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Tannoy vs Harbeth

novak said:
Really interesting reading.
Yes just came from the Falcon Gold Badge LS3/5A. Lovely speakers, I enjoyed them very much. The new room can take something a little bigger hence the new search. Very familiar with various Harbeths - and found the SHL5 plus and XD to be really good, more air and scale than other Harbeths IME. M30.2 XD also very good. A little softer but very open compared to previous models. I’d love to try the C7XD - perhaps could be my perfect speaker (SHL5 look a little dominating in the new space) but was thinking the Legacy Cheviot, whilst larger in some dimensions) they sit lower and might fit my room nicely. I just fear they’ll lose the open, natural sound. I know I need to try some but it’s a lot of faffing for a home loan, especially for such big boxes, and then there’s the challenge of trying the right Tannoy when I’m totally new to that world. Saying that, I’m very intrigued by the Tannoy design ethos and would love to try them.
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The Harb 7's were the first of the mid sized Harbeths to be given a more modern, faster, slightly less warm sound. At the time I auditioned them, I preferred the fuller sound of the HL5's. The later changes to the 5 range removed the differences considerably and the Anniversary I owned for a year or three was nearly perfect in many ways, but I was always conscious of that metal dome tweeter. Anyway.

The size of the 7 cabinets really can be a sweet spot I think. Big cabinets of course, with big drivers do a job nothing else can do low down. There is no substitute IMO for moving a lot of air. But for a compromise, with 'enough' bass if it's properly implemented, perfect mids, and a sweet open top, that size range ought to be bang on in a domestic situation. Something between 40 and 60 litres. I'd prefer the larger end and might add another 10 litres and add a seperate 8 or 10" Bass driver, then a dedicate mid and soft dome tweeter. How hard can it be?

How about saving yourself several thousand quid and trying some of the newer offerings doing just that?

https://www.wharfedale.co.uk/linton-heritage/
 
The advantages of a coax are identical vertical and horizontal directivity and sharper images.
Disadvantages are acoustic interference
 
It basically comes down to which you prefer, which in turn comes down to what 'works' in your own listening space. I have the tiny Harbeths. They're great for near-field listening, and not so fussy about having space behind them as the bigger models. I've never owned Tannoys, but those I have heard always seemed a bit too 'boomy' in the bass.
 
tuga said:
Are the any Tannoy speakers time-aligned?

The Churchill measured by Stereophile definitely is not…
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This perhaps explains why I've never been overwhelmed by the vintage 15-inch Tannoys.

I prefer the newer pre-Fyne-Audio 10-inch ones and if anything happened to my Kensington GRs I would probably look to Fyne.
 
Steven Toy said:
This perhaps explains why I've never been overwhelmed by the vintage 15-inch Tannoys.
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The proper vintage Tannoys are time aligned to a very large degree by the physical spacing of the compression driver, pepperpot, huge alnico magnet and driver phase. The ones that lose this aspect are the latter types with much thinner ceramic magnets and the ‘tulip waveguide’. As I understand it these required compensation in the crossover to pull them into something approaching an acceptable phase relationship.

PS No cone driver of any type can achieve proper time alignment, so everything is a compromise. There is no such thing as a time-aligned multi-driver moving coil speaker no matter the marketing bullshit behind it. Every last one has obvious phase inaccuracies. Arguably the only genuinely time aligned speaker on the planet is the Quad ESL63!
 
I have had a lot of different speakers over the years but last year acquired some original Tannoy Lancasters with 15"Golds, I can't see me ever using anything else other than a small monitor if I ever have a 2nd set up. The Tannoys have such realism, it really is like having a live act in your room at times, or like being at Ronnie Scotts, they are just very believable, everything sounds right but they don't do all that hifi spotlit stuff.
 
Rockmeister said:
Something between 40 and 60 litres.
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This is a really important measurement, I think. It certainly has been for me in my medium sized room which, as mentioned in previous threads, doesn't have the immunity to physics that others have achieved on this forum. I think JTC probably imagined he might have this immunity when he bought the huge Legacy Ardens. It's hardly a surprise that a move to a mini-monitor is going to bring greater clarity, unless you live in a baronial mansion.

I continue to live in the middle ground of the 4.5 x 3.5m room and the 40-60 litre cabinet that Rocky has mentioned. So that's where I will be making comparisons. It's impossible to glean any genuine conclusions from all these other comparisons, which are context free in many other ways too (room sized, amplification used, etc).

Compact 7s are around 40L and I think 70s Eatons are exactly the same. So there's a nice ground for comparison (one which I've done at length in the past). Legacy Eatons are a little larger - I think it is 50L, but the bass is tuned rather differently. They start rolling off quite high, but they also go lower than 70s Eatons. I've found this makes it rather hard to work out what's going on with the bass. They are clearly designed for closer to wall placement, and it's no surprise that hifinutt found them much more room friendly than the SHL5Plus, which are 60L (IIRC), and also produced a very significant 40Hz boom in my room.

So I'd suggest we keep comparisons as context rich as possible, and stick to BBC vs Tannoy of similar cabinet size.

I've enlisted my 13 year old daughter to help with my much delayed 70s Eatons vs Eaton Legacy comparison, since I have been procrastinating on this myself for ages. Results will follow.
 
Steven Toy said:
This perhaps explains why I've never been overwhelmed by the vintage 15-inch Tannoys.

I prefer the newer pre-Fyne-Audio 10-inch ones and if anything happened to my Kensington GRs I would probably look to Fyne.
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To the best of my knwoledge Fynes are not time-aligned either.

Time-/phase-alignment is down in the list in terms of audible impact, and the downsides are significant.
I will quote Linkwitz:

Design of Loudspeakers
Some general observations

The typical loudspeaker product is designed to make money and not necessarily to provide accurate sound reproduction.
Since customers prefer small, unobtrusive speakers and judge sound quality by the amount of bass that they hear and by high frequencies they had not noticed before, there is a staggering number of essentially identical designs on the market that meet these requirements at different price points.
No wonder then that there is a generic loudspeaker sound and that you can always tell whether something that you hear originates from a speaker and not from a live source.
The marketing departments of the different speaker manufacturers are busy to point out differentiating features and breakthrough inventions when it comes to the highest price points, but in reality box loudspeaker design has come to a the end of a road and all you will hear are slight variations on the same theme.
The fundamental problems of box re-radiation and non-uniform power response in a room are at best only partially solved by these conventional designs

Sound reproduction is about creating an auditory illusion.
When the recorded sound is of real instruments or voices there is a familiar, live reference in our auditory memory. The illusion of hearing a realistic reproduction is destroyed by distortion that is added anywhere in the signal chain from microphone to loudspeaker, but the speaker is by far the biggest culprit.
Every designer focuses on the on-axis frequency response as if it were the all determining distortion parameter.
Sometimes great attention is paid to the phase response in an attempt to preserve waveform fidelity, which at best can only be achieved for a single listening point in space.
Ignored usually, though of much greater importance, is resonance in drivers and cabinets and the slow release of stored energy that goes with it.
Furthermore, the uniformity and flatness of the off-axis frequency response which we hear via room reverberation and reflections is rarely a design goal.
You can check the naturalness of the timbre by listening from another room.
Does it sound like a loudspeaker is playing?
The imbalance in the speaker's power response between low and high frequencies destroys the illusion.

And then there are the non-linear distortions, the ones that add sounds that were not present in the original.
They are easily measurable in the form of harmonic and intermodulation distortion products.
Rarely do non-linear distortion considerations enter into the design of speakers.
Otherwise, consumer stores and recording studios would not abound with 2-way designs - usually a 6.5" woofer/midrange and 1" dome tweeter in a ported box - that are physically incapable of the sound levels claimed for them and which by distortion often create a unique box loudspeaker bass experience, variously described with slam and speed.
Some design attempts for reducing non-linear distortion lead to line source speakers.
While successful at this they introduce phantom image distortions and, coupled with a conventional vented woofer of sorts, they suffer the same uneven power response and rich excitation of room resonances as the typical box speaker design.

(...)

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/design_of_loudspeakers.htm
 
Tony L said:
The proper vintage Tannoys are time aligned to a very large degree by the physical spacing of the compression driver, pepperpot, huge alnico magnet and driver phase. The ones that lose this aspect are the latter types with much thinner ceramic magnets and the ‘tulip waveguide’. As I understand it these required compensation in the crossover to pull them into something approaching an acceptable phase relationship.

PS No cone driver of any type can achieve proper time alignment, so everything is a compromise. There is no such thing as a time-aligned multi-driver moving coil speaker no matter the marketing bullshit behind it. Every last one has obvious phase inaccuracies. Arguably the only genuinely time aligned speaker on the planet is the Quad ESL63!
Click to expand...

Speakers are either time-aligned or they are not. Tannoy fit the second category.

As far as I know, it is possible to time align cones and domes in four different ways:

• physically (e.g. Kef, AvantGarde, Cessaro)
• through first order filters (e.g. Thiel, Vandersteen, Dunlavy)
• complex analogue "delay" filters (e.g. PSI)
• digital "delay" filters (e.g. Kii, D&D).


Worst offenders are flat-baffle horns like classic Klipsch or Volti.
 
Tony L said:
The proper vintage Tannoys are time aligned to a very large degree by the physical spacing of the compression driver, pepperpot, huge alnico magnet and driver phase. The ones that lose this aspect are the latter types with much thinner ceramic magnets and the ‘tulip waveguide’. As I understand it these required compensation in the crossover to pull them into something approaching an acceptable phase relationship.

PS No cone driver of any type can achieve proper time alignment, so everything is a compromise. There is no such thing as a time-aligned multi-driver moving coil speaker no matter the marketing bullshit behind it. Every last one has obvious phase inaccuracies. Arguably the only genuinely time aligned speaker on the planet is the Quad ESL63!
Click to expand...

I agree that the Pepperpot Waveguide and Alnico magnets are an improvement.

https://www.tannoy.com/product.html?modelCode=P0DES

  • PepperPot WaveGuide powered by Tannoy Alnico magnet system enhances the point source symmetrical dispersion properties
 
Elephantears said:
This is a really important measurement, I think. It certainly has been for me in my medium sized room which, as mentioned in previous threads, doesn't have the immunity to physics that others have achieved on this forum. I think JTC probably imagined he might have this immunity when he bought the huge Legacy Ardens. It's hardly a surprise that a move to a mini-monitor is going to bring greater clarity, unless you live in a baronial mansion.

I continue to live in the middle ground of the 4.5 x 3.5m room and the 40-60 litre cabinet that Rocky has mentioned. So that's where I will be making comparisons. It's impossible to glean any genuine conclusions from all these other comparisons, which are context free in many other ways too (room sized, amplification used, etc).

Compact 7s are around 40L and I think 70s Eatons are exactly the same. So there's a nice ground for comparison (one which I've done at length in the past). Legacy Eatons are a little larger - I think it is 50L, but the bass is tuned rather differently. They start rolling off quite high, but they also go lower than 70s Eatons. I've found this makes it rather hard to work out what's going on with the bass. They are clearly designed for closer to wall placement, and it's no surprise that hifinutt found them much more room friendly than the SHL5Plus, which are 60L (IIRC), and also produced a very significant 40Hz boom in my room.

So I'd suggest we keep comparisons as context rich as possible, and stick to BBC vs Tannoy of similar cabinet size.

I've enlisted my 13 year old daughter to help with my much delayed 70s Eatons vs Eaton Legacy comparison, since I have been procrastinating on this myself for ages. Results will follow.
Click to expand...

I think that you are overthinking this. There is absolutely no relation between room-size and speaker cabinet volume.

Edit: except visual impact.
 
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The trouble with time alignment is the acoustic centre of a drive unit is a frequency dependant moveable feast. In the case of Tannoy DC's the alnico/pepper pots are not fully time aligned( 0.25ms) nor are the K series or Tulip waveguides(0.45 ms).
They all however fall within a 0.5 ms 'window' of close enough. I suspect Fyne also follow this rule of thumb. FWIW The XTA digital crossover that came with the pro range of tulip drivers had a set of tannoy specified eq and delay presets for the whole range, LF/HF delay was 'not necessary'.
 
tuga said:
Speakers are either time-aligned or they are not. Tannoy fit the second category.

As far as I know, it is possible to time align cones and domes in four different ways:

• physically (e.g. Kef, AvantGarde, Cessaro)
• through first order filters (e.g. Thiel, Vandersteen, Dunlavy)
• complex analogue "delay" filters (e.g. PSI)
• digital "delay" filters (e.g. Kii, D&D).


Worst offenders are flat-baffle horns like classic Klipsch or Volti.
Click to expand...

I agree the likes of Klipsch are the worst offenders, especially KHorns and La Scalas where there is anything up to a foot and a half of error! It is mitigated to a degree by the extreme natural roll-off of a horn (they really drop like a stone out of band), and the fact the whole midband comes out of the one horn (400Hz-6kHz), but they are still not good in the timing regard and really need some serious space to work. I suspect the classic two-way Altecs are a lot better. I’d love to try some Valencias or whatever.

The area I disagree with you is the notion you can time align a cone, which by nature is a cone and has a top and bottom which are at different distances to the listener! That is before you get to the utter chaos that are non-concentric drivers arranged on a baffle each activating the room from a different spacial and height location. I’ve not deep dived the measurements but I suspect the active version of the Kef LS50 has the potential to be the most time-aligned moving coil speaker possible as it is a very small and shallow cone and isn’t bound by the phase restrictions of a passive crossover circuit. It could well be superb. I certainly liked the first version when I heard them. The coaxial Genlecs have a lot of potential too, as of course do MEGs (I’ve owned RL904s, wonderful, but I didn’t like the port loading).

I struggle to even stay in the room with large widely spaced-out moving coil cone speakers on a tall baffle, e.g. large Wilsons, JM Labs etc. They make me feel ill, and I’m sure it is the phase/time issues of so many drivers fighting a room from so many places. That and the crazy heavy high-mass ported cabs storing and releasing energy. Sit me in front of a pair of ESL63s and I just relax and enjoy the music as everything is happening in time and without the dissection of multi-driver speakers. Very large Tannoys have ended up as my favoured compromise as they have most of the coherence and timing of Quads, but with far better dynamic ability and scale. Beyond that my taste is very, very small speakers with the drivers as close to a point source as possible and no porting, e.g. LS3/5As etc. They’ll never have the dynamics, ease or scale of ESLs, let alone Tannoys, but they have a coherence that is entirely missing for me with large multi-driver speakers. I am sure this is a time domain thing.
 
tuga said:
I think that you are overthinking this. There is absolutely no relation between room-size and speaker cabinet volume.

Edit: except visual impact.
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Very obviously there is when you're thinking of which Harbeth model you want to compare. The 5s hit the 40Hz room mode severely and the 7s not so much. You're not seeing the wood for the trees here.
 
Tony L said:
The area I disagree with you is the notion you can time align a cone, which by nature is a cone and has a top and bottom which are at different distances to the listener!
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I agree that the cones will produce different frequencies in different parts but how does that relate with wavelength at the listening spot?

Also you can add more ways to mitigate this and other issues such as harmonic and intermodulation distortion or directivity.
 
I think everyone else is taking the bait far too easily here, letting tuga move the discussion into yet another footnote to Floyd Toole, rather than actually enriching each others sense of which speakers work best in which context.

The first rule of aesthetic criticism is context.
 
Elephantears said:
Very obviously there is when you're thinking of which Harbeth model you want to compare. The 5s hit the 40Hz room mode severely and the 7s not so much. You're not seeing the wood for the trees here.
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I know what you mean, abdicating of low frequency extension due to room issues is a common approach but doesn't make it the right course of action in my view.
I have just experienced that fater living for a long time with large floorstanders and currently owning LS3/6s. Some people may live hapilly with a truncated low-end response but I am not one of them. Then there's acoustic and signal-level room correction.

One of my reference systems (as in the best I've listened to) uses a 12" woofer in a 100 litre closed bass bin in a 14m2 room.
 
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