Large rooms for huge Tannoys are mandatory - a fallacy or not?
Hi Dave,
Quote:
Hi Martin,I have heard Ians tannoys and came to the same conclusion as you,they didnt sound slow to me,but i once heard a pair of Edinburghs which I thought were crap,in a room of similar size to Mr Walkers,so cant make up my mind if HFW are correct in their assumptions regarding room size.
You've also heard mine in an even smaller room than Ian's, and they rock! There's nothing 'slow' about them whatsoever. I think Avinash is still trying to get over what he heard the last time ;)
Martin, you must pop over sometime for a sesh. I'd value your opinion of the difference in presentation between my Tannoys and Ian's - both are excellent but a little different :)
I've got a fair bit of experience now with listening to different Tannoys, and what's blatantly obvious is that the type of presentation offered depends largely on the vintage of the drivers and type and size of cabinets used.
When 15" drivers are used, for example, the cabinets must have a minimum internal volume of 300 litres - anything smaller than that will not allow the drivers to 'breathe', and thus a thin and somewhat 'pinched' sound will ensue, in comparison to what is possible with bigger cabinets. Therefore cabinets of the size of Ian's Canterburys and my Lockwoods are mandatory when 15" drivers are used.
Also, rather crucially, baffle width must be such that the huge cones have sufficient space on either side of the front of the cabinets to allow a 'freedom of movement' that ensures optimal performance, which is why you need a very wide baffle area to successfully accommodate this aspect of their design. This is one of the reasons why I don't think that the current Glenairs (which use 15" drivers) are entirely successful because compromises have been made in that area in order to make them more domestically acceptable.
Unfortunately, in some of the older designs, Tannoy had a habit of 'shoe-horning' their larger drive units into cabinets which were way too small to allow those drive units to behave optimally. Perfect examples of this were the Berkeleys with 15" drivers and Devons with 12" drivers. Both of those speakers used cabinets’ way too small for their respective drive units, and had a compromised sound as a result, although they could still be huge fun to listen to.
With regard to huge Tannoys needing very big rooms to work properly, all I can say is that experience so far suggests that is not the case.
It will of course largely depend on the vintage and type of speaker concerned, however neither Ian nor I have big rooms for our respective 15" Tannoys, and have experimented with the seating position we use. We have found that they suit near-field listening rather more than they do when one is sat further towards the back of the room, where bass sounds rather full and starts to dominate proceedings. The effect is very obvious in both of our rooms.
Therefore, when listening, we both sit around 3 metres away from our speakers for optimal results. Crucially, I also discovered this at the show we did at Scalford Hall, where my Lockwoods were used in a room about three times the size of mine at home, and guess where they sounded best? Yes, it was near-field, around 3-3.5 metres away! Consequently, the first two rows of seats were where the sweet spot was, and they sounded excellent there. Conversely, at the back of the room the sound was boomy and quite horrible.
Now of course much will depend on the acoustics of the room concerned, and the plasterboard walls of the room at Scalford Hall would not have helped matters (some large rooms might indeed work very well), but consider the results Ian and I have achieved with near-field listening at home and also that around 90% of Tannoy's biggest models in the Prestige range are exported to discerning audiophiles in the Far East, where the rooms are not much bigger than a postage stamp.........and the notion that large rooms are mandatory is far from conclusive.
As ever, there are simply too many variables, so one just has to suck it and see! :cool:
Marco.
