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Mission 770's rides again!

Well I can report that Dylan's harmonica is, on loud, high notes certainly a bit relentless yes! The Spendors certainly do a better job of getting the main tone and harmonics of things such as the harmonica and acoustic guitar in correct proportion.... they get timbre more correct... Not that the 770's are WAY out like Kans or anything! They're pretty good even at this but this is the Spendors greatest talent and big boots for any speaker to fill!
 
Hows the bass? That’s the bit I didn’t get on with as I recall, I remember a bit of typical ‘port’ hollowness.
 
Tony L said:
Hows the bass? That’s the bit I didn’t get on with as I recall, I remember a bit of typical ‘port’ hollowness.
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So far only used them with the St20... will try a big class A SS amp later.... They give very little away to the slightly larger Spendor's in extension, hardly noticeable, and out-do the Spendors in "slam" and "balls" but they are a bit more "fruity" than I recall them being in a larger room and with MF A370 powering them. I recall using a St20 (not this one) on 4 Ohm tap to get best bass from them years ago (using 8 Ohm tap right now) and that they seemed more sensitive to whether they were being powered by a big SS amp or a small valve one than the Spendors are when it came to bass control...

Certainly not loose or boomy but I'm aware that they're not infinite baffles then at the moment.... I've not even tried positioning or any other amps as yet...

They have now't but a single inductor, which I measured as having only 0.25 Ohms DC resistance, 'twixt speaker sockets and bass unit so there is good scope for an amp to grip it without a crossover getting in the way too much..
My hunch is that they are tuned a little on the fruity side but with the ability to let a good SS amp provide the grip electrically... if that makes much sense!? Hence my recollections of them having an impressive combination of slam, extension and grip for the cabinet size when used with A370 years ago.... or I could have my rose coloured nostalgia specs on!!

They certainly sound "alive", "dynamic", "powerful", "impressive", "big", "straining at the leash to GO!!" and I can easily see how a younger me was bloody impressed!
 
My memories may well be unfair as the bloke I knew with a pair also had (and still has) Gale 401s, which are excellent in that area, plus can move more air (a drummer, so listens loud). I borrowed the 770s for a short while with a view to possibly buying them, but they really didn’t work in the small odd-shaped room I had at the time (nothing but Kans did!). I certainly liked the budget 700s from the same generation that another friend had with a Planar 2 & A60. That was a cracking little system.

PS The 770/Gale system was a DM101, Syrinx, DV Karat, some bloody weird preamp with a DNM connection (Apex, Amex or something like that), and a bolt-together NAP 160 that kept blowing-up into the Gales (hence him buying the Missions). When it wasn’t blown up it sounded rather good.
 
Tony L said:
Original* white-face version? A friend had a pair and I never quite made my mind up about them. Certainly good in some areas!

*IIRC there were actually two, they changed the tweeter position on the baffle slightly.
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There were many, many revisions during production of the white face 770s almost to the point these were test/prototypes in the field.
Mission kept farting around with the bass tuning, so some were fast, tight and dry while others were fuller and warmer at the bottom - and all stops in between.
At least according to Farad Azima who confesses to this in HFN article a few years ago, and this does support the marmite press reactions.

Other than the work a bit later with Cyrus, I think the period 1978 - 1984-ish was Mission at its best. This gave us the white series 'speakers, the 774/773 arm/cart and the iconic 'Mission' cast amplifier. Farad and Henry Azima were very talented but they also weren't afraid to use the work of bright new designers and thinkers.
 
Arkless Electronics said:
That must have been years later in Messengers career... But as you know I'm a big fan of Spendor BCI, BCII and SPI (all very similar). Back in the day.... he used Brik's in his own system and for a while moved to 770's and declared them better... I believe he moved away from the 770's after maybe 6 months to a year... it was along time ago to be recalling precisely what a reviewer said in 1982!

Yep I can go with someone finding the 770 a bit "relentless" due to that slight brightness I mentioned... They are actually quite similar sounding to Spendors, more alike than different if that makes much sense!? Going from one speaker to another can often lead to some head scratching due to VERY obvious differences but there is quite a similarity overall... They are more "ballsy", dynamic "PRaTy" than the Spendors but less refined and rather more ragged I would say. Certainly at the level I now have the tweeters set to I think they would be rather "in yer face" with a hotly recorded violin! Which is basically why after comparing the 770's and BCII's at length years ago I gradually moved to the Spendors as my main speaker. It's making a nice change and very nostalgic for now though!

If I can't fix that "tweeter needs to be set to give a sting in the top end for it to be right in the midrange and crossover area" issue then I reckon I will be going back to the Spendors... early days in experimenting as yet though....

Yer need to try them Spendors of yours with some less "pipe and slippers" amps. to hear them properly!:D;)
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Some of us are quite happy with the combination of amplifiers and speakers we have.
This chasing ‘Audio Nirvana’ isn’t for everyone.
 
I find it astonishing that Jez can poke fun at the Linn Kan which possesses one of the smoothest and most refined tweeters ever made.

And then extol the virtues of the Mission 770, which is a great speaker in many ways but smooth treble?
 
david ellwood said:
I find it astonishing that Jez can poke fun at the Linn Kan which possesses one of the smoothest and most refined tweeters ever made.

And then extol the virtues of the Mission 770, which is a great speaker in many ways but smooth treble?
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I guess it boils down to what you define as treble.
I agree the top end of the Kan (all of them up to and including the Kan II) have clean and smooth top end when the tweeter is doing the work.
However the practically nonexistent driver integration where the B110 hands over to the tweeter can make MK1 Kans sound forward and harsh at times. This got fixed on the Kan II thanks to it having a proper crossover..... ;)
Love the Kan II.
 
Remember going to pick up mine at the store,they were the rave speakers of the time.When I got there they were demonstrating some strange chrome end capped things to a couple of guys, it was a jaw on the floor moment (Gale 401's) just couldn't belive how clear the mids were and the Bass wow, the 770's were so disappointing when I got them home, stopped buying the hifi press after that and let, my ears do the deciding.
Sold my 770's onto another mug and ended up with the wood version of the 401's,still have them in my collection.
 
david ellwood said:
I find it astonishing that Jez can poke fun at the Linn Kan which possesses one of the smoothest and most refined tweeters ever made.

And then extol the virtues of the Mission 770, which is a great speaker in many ways but smooth treble?
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The Kan is the worst speaker ever made in all probability.... As I say every time it's mentioned! I'll take even MkI Diamonds over them all day everyday!
 
Tony L said:
My memories may well be unfair as the bloke I knew with a pair also had (and still has) Gale 401s, which are excellent in that area, plus can move more air (a drummer, so listens loud). I borrowed the 770s for a short while with a view to possibly buying them, but they really didn’t work in the small odd-shaped room I had at the time (nothing but Kans did!). I certainly liked the budget 700s from the same generation that another friend had with a Planar 2 & A60. That was a cracking little system.

PS The 770/Gale system was a DM101, Syrinx, DV Karat, some bloody weird preamp with a DNM connection (Apex, Amex or something like that), and a bolt-together NAP 160 that kept blowing-up into the Gales (hence him buying the Missions). When it wasn’t blown up it sounded rather good.
Click to expand...

I'd take 770's over 401's!! Only ever heard 401's a couple of times and was not impressed...
One of the best features of the 770's is they will go stupidly loud without complaint.

I well remember when the 770 first came out and hearing them against various other speakers in two hi fi shops and how they made the speakers I compared them to sound like they had duvet's over them...
 
Anyone remember the Mission pre-power of the same era as the 770 etc, the ones that were just a big cast alloy Mission logo? Never heard them but would make for quite the iconic 80s system with a nice white-face pair of 770s! IIRC the preamp was battery powered.
 
Robert said:
There were many, many revisions during production of the white face 770s almost to the point these were test/prototypes in the field.
Mission kept farting around with the bass tuning, so some were fast, tight and dry while others were fuller and warmer at the bottom - and all stops in between.
At least according to Farad Azima who confesses to this in HFN article a few years ago, and this does support the marmite press reactions.

Other than the work a bit later with Cyrus, I think the period 1978 - 1984-ish was Mission at its best. This gave us the white series 'speakers, the 774/773 arm/cart and the iconic 'Mission' cast amplifier. Farad and Henry Azima were very talented but they also weren't afraid to use the work of bright new designers and thinkers.
Click to expand...

Yep I agree on that! They were my favourite manufacturer and the one I made a beeline to at hi fi shows back at that time. They seemed willing to tear up the rule book and do what they thought best even if they had to develop it from scratch back then.
 
Tony L said:
Anyone remember the Mission pre-power of the same era as the 770 etc, the ones that were just a big cast alloy Mission logo? Never heard them but would make for quite the iconic 80s system with a nice white-face pair of 770s! IIRC the preamp was battery powered.
Click to expand...

Yep. I remember hearing their top system at Harrogate show with their own TT, arm and cart fed through those amps and then 770's... sounded great!
Years later I had a set in for repair. They are designed by Stan Curtis.
 
Well that's REW downloaded and installed.... looks bloody complicated! Me thinks there will be quite a learning curve here... I may need to "pick the brains" of REW users here on pfm...
I'm planning to use it with my own diy measuring mic I made 20 years ago then a M-Audio 2496 sound card I have in my PC.

Mic is a Panasonic electret insert which it was widely reported were so accurate "off the shelf" that they were eminently suitable as measuring mics and that unless you were spectacularly unlucky and got a "Friday afternoon" one could be trusted to be within about +/- 0.5dB of a B&K pro measuring mic up to about 15KHz, above which they went a bit awry. At that time (still now?) they were used in most of the affordable "hobbyist" measuring mics... I designed and built the PSU, phantom powering, amplification and meter driver for relative SPL indication on an analogue meter. It also has line out of course. Obviously there is no calibration file! I'm reasoning that as I'm not trying to measure within +/- 0.1dB or anything close it should be "close enough for jazz" (or Jez!). Whether or not the mic insert has kept it's characteristics after 20 years of storage is another matter...

One of the first things I've found is it asking for calibration of the sound card... mention is made of sound card calibration file... (??? not something I'm aware of sound cards having...) but there is also mention of doing a loop back measurement on the sound card... Hmm... learning curve...
 
@Arkless Electronics , Falcon sell both a ferrofluid (A1 suffix) and non-ferrofluid (A0 suffix) version of the Audax TW025 tweeter. Knowing your tendency for listening at "enthusiastic" SPLs I assume you originally opted for the ferrofluid version for the increased power handling?! :D

I bought an A0 pair (without ferrofluid) a few years ago for my JR150 as I was told they were drop-in replacements for the HD100D25. They weren't. The newer model is 5 to 6dB louder than the original. It does however have a very similar frequency response profile, suffering from a rising response directly on-axis but smoothing out nicely when measured off-axis:

48036696947_7dc6526a3f_b.jpg


Lacking the ability to easily knock up an L-pad, I instead bought a pair of used HD100D25's on eBay. This turned out to be a bad move as they had a huge dip in their response below 3kHz and raised levels of distortion below 2kHz:

48036593196_3cbca313b8_b.jpg


I tried my luck with another used pair of HD100D25's and suffered the same fate. None matched the frequency response or sensitivity of the original HD100D25's I pulled from my JR150:

48036593181_3a5886cf3c_b.jpg


I ended up resorting to buying another complete pair of JR150s and crossing my fingers that they had a perfectly matched and fully functioning pair of HD100D25's, and luckily they did!

I never got a definitive answer on whether the version of HD100D25 used in the JR150 used ferrofluid, but the advice was most likely not given that the JR150 dates from the late 70s. I'm therefore struggling to explain the 6dB efficiency difference between the HD100D25 used in the JR150 and the newer Audax TW025A0, if dried up ferrofluid doesn't explain it then what would, a stronger magnet on the new unit, or... ?

As for the HD100D25's I bought on eBay with ropey frequency responses and distortion profiles, if nothing else it demonstrates that buying used drive units with unknown histories is a complete crap shoot!...
 
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