Amp pairing with Tannoy Turnberry?


Hi all!

Going to be picking up a pair of Tannoy Turnberry speakers in the near future, and was looking at some various options for integrated amplifiers. There are a couple on my radar and was wondering if anyone who owns the speakers has any insight. 

1. Primaluna EVO 300 or 400 - torn on whether the extra $ warrants going for the 400 over the 300. I had a Primaluna + Tannoy pairing some years ago and loved it, so immediately thought of this one.

2. NAT audio single HPS v2 - this is at the very top end of what I could consider budget wise. I have heard this amp, but not with the tannoys. It sounds incredible to me, but I'm not sure if it would play nice with the Turnberry speakers and don't have the ability to test one at home. 

From what I've hard of the NAT, I'm thinking it may be the better option, but maybe there is a better solid state in the price range I'm looking at. Ideally, I'd like to stay in the 5-6k range, but willing to stretch a little bit more for something I will be happy with for the forseeable future. 

Thanks for any insight.

mmcgill829

Showing 1 response by atmasphere

@mmcgill829 We have a number of customers using Tannoy loudspeakers. From what they report, its apparent that you benefit from more power on that speaker- 60 Watts being a good minimum, unless you have a smaller room! One of our Tannoy customers has run both our tube amps and our class D amp on his Westminsters and reported good results with both, so apparently the speaker is friendly to both tubes and solid state as long as the solid state amp does not exhibit harshness.

Due to the efficiency of your speakers, unless you have a smaller room I would avoid SETs in particular. If you do get talked into one, here's something that you should know: To really hear the SET at its best, the speaker should have enough efficiency to avoid using more than about 20% of full power of the amp. Above that power level the higher ordered harmonics show up on transients, causing the amp to sound 'dynamic'. But its really distortion masquerading as such due to how the higher orders interact with the human ear. Dynamics should only come from the signal and not the amp! Larger SETs also make less bandwidth entirely on account of the output transformer; its very difficult to make an output transformer for an SET that has 'hifi' bandwidth and handles more than about 7 Watts!