advertisement


Tannoy vs Harbeth

Tony L said:
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.
Click to expand...

With Wilson and Focal demos it has been a mix of overly-loud sound and astringent treble (Wilson used Focal tweeters in the past), and I agree in regard to port sound except when the tuning is overdamped and the frequency is low enough (≥30Hz).
I am not so convinced about your time-domain theory, but some people are more sensitive to this, both with speakers and with digital filter (linear vs. minimum phase).

One of my most memorable listening eperiences is of an afternoon spent listening to ESL63s w/ Gradient subs, a system which mostly overcomes the former's shortcomings.
 
Elephantears said:
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.
Click to expand...

Toole is an important figure in audio but I am critical of some of his research. I am not one of his disciples, if that's what you're implying.
But I also find it important to distinguish personal anecdotal experience with theory and fact.

It's easier to attribute the wrong causes to audible issues if your technical knowledge is limited. And in that case your opinion is not enriching but misleading.
 
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.
Click to expand...

FWIW neither Harbeth was problematic in the bass in my room. How a ported speaker works in a room is all down to the port-loading frequency and has nothing to do with cabinet or driver size IME. My huge Lockwood cabs don’t boom at all despite real bass weight and heft, yet the comparatively tiny MEGs and ProAc Tab Ref 8 Sigs boomed like fog-horns in the same location. Go figure!

PS It is incredibly hard to get a well designed sealed box to boom IME.
 
Harbeths can be very musical, especially the smaller ones. I quite like them but have always preferred Tannoys by a country mile. For me it's an odd comparison as they are very different indeed in how they sound in a room.

There are quite a number of reasons why a lot of people don't get along with Tannoys. The main one is that the vintage cabinets most people will have heard over the years (and I include most of the Lockwood models, three of which I've owned) can be a bit rubbish compared to modern fully damped and braced designs - leading to boomy and uncontrolled sound in many settings, and a consequent loss of subtlety for music that requires it. Also the crossovers have always been mass-produced down to a price - this affects modern Tannoys as just badly as vintage ones (vintage ones of course are additionally subject to age-related degradation of components as well as the fairly basic quality of the mass-produced stock autoformer). This can be addressed by improving the components - though beware there are some incorrect circuit diagrams out there doing the rounds. It's hard to get the amplification right - too low a damping factor (most single ended amps fall into this category) and they sound sluggish and boomy in the bass, too high and you can suck the music out of them, vintage ones especially. Finally, they get a bit big, and they do need a bit of space to breathe.

But barring space concerns, all of the above can be addressed, though not without effort. Anyone complaining of boomy or honky Tannoys just hasn't heard a properly sorted pair. I would venture to suggest that people attracted to that epic Tannoy scale-with-subtlety that they do when well sorted and sympathetically partnered wouldn't even look at a pair of Harbeths, even large ones, pleasant though they are and of course, rather more easily domesticated.
 
Tony L said:
FWIW neither Harbeth was problematic in the bass in my room. How a ported speaker works in a room is all down to the port-loading frequency and has nothing to do with cabinet or driver size IME. My huge Lockwood cabs don’t boom at all despite real bass weight and heft, yet the comparatively tiny MEGs and ProAc Tab Ref 8 Sigs boomed like fog-horns in the same location. Go figure!

PS It is incredibly hard to get a well designed sealed box to boom IME.
Click to expand...

Good points.

I would add high-output impedance (low damping) amplifiers to the list of potential "bass-boom" causes.
 
Tony L said:
FWIW neither Harbeth was problematic in the bass in my room. How a ported speaker works in a room is all down to the port-loading frequency and has nothing to do with cabinet or driver size IME. My huge Lockwood cabs don’t boom at all despite real bass weight and heft, yet the comparatively tiny MEGs and ProAc Tab Ref 8 Sigs boomed like fog-horns in the same location. Go figure!

PS It is incredibly hard to get a well designed sealed box to boom IME.
Click to expand...

Oh come on Tony, you know the difference between the 7s and 5 and it's not just about ports. We could have a proper discussion about ports if this discussion wasn't so consistently veering into the realm of absolutes and a priori statements. For instance, the difference between the port size on C7ES2 and C7ES3, which had a significant effect on the sound, compared to the oversized port on the equivalent Spendor model.

I know ports are a massive compromise, but how can we have a proper discussion if you're saying cabinet size doesn't matter?
 
tuga said:
I would add high-output impedance (low damping) amplifiers to the list of potential "bass-boom" causes.
Click to expand...

Though maybe not in the way you expect. The interaction is far, far more complex than paper specs would suggest. I’ve been surprised many times on this one.
 
Tony L said:
Though maybe not in the way you expect. The interaction is far, far more complex than paper specs would suggest. I’ve been surprised many times on this one.
Click to expand...

I never look at paper/manufacturer specs. I prefer measurements.
 
tuga said:
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).
Click to expand...

A 1st order (acoustic) filter doesn't time align the drivers - but to achieve good phase alignment with a 1st order crossover, you'll have a much better chance of success with time aligned drivers. For anyone thinking, "Hold on, my Epos ES11/14 or AR18 etc use a 1st order filter and aren't time aligned?" That's an electrical filter, the acoustic response is the actual frequency response. It could take a lot of parts to achieve a perfect 1st order acoustic crossover.
 
Fatmarley said:
A 1st order (acoustic) filter doesn't time align the drivers - but to achieve good phase alignment with a 1st order crossover, you'll have a much better chance of success with a time aligned drivers. For anyone thinking, "Hold on, my Epos ES11/14 or AR18 etc use a 1st order filter and aren't time aligned?" That's an electrical filter, the acoustic response is the actual frequency response. It could take a lot of parts to achieve a perfect 1st order acoustic crossover.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the correction, I put time and phase in the same bag although they are technically different...
 
Elephantears said:
I know ports are a massive compromise, but how can we have a proper discussion if you're saying cabinet size doesn't matter?
Click to expand...

A ported cabinet’s resonant frequency is defined by a variety of factors, and in my direct experience the port loading frequency and how that interacts with room nodes is the key from the subjective end-user perspective.

Elephantears said:
For instance, the difference between the port size on C7ES2 and C7ES3, which had a significant effect on the sound, compared to the oversized port on the equivalent Spendor model.

I know ports are a massive compromise, but how can we have a proper discussion if you're saying cabinet size doesn't matter?
Click to expand...

You actually destroy your own argument by stating, accurately IMO, that much of the difference between the C7ES2 (which I owned), and the ES3 (which I’ve never even heard) is down to the different port loading. The cabinet size is identical! IIRC they changed the driver slightly too, so a change to the port makes sense.

FWIW there will also only a fairly narrow range of port loading that a driver such as the Harbeth 8” Radial unit will be able to cope with. Like any driver it will be designed along with some cabinet math for optimal performance. It will expect a certain air-load/resistance. A Spendor (or whatever) will have a different suspension, spider, cone mass, motor (magnetic flux, voice coil etc) parameters etc, so may well end up with an entirely different port loading frequency than a similarly sized Harbeth box with a similar sized bass-mid cone. It is all about the optimal loading of a given driver, the box size is just part of that loading picture as the physically different sized M30, C7 and SHL5 prove.
 
I'm not 100% sure that the argument is here, but if it's "What causes bass-boom?" I'd say the large majority of the time it's down to the frequency response in room. It could be from a port that tuned badly, or even if the port is correctly tuned, it could be caused by room modes. A sealed speaker usually rolls-off earlier than ported, so there's less chance of a peak in the lower frequencies. Driver or cabinet size makes no difference, it's how the low frequency response of the speaker interacts with the room that matters. You could build huge great speakers and tune them to have very little low frequency output, and conversely you could tune some tiny speakers to have very extended lows.
 
Steven Toy said:
Music is music. Choosing speakers (or any other component) according to genre is where Hell lies. Why caricature your music?
Click to expand...
Some of my rock music recordings are a bit on the rough side so I need some speakers that surrender a bit and round up corners to make it bearable. I also want to feel the lower frequencies of bass guitar so a Harbeth monitor won’t work for me.
 
Elephantears said:
Oh come on Tony, you know the difference between the 7s and 5 and it's not just about ports. We could have a proper discussion about ports if this discussion wasn't so consistently veering into the realm of absolutes and a priori statements. For instance, the difference between the port size on C7ES2 and C7ES3, which had a significant effect on the sound, compared to the oversized port on the equivalent Spendor model.

I know ports are a massive compromise, but how can we have a proper discussion if you're saying cabinet size doesn't matter?
Click to expand...

You can't say that categorically, you'd have to compare the C7 with different ports.

The C7 and equivalent Spendor have different midwoofers and port tuning is not only about resonant frequency but also damping, and the Harbeth walls are MDF.
 
Elephantears said:
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.
Click to expand...
You've had it son...once tuga get into the swing I doubt he even reads your replies. Numbers rule from now on.
I suggest you start a new thread about sound experiences in your room size. You know; one where people have actually heard some speakers.
 
hifinutt said:
you could put ANY class d amp on my tannoy eatons and they would sound beautifully smooth , lovely treble .had some icepower monos on them for 2 years and lovely warm and natural sound .the f5 class a monoblocks have more bite and dynamism though and the speakers just keep getting better and better . I have hypersensitive hearing and cant stand sharp treble or courseness
Click to expand...
I tried a March Audio Purifi on my Tannoys and did not like it at all.The treble was OK but it sounded very musically disjointed and mechanical.
The Bakoon amplifiers sound wonderful with Tannoys.They have a highy detailed treble but it sounds very natural and pure.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top