Tannoy owners

I have recently transplanted my 15” golds from rectangular yorks into reproduction grf cabinets.

This dramatically extends and improves the bass, which now bends space and time. But it also improves the mids which seem liberated from bass mumble.

wbass said:

Not to necro this thread, but I recently auditioned a bunch of speakers in London (on a visit) and, to my surprise, ended up liking a vintage (80s?) pair of Ardens. Among other things, I also heard Magico A5 and the newest Harbeth 40 monitors. The Magico really impressed with their bass extension and weight. They made drum sets, in particular, sound weighty in a way I'd not previously experienced. The Harbeths, despite having a sweet top end and a good mid-range, I didn't connect with for some reason. They sounded too restrained, too polite. Maybe they weren't broken in....

Anyway, I quite liked the Tannoy Ardens. What they really got right--as they're meant to according to this and various other forums--is the coherency. One of my test albums is Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue. It's a toe-tapper, but a speaker needs to be able to follow the nuance and phrasing of Kenny's lines, and the Ardens did this very well. They also made decent bass, but it wasn't in the realm of the Magico (no surprise). The guy at the hi-fi shop (Audio Gold in north London, nice people) felt that I'd find the Ardens too soft for more rhythm-driven stuff (I'm a jazz guy, mostly, with some rock and electronic in my playlists). But what I didn't experience is the Ardens being too dark.

I've previously auditioned the Tannoy Legacy stuff (I believe it was the Canterbury or Westminster), but found them too muffled for my tastes. Probably I need to go and give them another go. But this thread and @montesquieu comments have also got me interested in the RFC Tannoy restorations. Since I'm likely moving from Chicago to London in the autumn, the RFC is a semi-realistic proposition. Maybe the RFC Cheviot (in what I'm anticipating will be a small to medium-size flat). My Magnepans won't be coming, sadly.

@montesquieu Are you still using your RFC Canterburys?

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Apologies, a bit late spotting the resurrection of this thread! Yes I still have my RFC Canterburys I doubt very much if there's anything (at least anything without a telephone number price ticket) that would tempt me away from them.

There are two models of Arden, they look much the same from the outside but the original has the 15in (Alnico) HPD while the MkII has the later (ferrite) 3828 driver. This driver has its fans (even over the Monitor series) but is different in many ways to the earlier drivers and I personally am in the Monitor series camp.

As I understand it a civil war in the Congo in the late 70s impacted cobalt prices and availability, which prompted the move away from Alnico not just at Tannoy but more generally. It wasn't done for sonic reasons. The 3828 remains significantly better than a lot of later Tannoy dual-concentric drivers which needed complex time-alignment built into the electronics, this killed much of the magic.

BTW I'm always happy for the Tannoy-curious to come and have a listen. The RFC cab designs and crossovers in my view are a major part of the sound, I wouldn't expect the old factory cabs and crossovers (especially if unserviced - a lot of the components will be well out of spec after 40+ years) to give quite the same result.

Is Paul at RFC still active, Tom?

That website doesn't seem to have changed for a long time.

Yes he's still working. I'm not on Facebook myself but I believe you are more likely to see updates there these days than on the main website.

Hi all, I own two 15" heritage Tannoys, one Silver and one Red, in matching vintage custom teak Tannoy branded (literally) cabinets. I'm selling them both actually, and am having trouble removing the crossovers. It seems only two of the four mounting screws have grooves for the screwdriver.

Are the other two nailed in? Any tips on removal from the knowledgeable folks out there? Pics attached taken after I removed half the screws.

Also, any tips on selling successfully? I'm in the Boston, Mass. area if that matters.

Jay Leap said:

Hi all, I own two 15" heritage Tannoys, one Silver and one Red, in matching vintage custom teak Tannoy branded (literally) cabinets. I'm selling them both actually, and am having trouble removing the crossovers. It seems only two of the four mounting screws have grooves for the screwdriver.

Are the other two nailed in? Any tips on removal from the knowledgeable folks out there? Pics attached taken after I removed half the screws.

Also, any tips on selling successfully? I'm in the Boston, Mass. area if that matters.

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nailed in?

Hi Jespera, thanks for your reply. I'm not sure of your meaning. Are you guessing they are indeed nailed in, or are you questioning my question about whether they're nailed in?

Jay Leap said:

Hi all, I own two 15" heritage Tannoys, one Silver and one Red, in matching vintage custom teak Tannoy branded (literally) cabinets. I'm selling them both actually, and am having trouble removing the crossovers. It seems only two of the four mounting screws have grooves for the screwdriver.

Are the other two nailed in? Any tips on removal from the knowledgeable folks out there? Pics attached taken after I removed half the screws.

Also, any tips on selling successfully? I'm in the Boston, Mass. area if that matters.

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Famously, Tannoy's founder Guy R Fountain said 'We aren't in the furniture business'. Tannoy's own cabinets were never all that well-made (at least until quite late in the day), hence openings for other cabinet builders through the 50, 60s, 70s, notably Lockwood, whose cabinets are generally better than those of Tannoy themselves in this era though still nowhere near today's standards (and without a great deal of science behind their design). Anyway, given Tannoy's construction standards in the 1950s, it's not necessarily out of the ordinary for these to be nailed in. Without drivers, the cabs probably aren't worth much.

With regards to the drivers, in just about any circumstance I wouldn't recommend mixing drivers from different periods as both designs and materials went through significant changes between iterations. However if you are going to mix an un-matched pair, then Silver/Red is possibly the only pairing you could sort of get away with, the specification change between them being pretty small. Both are 16 ohm with hard surrounds and similar voice coils and work happily with the same crossover. Given the matching cabinets, I suppose it's not impossible that these were sold, somewhat naughtily, as a pair originally (most Tannoys sold throughout the Silver and into the Red era were for single speaker mono systems), but you might struggle to sell as a true pair into the 'collector' market which is concentrated in Asia.

There were far larger changes later with the Gold (moving to 8ohm and higher power handling) and even bigger changes still with the introduction of the HPD (different/reinforced cone structure and surround material, allowing much higher power handling before break-up as well as improved frequency extension).

Jay Leap said:

Hi Jespera, thanks for your reply. I'm not sure of your meaning. Are you guessing they are indeed nailed in, or are you questioning my question about whether they're nailed in?

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Sorry, i think its a nail and you’ll need an instrument like this to take it out.

Thank you @jespera and @montesquieu kindly for your replies. I ended up buying and using one of these to remove the nails, which worked great.

In addition to selling them individually and without the cabinets, do you or anyone else have any advice on selling them successfully?

There's a Yahoo group but from what I've seen/heard a lot of these are going to the Far East so eBay would be the best bet I suspect. Past prices can be seen on Hifishark. They do vary a a bit.

Ebay is one option but nowadays hifishark is used a lot to search so it may also work to put them for sale in the classified section here.

As for the red/silver matching: i think it was quite common to start off with a mono silver and then later, when stereo emerged, to add a red. This why there is quite a few silver/red pairs around.

In your case the cabinets must be US made. Probably made when the red was added. These are generally cheaper quality than the UK ones and not so sought after.

My guess is that may work best to sell each unit and crossover, and cabinets separately.

Somehow I feel like there is lots of myth around vintage Tannoys. Sometimes it seems there would be much more good speakers around Tannoy drivers if a similar attention given to Golds or HPDs would be given to drivers such as 3808... 2 cents.

anubisgrau said:

Somehow I feel like there is lots of myth around vintage Tannoys. Sometimes it seems there would be much more good speakers around Tannoy drivers if a similar attention given to Golds or HPDs would be given to drivers such as 3808... 2 cents.

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It wasn't just that the end of the Alnico-magnet drivers came with the demise of the HPD series .. the drivers that immediately followed - including the K3808 - were good, if not quite at the level of the Monitor Series, but very soon after, Tannoy started mucking around with drivers designed to work with the very high power (often Class B) amps of the era, and this also saw the introduction of abominations like plastic cones as well as DC designs that required time alignment in the crossover (which lost sight of the most successful characteristics of the Monitor Series speakers, which is were that they were relatively easy to drive and operated as a phase-coherent point source).

Tannoy lost the plot in this era (which coincided with move to Coatbridge in Scotland - actually not many miles from where I was born and grew up). A mate of mine has a pair of modern Prestige Canterburys - which I like a lot - but there's no way I would ever swap them for my HPD-based speakers.

Of course tastes are always on the move and while people 'returned' to appreciate the qualities of 50s-60s-70s Tannoys during the valve amp revival of the 00s and 10s, cheap, decent sounding high power amps using modern FETS and Class D chips could well bring the later drivers into back into fashion I suppose.

I feel the same. I dont want to swap my vintage tannoys for any of the later models.

As for selling vintage tannoys: buyers will like to see a lot of photos from all angles, and for matching purposes: serial numbers, and dc resistance measurements of both the bass and the tweeter.

Beware, you may get disappointed.

bonzo75 said:

I am quite sure Montesquieu's tannoy HPD and another gold 15 is better than any Canterbury, Tunberry, Kensington, and Prestige royal that I heard. I didn't like any of the other ones at all.

It is just Westminster that I am waiting to hear set up properly. There seems to be a good set up the jefferey, Ron, and Keith know on the west coast

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anubisgrau said:

Beware, you may get disappointed.

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Inclined to agree with Gordan. I have only heard Westminsters briefly, in a setup very different to mine and they sounded ok - though I wasn't able to do any sort of critical listening with familiar music. But I did have a pair of Autographs made, which are similar in design - large three-way horns with the bass horn being a long, folded back-horn.

The reason I had the Autographs made was because I had enjoyed 15in Monitor Golds in a GRF mid-horn cabinet for several years. The theory of the GRF is a sort of two and a half way horn - the treble horn is a front-loaded compression driver, roundly between 1khz to 20khz. The midrange and bass use the woofer cone from 20hz to 1 khz (which is quite a big gap). The bass frequencies as well as coming out of the front (unloaded) also go through a backloaded mid-horn, as as such the speaker has some of the characteristics of horn speaker in the mid-range - somewhat emphasising the midrange/upper bass which is pleasant, though probably not very accurate, though with the down-side that the perceived bass response falls off rapidly by comparison.

The Autograph and Westminster are three-way horns out of two drivers - roughly:

Treble - front loaded compression driver: 1kHz to 20kHz
Midrange - front loaded cone (though the loading is fairly mild, coming from the flare on the cabinet): 250Hz to 1kHz
Bass - back loaded cone, folded horn : 20Hz to 250Hz

The bass horn is where the difficulty arises. The internal length of the Autograph and Westminster horns are 3.5m which in terms of the physics probably equates to a truncated horn of 6m (as indicated by the relatively small exit apertures). This is quite a large distance and would definitely be enough to affect the phase response. Consequently, as I understand it, the Westminsters (though not the much older Autographs which pre-date this technology) do feature time-aligned crossovers - how well the time-alingment works should determine how successful they are as a speaker.

I am interested in your thoughts on this @bonzo75 when you do get to hear - I've personally been unconvinced by any of Tannoy's other attempts at time-aligning crossovers, though of course in theory the approach should work. Making sure the signal isn't overwhelmed by crossover complexity is possibly a reason why Tannoy tend to recommend (and demonstrate) their speakers with quite powerful amplifiers, even though they are nominally quite efficient.

I didn't keep the Autographs as while they did subtlety well and had tons of 'horn-like' impact, the phase issue was audible.

I used to own a pair of westminsters royal se. Could do scale and snare drum like few other speakers i've
heard, but ultimately they sounded embarrassingly muffled and closed-in in comparison to both my
mg 10" and 15". Didn't go particularly deep either. Managed to find a new home for them.

I think the main trouble is the quality of the drivers (and possibly the crossovers) -- not the cabinets.
I've heard the same muffled sound from the other tannoy prestige models.