Tannoy Speakers & Bi-wiring

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.

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.

Mulveling, the most fundamental rule of biwiring of passive speaker is to use the same wire for all the drivers, else the drivers will not be time aligned. Please read this:
http://www.vandersteen.com/pages/Answr7.htm

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.

Arj, as far as I know, the Tannoy Prestige internal wiring is Acrolink for Kensington and above and it is Van den hul silver cable for Turnberry and below.