Tannoy anyone? Cheviot Legacy vs. Stirling GR

@budburma

That does NOT sound like my experience at all with new Tannoys. Sure, they can sound better with burn in but they shouldn’t sound anywhere near bad at hour 0. Burn-in isn’t going to fix that. I would NOT be a happy camper in your shoes.

It’s definitely worth opening them up and checking all connections (i.e. carefully remove the front drivers and then binding post plates). The internal speaker wires are not soldered to the drivers nor binding posts. They are connected to terminal posts via cheap little slide clips. I’ve even seen those come off from shipping. I’ve had one come off from loud bass playback in my Canterbury GR. If a driver or drivers(s) is no longer connected because of this, it will very clearly sound "broken" (maybe a disconnected woofer in your case). 

At least feel the surrounds for vibration during playback to make sure neither woofer is "cold"! 

@budburma

Hoping it turns out well for you! I’d suspected maybe they were still selling though Scotland-made stock for a while after the factory closing. Thanks for that confirmation.

Thought I’d add some pics from when I had my R speaker’s woofer become internally disconnected. This happened only 5 months into ownership. You can see two black wires to the woofer (light brown and blue bands), and 2 in the back to the tweeter (yellow and green bands). The thicker yellow wire is the optional ground connection. And the little gold slide clips instead of soldered connections - when one of these (other than ground) comes off, it’s gonna sound real bad (as pictured, they are properly connected)! Nothing’s come disconnected since then (4 more years in), so maybe it had been barely hanging on from shipment?

The 3rd pic is from me tightening up a binding post on the L speaker. Same little slide clips on this side too. Same deal, if one comes off it’s gonna sound bad.

@budburma

I’d definitely have them checked over by a tech before giving up on them (check internal wiring and each driver for continuity and DC resistance, etc). They’re too nice and expensive to not sound wonderful after 100 hours, or really even from hour #1. I still suspect this is much more likely to be internal issue and has nothing to do with supposed burn-in requirements.

Sorry you’re having such a bad experience so far :(

My experience, going through a lot of audio gear: Companies make production mistakes all the time. Sellers of used gear sometimes either "miss" things wrong with it, or try to pass the buck. And stuff happens in shipping! I think the "burn in" panacea is bandied about a lot of times when the gear really needs to be checked out for operational health. Your brain can adapt to a skewed sonic balance over time, but only so much!! I once had a tube headphone amp fixed by a guy who erroneously put small bypass caps IN SERIES with the big output caps. It sounded like sh**t and his brilliant response was "those big caps take a LONG time to burn in!". At that point I opened it up, and even with only the most minimal circuit knowledge, this doofus’s mistake was clear as day. The classic roll-off formula indicated that with the values involved, the bypass cap was acting like a high pass filter starting at 1kHz! NO bass and very little midrange. Went to another tech who got that (among other things) right.

In all my history there is ONE TIME I can remember a piece of gear that sounded mediocre out of the box and then improved wildly after ~300 hours. It was a set of Audio Technica L3000 "Leatherhead" headphones. It didn’t sound broken out of the box either - just not inspiring like it eventually did. That’s the only time something has changed enough from burn-in to completely reform my opinion of it. And I DID have an older burned-in one to compare. I think they did something weird with those L3000 drivers - that model sounded way different than any other AT headphone of that time period.