Valve preamp recommendations

What not tap firebottle up fornthe matching pre? The Kin

I did kinda throw a hint Alan’s way , think I’m sorted now though mate

Hello mate, sorry I’ve only just seen this , I bought a schiit freya to go with them but I don’t think it’s all gelling with my Tannoys so the search may continue 😩

So I had a light bulb moment! Maybe it’s not the amps or cables that have caused my system to lose the magic “ I then realised it went back in January ( when I recapped my Tannoys)
So yesterday ( day off ) I put all the old original caps back in place ( with silver solder ) and hey presto the magic is back and not making that mistake again.
If it ain’t broke bloody well leave it alone.
The Freya with the firebottles ( and Jolida glass fx iii dac )is quite remarkable imo .

I think I had convinced myself that new caps MUST surely be better than 40 year old ones ( wrong!! )
Point 2 : I just happened to read somewhere that to recap these tannoys was considered sacrilege and then it clicked ( that’s when the magic went ) ok so I was a little slow , so I got to refitting all the old caps back ( they’re only little cheap Philips ones ) I resoldered them all back in the exact place ( but with silver solder ) , plugged them in in anticipation, then wow all the memories came back along with the imaging, soundstage and no ear piercing treble . Over £100 in caps wasted but I learned a valuable lesson. Leave alone

It won't be the caps causing any change in the way the drivers were meant to sound when they left the factory, trust me on this.  40 year old caps can drift, and the originals have a nasty habit of corroding worst at the junction where the legs are moulded to the body.  I had a set in recently that when the crossovers were removed from the cabinets for service, four of the caps simply fell out!

The very fact you've re-soldered the caps in place will also have remedied any old dry joints too.

 Recapping using the correct values, AND cleaning switches properly cannot possibly skew frequency response nor make the sound worse...the opposite is almost always true IME.  I've yet to hear any properly serviced crossovers make the speakers sound anything other than fabulous again.  These purists on some users groups and forums really are responsible for spreading this urban myth about leaving things as they were 50 years ago which is bordering on lunacy when you think about it.  The often almost always cause of this lack of soundstage and thinness to the sound with brand new caps is a phenomenon and best explained by pointing out that it does take a number of hours for them to fully stabilise.  The sound then opens up, becomes fuller and with improved soundstaging.  It generally takes a day or two at most.

The other consideration is that drivers themselves will be way out of spec by now...most especially MGs, more so than HPDs, but HPDs suffer from suspension increasing in compliance with age as with MGs.  This alters their mechanical Q and free air resonance.  Where MGs are concerned, the surround hardens with age losing compliance whilst the suspension does the opposite so distortion levels rise along with free air resonance values.  

Tannoys must be some of the most misunderstood speakers on the planet with groups assigning all sorts of weird and wonderful theories, few of which hold water i'm afraid.

It can be for all sorts of reasons Oli, but the main two tend to be firstly not allowing sufficient stabilising time for caps (and not dismantling and properly cleaning switch contacts) and secondly having lived for speakers for years which are out of spec , in some cases by a long way, so get used to that sound over time. Trust me when I say the difference between serviced drivers and crossovers, especially in decent cabs just blows all of the standard vintage models into the weeds. The improvement is not subtle!

I'm always open for any enthusiast to come and hear or themselves as I have a few pairs knocking about here funnily enough! I'm tempted to keep one set as bog standard with a switch added to the back which switches between old and new crossovers. Hearing is believing.

It depends on the position in the circuit, but really, most people wrongly assume that more cost = better sound, when crossover design makes a far bigger difference. Some speakers I've had here (factory speaker models) would never have sounded good as the crossover design ensured that drivers were massively out of phase and many use far too much overlap or have just not been linearised properly. Others (no names but these are popular) use crossovers in some models which kill any dynamics and life, with poor low level detail (personal experience as I owned a pair once). Putting the world's most expensive cap might bring a warm glow to the person spending the money but it's often met with bitter disappointment when it sounds the same! Tolerance is also important.

I tend to use Claritycap ESAs (flying the flag and all that) in the series positions for tweeters and mids, and Jantzen Standard Z caps or JB JFX caps for other duties. They're not silly expensive and compete well with caps at 10x the cost. It's not hard to learn why as all caps which are correctly specified will have identical impedances at specify frequency points as that is precisely the job of a cap. Few impart much colouration unless out of tolerance in critical positions where it might matter a lot if they're more than 5 or 10% adrift. Some, like 'lytics can drift appreciably with load, and thermal drift is one reason I would shun any lytic unless there's just no space to use anything else. Then there's the effects of cap construction and the effects of putting that cap in a particularly electrically resonant part of a circuit. Trial and error led me to discover that a certain cap design performs better (measurably) in such places, much to my surprise. One of my little trade secrets ;-)

Some very expensive speakers put most R&D into inductor design and specification and just use inexpensive polys for all parts of the circuit. Verity Audio are one such company. Their speakers sound pretty amazing.

Inductors really make or break a loudspeaker system and have the single largest impact. Most entry level to mid range speakers use pretty cheap (and in some cases) under rated cored inductors which exhibit surprising levels of distortion and hysteresis as well as the fad of using big air cores for the bass which is counter productive due to the high ESR due to the larger number of windings needed to match cored inductor values here.

Marantz 880's were well designed and used quality crossovers. They did on some models use small E&I cores for the bass duties (big tick in the box) and many used poly caps. There were various examples about but most used quality parts, somewhat messily put together on hardboard like sheets. They were pretty good in their day tbh.  You could spend money on those but tbh, if they already use decent polys, they may not show much improvement from recapping unless tolerances were poor (as with many Tannoys) or lead out leg corrosion is an issue (in which case just replace the lot like for like).