Tannoy Speakers & Bi-wiring

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.

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.

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.