Speakers Fave's

Tannoys. Had 22 pairs!

Aye but if anyone else had them they would be crap eh?

My first pair of 'hi fi' speakers were Spendor Preludes.
I loved them to bits but I just couldn't control the bass. I ended up with socks in the ports but then let them go in favour of some Linn Index Plus's.
I now know that the room was the problem was the room. It was small and I had no choice but to have them against a wall.
I wish I'd never lost them to be honest.
I can still remember the sound with it's slam and dynamics from 39 years ago..

My current RFC Canterburys, the Mk2 versions. I've not really heard many that have eclipsed them for me for realism of timbre and their ability to swing full scale when called for and they do a great job of trying to replicate as closely as any decent speaker can, the acoustic of the recording venue as described by those who were there. I had a former Producer for RCA visiting a few weeks ago and she coincidentally happened to be one of the producers on several LP's that I cherish. I put on an album for her recorded at Walthamstow Town Hall in 1977 which she had been the artistic producer for. She exclaimed after the first few minutes "...you've captured the acoustic better than any speaker I've heard...seriously!". . I get to listen to more than most as I usually have several pairs in for work these days, at any one time, old and new. Annoyingly, the only other speakers I really liked almost as much were a set of TAD CR1s, and their larger brothers the Reference 1's but at £46,000 for the stand mounts, that's not happening any time soon....or not so soon.  Even if the price is on another planet, these deserve a decent audition if you get the chance.  At half the cost new they'd still be expensive but the engineering behind them is pretty impressive as is the quality in all respects.

Here here!

As it happens, here's a 3-way prototype I've been working on,the RFC "Reference Rubicon" .  1m tall, sloped cabinet weighing 40Kg containing two top tier SB Acoustis drivers and a SEAS Millenium tweeter.  Prototype crossover sat next to it:








And a few quick and dirty phone recordings, not that they tell you much:  you need to click on the photo and wait for the play control to appear to hear it.





Frequency response (in room 1/6th octave smoothed in free space).  Measured response close to wall (f3) is 31Hz to 18.5KHz and 28Hz-20KHz(f6)

Thanks. There's method in the madness. Bass close to floor avoids bass slap issues and results in a smoother bass response. However this has to be balanced with limitations on upper crossover frequency as driver spacing to mid must be within one wavelength at crossover, which these are...just. Any further and the field lobing pattern is skewed and things like comb filtering on overlap can be made worse. It also allows the relatively high mass moving part of the largest transducer to be at the stiffest point in the cabinet further reducing cabinet resonances. These are incredibly well damped and so they ought to be at 48mm thick and heavily internally braced! Internals are also specially shaped to reduce or eliminate any internal standing waves. They do sound pretty impressive for their modest footprint and are as smooth as butter with very good driver integration. The client for this design left a very happy man this afternoon. He now has CAD plans for the completed design and as he's a talented cabinet maker aims to make his cabinets himself which will be gloss black front and dark crown cut walnut everywhere else. Personally I would have run with gloss black with a walnut front (ie the other way around).

They sound very similar to the speakers in my laptop.

What's the woofer, 8 inch?

Any news on your Tannoys, Macca?

Are they anywhere near ready?

10 inch woofer

4 inch mid

sound just like my laptop too!

The look pretty capable Paul. Remember when we were talking about doing a budget 3 way along the lines of the JBL 'Century' because no=one else was offering anything like that?

Someone else had the same idea kralkaudio.com/shop/tdb-10-professional-three-way-monitor/

Fair enough but it's got to have been over a year?

Wow

Heard some Klipsch Heresys today and I didn't think on what other's have said they'd be my cup of tea. They were excellent...refined, balanced, great imaging and superbly coherent for a multi-way design like that and not at all as coloured as I had anticipated. In fact they were far less coloured than many newer (mediocre) designs I heard at the Bristol Show today. ATC were also pretty epic. Talk about getting a quart from a pint pot...you have to hear the new ATC scm 7's and 11's....monster amplification needed...

I've done a brief overview of the highlights for me which I may post on a separate thread later.