Tannoy Everyone?! with Leben CS600 or Pass XA25/30.5?

@pehare I'm interested to hear your observations after the amp is broken in.

Not all amplifiers are created equal...take a listen to the Sophia Electric. They never ran out of gas for me in a large room and you gain the midrange...huge. 

The Alnico and Pepperpot may be the way to go with Tannoys, but the size of both the speakers and the price make them a no go for me, too, @audioguy85 . That said, the Stirlings are strutting their stuff after an extensive and painful break-in. The metal tweeters can still rule the high end roost crying out for too much attention from time to time, but those times are fewer and further between as time goes on. 

@waltersalas The Plinius SA201 was also part of my favorite past system with pretty much any preamp - Ayre K1xp, Cary 98P, AES DJH AE3, Klyne 7lx4.0p and Dynaudio Confindence 3's. I love the Plinius sound (and what a match with Dynaudio!!) - big, deep, rich, detailed, dynamic with subtleties revealed, just warm enough with velvet glove/iron fist control and plenty of power to lope along with ease. The Pass XA25 lasted less than a week here feeling dark, wooly, lacking in dynamics and generally boring - at least in this system. Happily, they're popular, seem to work well elsewhere and it was a quick and easy sale.

The Syrah is wonderfully rich and engaging even if it's a little quirky with a hum to start that fades relatively quickly, gain that's hard to match (but has easy on the fly adjustments),  a high pass switch that you better remember to turn off your amp before you switch to engage it(!), and tubes that are sort of a pain in the ass to source. BUT in the end, worth every bit of it. @jslateiv really got it in beautiful sounding condition, updating old cap caps, connections, etc.

With all that in mind, what has really brought it home are the Dynamic Design cables - especially the TBK Nebula IC's and SC's . Such presence, nuance, detail, imaging, but the word that most appears in my thoughts is "clean" but that's hardly complete - thoughts aren't expressed in the right language somehow. The absence of things is as integral to their prowess as what's proffered. No distraction of distortion, or even a hint of a peep of sound in-between images is closer and with the most beautifully wrought staging and dense, articulate, delineated, yet rounded images. They reall are wonderful and for the first time in decades of this hobby, I have a full loom of one company and couldn't be more satisfied and overjoyed eveh!

A decription of what I experience rather than hear gets much closer to what I want to convey. Dynamic Design is so captivatingly natural sounding. Their nuance is a deceptive part of their invitation, especially these TBK nebulae (the Heritage AE15 and Titania, too, though)  - an invitation to turn away from studying and just delight in the journey.

I'm finally (and once again) transported to a fully involved purely musical state without noticing or caring about any deficit - listening to the music and not the equipment (finally, reprise). I really haven't listened for detail, or been driven to, in most of my reference tracks because I'm so swept away by the PRaT and presence. A gentle giant.

Anyway, for me, the most important aspect to achieve has been 'musicality', whatever that ineffable quality is for each listener, and I've always said I'll trade detail and (over)articulation for that any time. And these DD help provide exactly that experience in spades.

As a card carrying member of this club and it's dis-ease, that feeling is fleeting and now I noticed an odd vertical collapse of my soundstage but 40% or so - it's happened before and a tube going wonky has generally been the culprit, so the search is on! My AMR is on deck and I need a spare set of 6SN7's to switch out on the Syrah...

But I digress....

@budburma those Sterlings are no slouch, I'm certain they sound wonderful! My Eatons are good enough for me, huge standmounters...like you, the larger much more expensive Tannoys are way over my budget, and I cannot fit them in my room...so I'm content with the Eatons for now. 

This business about the best Tannoys being the ones with the alnico magnets and pepper pot tweeters often gets mentioned, but is it really true?

When I compared my 1970s Berkeley’s (alnico/ pepper pot) with their predecessors in my system, the slim floorstanding Revolution 3s from around 2003, I found them to be remarkably similar in sound despite being entirely different in size and design.

The main sonic differences I detected were the size of scale and the sheer ease of the sound. In the end, it’s this sheer ease of sound that’s most pleasing to me.

A good analogy might be to say it’s like comparing a family Toyota with a Lexus.