Prestige speakers use Dual Concentric cone speakers and are easily recognisable by their "vintage" design. Tannoy's image is particularly linked to studio monitors on the one hand and its Prestige range of home speakers on the other. "Dual Concentric" is a trademark although Tannoy is not the only speaker manufacturer to design coaxial speakers. Tannoy is notable for its 'Dual Concentric' speaker design, which places the tweeter behind the centre of the medium or bass driver. Identification being such because the company logo name was prominently shown on the speaker grills. It became a household name as a result of supplying PA systems to the armed forces during World War II, and to Butlins and Pontins holiday camps after the war. The brand was trademarked by 10 March 1932, on which date the Tulsemere Manufacturing Company formally registered as Guy R. The name Tannoy is a syllabic abbreviation of tantalum alloy, which was the material used in a type of electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. However, this was later corrected and in 2016 it was confirmed that Tannoy loudspeaker manufacturing would continue in Scotland, with a brand new manufacturing facility planned. Later on it was suggested that the Coatbridge facility would be closed and all related activities would be relocated to Manchester, England. In 2015 Tannoy was acquired by Music Group (company) along with TC Group which itself had acquired Tannoy in 2002. The company was founded by Guy Fountain in London, England as Tulsemere Manufacturing Company in 1926 and moved to Coatbridge, Scotland in the 1970s. Having said all that, KEF has not produced a single non uni-Q loudspeaker for decades and Andrew Jones, after KEF, went into ELAC where they produce their own vesion of the concept, receiving good reviews.Īnd during all that, the BBC LS3/5a remains a legend and B110 and T27 command high prices.Tannoy Ltd is a British manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems. But most people don't listen in ideal rooms, don't have room treatment and left/right hemispheres of the rooms are hardly symetrical, hence one can't really expect a great stereo image or even same frequency response coming from the left and right. In controlled measurements in an ideal room, the concentric drivers, well placed on a suitable enclosure, should prevail, by at least a tiny margin. There are so many compromises made in designing a loudspeaker that I doubt the single point source concept outweighs all the rest. Especially the aspects that affect external looks, seem to more follow a fashion trend or wife acceptance criteria rather than solid engineering findings. Allowing for the technical solutions that have become obsolete or superseded by others, I find that many or most manufacturers of loudspeakers don't really use all of that expertise in their products. There has been a lot of research and a lot of expertise has been gathered over the past several decades. Problems including diffraction and directivity maladies due to the mid range surround affecting the tweeter's low end response made them introduce the uni-q in the entry level models rather than the reference. The midrange as well had to use a stronger magnet as it lost the core material.Īccording to KEF as well, it took them several generations to make coaxials sound good.
#Tannoy dual concentric speaker drivers#
If they had a sales organization as effective as Bose or Klipsch, in older times until now- we'd likely see Tannoys all over the place, IMHO.Īccording to KEF, concentric drivers were not viable until neodymium became available as magnet material, offering strong but tiny magnets for the tweeter that needs to be tiny to fit within the midrange's voice coil area.
It's just that, IME, the fact that Tannoy can't market or distribute their way out of the proverbial paper bag- that is why they're not any more popular than they are. That said- IMHO- Tannoys from the 1990s and newer (from the time of the Churchill Wideband and beyond)- they have seemed to consistently get everything pretty much right. And even there, there's some "quirks" about them (primarily small response deviations from flat response), that can make them not match what some people want to hear. Tannoy, IMHO, is about the only people who have reliably "gotten it right". Many fail the second (forcing the woofer to go too high in frequency, and/or rolling off in the top octave badly, which can result in harsh and/or dull soud), and even more fail the third (the tweeter gives up when asked to provide life-like transients). Dual concentrics are harder to do well than other designs- primarily, due to the difficulty of building a concentric tweeter that will simultaneously fit, cover the needed frequency range (from below 1KHz to above 20KHz, ideally), and handle the dynamics and max output level correctly.
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