What are you up to?

Cheviots, Berkleys and Ard-Ons (sorry) were incredibly coloured as built by Tannoy. Big and LOUD beyond a doubt, but hardly realistic in the wide scheme of things and an absolute hoot when compared with say, IMF RSPM IV's, which could replicate a brass band incredibly well in a faor sized room, the bass drum 'push to the chest' included. Not sure if it was the HPD drivers, crossovers or boxes that did it, but suspect a little of all three. When Lockwoods do a rebuild, they use aluminium coil formers now I understand and reading other articles, this may reduce any driver related issues. The crossovers as supplied back then are a large bottleneck I gather, but as for some of the aftermarket ones, I don't know as just willy-nilly replacing old coils with fancy new ones and poly caps everywhere may well change the response and I don't think these me-too people ever measure what they do, so it's all 'down to your ears' which of course are judged better than any measurement (just to make sure these mods have done the right thing for the design). Tannoy did a huge amount of refinement and revision on the 80's and were better for it, so who knows.

Hope yours eventually sound good Martin, but you'll need to get over the HUGE soundfield first to be more objective about them. I'd have thought the DMT's rather better myself - they certainly look more modern to me - more modern driver design, the tulip waveguide rather better than the pepperpot castings were *at the time* but maybe it's the cone material, I don't know. All conjecture as in the 90's, 'Pro' Tannoys were well off the domestic viewpoint, as were the professional JBL's (and JBL had become seriously good by the mid 80's) and of course before PMC got fully established, ATC were happy to oblige

The Turnberry SE has a tulip waveguide and I was amazed how smooth this was over some of the previous models using this. None of the pepperpot screech or spikiness I remember of old models, this latter now possibly higher than I can now perceive. Old tannoys from the 70's used to have major integration problems at 3k or so, but with old vinyl as source it probably didn't matter so much. Tubular bels sounded amazing on mid size mid 70's Tannoys I remember and was probably mixed on them.

Apologies, pics of HPD pepperpots with terrible casting errors in the holes kind of put me off for life..