The Tannoy Eatons finally arrived from Scotland yesterday and I've had a bit of fun last night and this lunchtime listening.

Lovely nick and the bloke from Shiply seems to have looked after them very well on the journey.

I must say they are rather nice. Proper Tannoy sound, remarkable (clean) bass from modestly sized boxes (well modest in Tannoy DC land anyway). The 10in HPD 295a drivers sound more like Golds to me than later HPDs and from what I've read of the construction, they are indeed the closest to Golds of all the HPDs. They have a sweetness about them that's quite fetching.

The Radford STA25 in the main system drives then beautifully but the 200w Class D in the study manages pretty well too. Nice soundstage, all the usual positive Tannoy attributes of fullness, phase coherence, and so on. A shade less accurate in timbre/more 'vintage' sounding than my 12in HPDs but then again the big ones have some very flash crossovers driving them which breed out much of the Tannoy idiosyncrasy. I suspect a trip to Paul at RFC would even the playing field a bit.

Unfortunately the Eatons are rather too large for my little study - they only fitted because the TT is doing duty in the main system while Russ Collinson makes some changes to the TD124 plinth - so I'm not sure how long they will be staying. I'll take my own pics at some stage but here are from when they were purchased: