719 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/zoom25]

Thanks for posting!

[u/BugleBoy6922]

Well, this is delightful. Something very appealing about Harbeths.

[u/Dre_wj]

Have to appreciate the patience and attention to detail here!