NOW SOLD.
Having bought Walpurgis’s Tannoy crossovers recently I dug out MY 12 in Monitor Golds from storage to hear how they were sounding, putting them in some maple cabs I also had stored away.
The answer is - fantastic! A really nice partnership with the Radford STA25 I have in at the moment (awaiting the STA100 coming back), which is just exactly what they would have been used with back in the mid 60s. Like pretty much all vintage Tannoy DCs, what they like is 20-40w of push-pull amplification which the Radford provides with aplomb.
The drivers are early Golds with the harder/sticky surround, and with the exception of the 8 ohm nominal impedance have more in common with earlier 12in Reds than with the later 12in Golds/rubber surrounds. The cabs are currently sealed (though port holes are available having been blocked up) and built to Chatsworth dimensions so the sound is pretty much as a Chatsworth cabinet - sweet, punchy, and detailed, though with a bass response that falls off quite rapidly below 60-70hz. (A properly designed port would improve on this at the expense of a little bit of impact).
Anyway while it’s been fun this past couple of weeks I don’t really want to put these back in storage so I’m offering them for sale. The crossovers are for the HPD315 but the crossover point is the same 1khz, so they work absolutely fine. (parameters here: http://www.44bx.com/tannoy/Tannoy_ts.html )
I'm selling the drivers on their own for £800 and with the crossovers for £950. The cabs are solid maple but very rough and ready so are offered for free to anyone who buys the driver and crossover, if wanted - they would need some work to be living-room friendly, but actually sound pretty nice even as-is.
I had toyed with making a project out of this, having the cabs fixed up and sprayed a funky colour, maybe port dimensions calculated and a tube fitted to the port hole that's currently blocked up. I also thought about having some corner Chatsworths made (how about this for a vintage theme - plans are available: http://www.worksofdesign.com/tannoy-...binets-1958-2/ )
But the fact is I don't have the room, my study can really only accommodate small standmounts (currently Tannoy DCs, natch, but small modern DC6 versions). These vintage beauties deserve to be heard.
Collection from Bracknell area, less than 10 min from J4a M3 or from J10 M4.