Best vintage Tannoy for rock?

You are wrong there....you can get huge (more so), powerful (more so), and beautiful (more so) with modern Tannoys....you need the right ones. I can see someone feeling the tulip waveguide is not as beautiful, but the traditional type new Tannoys with the Alnico magnets and pepperpot waveguides will do all the old ones do, plus some. You'll pay more than for the old ones to get those advantages, so that is a negative. But they are still reasonable in price compared to what passes for state of the art in modern speakers.....and most are nothing near the performance.

Now this is what audio is for! Music! Leave it to a Tannoy guy to start that enthusiasm. That's what they (and some other, but few) are about: music.

What Douger said.....they will crank it out on rock.

Supertweeter use is not unanimous. Many folks like the older style (including new Prestige line speakers) without.

I don't think we disagree much, Dan, I have used old Tannoys too, and know they can be great. I said "plus some" since the new ones will play louder for a longer period but I did not say that was a huge matter.

Perhaps you interpreted my indicating new Tannoys will crank to mean that older ones won't. I was addressing the OP who indicated the new ones won't do what they old ones do. They will....if you pick the right ones. Westminster Royal SE and Canterburys are two of the right ones.

No disparagement of your older Tannoys....trust that! Few new speakers can do what they do. We could argue that almost no new speakers do what they do!

RIP Arthur, we knew each other pretty well and I liked him very much. You are lucky to have some of his work.

Why don't they get respect? Well, I'll flip the question: have you seen any other speaker that can go on for a long thread and not have any real haters out there, but many lovers?

Maybe by respect you mean in the current high end scene of North America and the magazines. I'll answer why there is not constant talk there:

1. No big advertising in high end journals.

2. Not some new company claiming to have reinvented physics, claiming to have a genius designer the likes of which audio has never seen.

3. Not claiming to have INVENTED something new.

4. No crazy made up physics stories, the market loves those science and physics defying stories more than real physics and science. The reviewers buy into the made up stuff and the consumers do. Fiction is much more fun than reality to the average layman.

5. Old company so no chance a reviewer can act as if he "discovered" them,and no consumer can feel like he is a pioneer among consumers that discovered the secret nobody else knows about.

6. The forced death of horn speakers in America by influential revisers in the 80's: you know the mantra, "horns don't image, horns are bright, horns quack, horns honk". We in this thread know that this is as ridiculous as saying "I have heard Thiels, they are too bright, so all cone speakers are bright". But nobody ever accused the public or the high end audiophiles in particular as being particularly logical or not being gullible.

The above certainly is not a conclusive list, but it's a start.

Dan, nice post, and nice sign off (Yours in the love of music and Tannoy). Yes, we are on the same page.

One thing about Tannoy guys: they are so often about the music. After all, they can't be about prestige as the gear is not raved in the mags. They can't be about conformance, as they are not the current hot thing (which means nothing about sound....in fact, how hot something is might be inversely proportional to how much like music it sounds!).

And sure a bunch of us have conversed, and a bunch of us forget that! You are not alone, with so many e-mails, forums, etc. these days who could remember all the contacts?You are not losing it!