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HELP (Tannoy HPD)!

djdstone

djdstone

pfm Member
Had a power surge in my house and everything tripped and I think that my lovely Tannoy Berkeleys have been damaged so some advice is needed. The treble on both channels seems to more very distorted but the lower frequencies are fine - would they be fixable? I've tried different power amps thinking it was that but the fault is there on both channels. I'm using my own hand wired cross overs so perhaps something has gone in the HF circuit. I guess I'll have to try using the original crossovers as see if that solves the issue. Major pain in the backside as i'd just installed more boards on the DDDac and they were sounding fabulous. Anyone got any ideas?
 
Everything about vintage Tannoys can be fixed, so do not panic! Try swapping the crossvers out if you still have the originals as you want to establish whether the issue is with them or the compression drivers. The latter are available as a new spare part, not cheap, but certainly available. About £100 each now I think.
 
Thanks Tony - I will try that first. Do you know where the new compression drivers can be sourced? This always happens when I’m skint too :-(
 
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You must be gutted. Very bad luck. Hopefully something in your crossovers. Keep us posted. The path to audio nirvana is littered with obstacles.
 
Just a thought. I live in a rural location and have power issues from time to time, which is one of the reasons I never leave gear powered up when not in use. If you contact your power distibution company, its Northern Powergen here, for details of the fault, time, date, nature etc, you may have the basis for a claim. Your home insurance company should also be able to help if the power distribution company is at fault.
 
will try the crossovers and fingers crossed it will be that. It’s replicated on both channels though so I’m suspecting the worst. Good job I’ve got the week off work.
 
BTW Tony - are they easy to fit? I’m assuming that there’s no way to repair the originals if the are faulty?
 
Will do that too. Just so annoying as everything was sounding wonderful. I’d just added some more boards to the DDDAC and the level of detail and soundstage are amazing. The MA12s sounded great too - I was evening surprised by how low they can go.
 
djdstone said:
BTW Tony - are they easy to fit? I’m assuming that there’s no way to repair the originals if the are faulty?
Click to expand...

On HPDs I understand they are pretty easy, but they are fragile and easily damaged. On Monitor Golds they are a PITA as they need very precise alignment in order to sound right and behave as a pair. On both they are meant to be a simple drop-in, but this is not the case IME. Having a pink/white noise source and real-time measurement is a real bonus and gets the job done quicker.

The cmpression driver is a single assembly mounted on a black plastic back plate that is attached to the speaker with four bolts. Beneath this and the speaker magnet are x number of thin card spacers, the number varies unit to unit (these were hand assembled speakers to quite poor tolerences compared to modern manufacturing so they were ‘paired’ to some degree with the spacers). Be very careful with these spacers as they are unavailable and don’t get them mixed up x the ones in a given speaker belong to that speaker, not the compression driver. Also be very conscious of bolt tightness, these are not designed to be done up tightly and sound very wrong indeed if done so. The ‘alignment’ bit is there will be a fraction of a mm movement in any given direction, which does not seem a lot, but effects the frequency response hugely. You need to very gently asjust the compression driver to find its best place in the magnet gap and this will return the smoothest, flattest response (noise generator being hugely useful here). You also need to get both speakers sounding the same (pair-matching is the bane of vintage Tannoys, they tend to be shockingly bad). I’ve not actually used it for this task yet but I understand the free REW software has this function.

PS I’ve edited the thread to make it a bit more obvious as to content.
 
Just done some switching around of gear and thankfully the Tannoys are fine. The problem appears to be with the DDDac itself - I will email Doede (the designer) today and see if he has any suggestions as to what the fault might be.
 
thanks Tony - i really appreciate all your help. I’m hoping that the distortion on the Dac will be a simple fix and it really is excellent and it’s taken me some time to build.
 
That's good then... The reason I asked about the power amp as that something like your Heathkit would be very unlikely indeed to harm your speakers no matter what sort of mains outage... but a SS one could.
 
Thanks - so glad that the Tannoys are alright - now I just need to figure out what’s causing the HF distortion on the DDDAC
 
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