Tannoy Speakers & Bi-wiring
You'll find many different opinions on bi-wire, but I do believe it is best to do a true bi-wire, this is what Vandersteen recommends, which is 2 separate runs of identical cable. IMHO, I would agree with Stereo5 and use Audience Au24 jumpers to replace the brass ones. I tried bi-wire with different speakers and different cables, and it always seem to lose coherence compared to single wire with matching jumpers. This article seems to explain why, http://www.sonicdesign.se/biwire.html |
I have played around with Biwiring with my earlier ATC and my present Tannoy Turnberry SE. With ATC, biwiring has a tremendous effect on the positive side, no negatives at all. With Tannoy however I prefer single wired sound. It is tighter and more coherent with single wiring. Biwiring makes it sound less grounded and more hifi overall. Go for a high quality speaker cable and Tannoy's own jumpers which they supply for the Canterburry. |
Kiddman, The amps are M-60's v 3.1. I find the bass in my room great, full and articulate. Previously I had Merlin speakers and when I whet from Quicksilver V-4's to the Atma-sphere's, I think it really brought out the bass more. Of course with the Tannoys, and the much larger driver, all the more. The Merlin's were really quick though. |
from the TANNOY website Q: Bi-Wiring- the how and whys? A: The majority of our residential loudspeakers have two sets of speaker terminals, one for the bass (LF) and one for the treble (HF). These are normally joined by links, and a single cable run is used to the amplifier. However by removing these links, and using two sets of cable or a special bi-wire cable, the LF and HF are only connected together at the amplifier. Even the best cables suffer from losses due to their electrical resistance, inductance and capacitance, and so bi-wiring avoids interaction between the LF and delicate HF parts of the signal. This gives better clarity, detail and an improved soundstage. Your Instruction Manual will detail how to prepare your loudspeakers for bi-wiring, and your dealer will be able to advise on suitable cable choices for a given budget. For further information, please refer to our White Paper (2) I have the TANNOY DC6s in my "B" syaytem: bi-wiring is step up from third party jumpers (ATLAS) and and bigger step up from the brassplate supplied jumpers (3) TANNOYS are generally internally wired with VAN DEN HUL. VDH even made a specail "Tannoy" branded version a short while back. I wiould suggest that you start there Me, I am using ATLAS HYPER 3's bi-wired with stellar results. Again, the better the speaker, the better cable required to priduce the desured results. |
fwiw when using a single run of wire with jumpers there are 3 (actually 4) ways to hook them up. 1) speaker wire to woofer and jumpers to tweeter 2) speaker wire to tweeter and jumpers to woofer 3) one speaker wire to - woofer and one to + tweeter (or vise versa) and jumpers between them like normal. Bob Neill from Amhearst Audio recommends the 3rd option and I found it to be the best choice because it eliminates (for the most part) favoring one of the drivers over the other which I found happens when using the normal jumper hookup method. I hope I made myself clear and there are no mishaps because of miscommunication. |
Pani, what wire are you using to bi-wire the Tannoys? I have used quite a few. When I was using Naim amplification I used the NAC A5. Now I am using wavac valve amplification so I have tried speaker cables from Harmonix, ASI Liveline, Chord. The thing is, with Tannoy, while biwiring makes everything sound very airy and open, the feeling intimacy and tight coherence is lost in the process. The speakers disappear more readily when biwired, but that feels more like a special effect because music becomes too distant. It is just my observation with Tannoys. As, I said before, with ATC biwire is a must. |
I have Canterbury SE, and bi-wire with Audioquest Mont Blanc low and KE-4 high. I really want to think cables are BS, but there is a modest improvement in resolution, clarity, and extension by running this bi-wire config vs. either cable alone (the jumpers used are either nice Acrolink or VdH; not junk). It's not a huge improvement, but I always end up going back to it, otherwise I'd happily sell either cable for their used market value. That said, the retail value of comparable current cables is ludicrous. For anything near their the current retail prices, that money would be WAY better off invested anywhere else (e.g. phono stage, amp, vintage tubes, etc). For the prices I paid for these used cables a few years ago, they're a reasonable addition to my system. |
Pani, that page does little to convince me of such a fundamental rule. There can be no impact on time alignment, even with cables of slightly differing lengths -- electronic signals are orders of magnitude faster than sound waves. My Tannoys are not actually time aligned, anyways. Barring electrical mismatch, I'm skeptical there can be much impact on coherence -- if there was, then I'd have gone back to a single run. It's quite coherent sounding, as to be expected of a Tannoy. Next, look at the crossover adjustments on these Tannoys: you can modify 1.1kHz tweeter shelving, which I've had sound excellent in either 0.0 or +1.5dB positions. That's MUCH larger than the differences between any 2 reasonable cables. Yet the tweeter and woofer can still blend seamlessly in either configuration, as long as it's the right choice for the overall system balance. And then the tweeter/woofer drivers themselves couldn't possibly be more different (2" metal dome compression driver; 15" paper woofer), and yet they too blend beautifully. Again, these differences are far greater than those between cables, yet they don't preclude excellent coherence. |
Tannoy prestige internal wiring is a combination of Oyaide (OHNO) and high purity silver for the crossovers I would think getting the default jumper cables from Tannoy (i believe Oyaide) would be ideal. I would love to try out a Biwire some day..but so far have stretched my budget to get a single wire..and would prefer a high quality single wire to lower quality Biwires . |
Mulveling, I only tried to suggest you that you may want to avoid using different cable for biwiring because there is a reason. I am surprised that: 1. You say that your Tannoy is not time aligned. Its dual concentric driver is considered one of the best out there because they sound like a point source, due to their excellent time alignment. 2. You pointed out about the cross-over adjustment that Tannoy provides. You are confusing between frequency domain and time domain issues. Changing the crossover point on your Tannoy boosts some of the HF frequencies still keeps the time alignment intact because they are compensated accordingly in the crossover design by maintaining a smooth overlapping region. That plot is lost when you feed different sonic pattern to each driver (due to different wires) and expect the crossover to still keep a smooth overlap. I have heard it very clearly when I tried it on my tri-wireable ATC speakers. Even though I heard tremendous clarity in individual segments, the speaker did not sound like one driver if I used different wires. |
Hi Pani, The Tannoy dual-concentric really is not time aligned. The compression driver diaphragm is about 6 inches behind the woofer's acoustic center. However, Tannoys are phase coherent at the crossover point, thanks to the following slick hack: that 6 inches is equivalent to 180 degrees of phase at the crossover point frequency of 1.1kHz -- hence the tweeter's wiring polarity is simply reversed to yield phase coherence at that point. A while back Tannoy gave in to market demands and introduced a compensation network to electrically time align the dual-concentric driver. However, apparently the cure was far worse than the disease...it was very short lived and never surfaced again. I also read somewhere (I forget where; not much value without a citation, unfortunately) there was a study that concluded there was audible improvement for a speaker to be either time aligned or phase coherent, but that having both of them together didn't seem to further the improvement. Anyways, looking at 6inches divided by 340 meters/sec (the speed of sound) is going to vastly exceed the time mis-alignment effect of any cable discrepancies divided by 200 million meters/sec (about two thirds the speed of light, i.e. signal propagation in cables)...by several orders of magnitude. That said, I wouldn't turn down a chance to try identical cable top & bottom, but I'm not going to make any purchases to do so. The mixed run sounds better than single run of either, and that's good enough for me. |
I have also read the internal wiring on the Canterbury SE is Acrolink. I am using Auditorium 23 speaker cables with my Canterbury SE & like the combination very much with my 300B amps. Auditorium 23 is designed for high efficiency speakers, you can find many good reviews. Can't really comment on the bi-wire question of OP as I have not tried this yet. However I would strongly suggest trying the grounding cable option offered, if not done yet, as this yields noticeable reduction in hash picked up; makes the sound smoother & cleaner. |
Just got a new pair of Stirling GR's and am running the Tannoy provided jumpers and am wondering what the consensus is These days on bi-wiring or not? I can send my JPS Superconductor V single WBT spades pair back to JPS and they'll bi-wire them for 300 or I can get JPS jumpers for 300 or should I just leave well enough alone and use the stock jumpers? These are fantastic speakers right out of the box, amazing! |
I've been bi-wiring my Canterbury for years (first SE, now GR), and yes I feel it's an improvement. Every time I drop the 2nd cable run and plug in those Acrolink jumpers I lose a bit , dynamics, and basic "jump factor". However I'll note that I've only tried biwiring with two separate cable runs versus a single run. I've not compared the same exact single cables, with one terminated for biwire versus another terminated single wire with jumpers - which would be like you having JPS reterminate your existing cables. Tannoy recommends biwiring in their manuals, but then their toe-in suggestion is kinda wack so take that with a grain of salt. Enjoy your awesome new GR speakers! |
Greetings from Zagreb, Croatia !!! |
