Amplifier for Tannoy Turnberry GR

S1nn3r - Those are some nice looking amps. Have you tried other Manleys with your Kensingtons?

Mmarshall,

I just got my Manley Neo-Classic 300B preamp and 2 Chinook for my MM and MC cartridge. Will put them together as soon as I'm able.

Pani wrote "...had a McIntosh C275 for demo at home and I
realized that these speakers sound so clean and dynamic
that any amount of power can be consumed unknowingly."

Pani - can you give me your impression on the MC275 you demoed? I stopped into a dealer yesterday and had a chat with a salesman. He suggested that the MC275 would be a great match with my Turnberrys and even offered me a very good deal on a brand new unit. I am very tempted to snap it up. He thought this amp would be a much better match with my speakers vs the MC452.

I have ruled out the Wyetech Onyx but I still have the Wyetech Topaz on the list. The MC275 looks intriguing.

Some time ago I heard Tannoy Prestige line speakers using Octave tube amps. The combo sounded very good. I like Octvae tube amps. Many tube amps sound overly warm or lush Octave doesn't while still giving that tube "magic".

I have heard the Topaz, although not with any Tannoy speakers, and it is a very good amp. The Kensington I heard were fairly easy to drive; they worked well with amps that were rated at 15 watts to about 50 watts that I heard coupled to the speaker. Based on what I heard with the Kensington, I would look for something with a that would not be excessively hard or brittle sounding at the higher end of the midrange. That means I would pay attention to how it works with solid state and some of the higher-powered tube gear that have a tendency to sound "hard" in the same range.

I have heard the MC275 on efficient speakers not too long ago and the particular setup sounded terrible--muddled and lifeless. A short while later I saw an episode of "How it is Made" that featured the construction of the amp, and frankly it was shocking. I would never buy anything built like this. All of the input connections and the connections to the speaker terminals are made by a press-fit printed circuit board, meaning that even the output to the speakers is being carried by a mere board traces, and no connections are soldered. The winding of the output transformers was done on a machine that appears to do four or five transformers in a matter of seconds--so much for the handwound, interleaved, and carefully insulated transformers that made McIntosh amps something special.