Tannoy Speakers & Bi-wiring

Red I bet you would hear even a bigger improvement with the Zero-Autotransformer used with the Atmasphere amps. I know I did using my M60's with some Acoustic Zen Crescendos.

(Dealer dislaimer)

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.