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Speakers and speaker design for organ-friendly hifi

Started by David Pinnegar, May 04, 2011, 04:36:38 AM

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David Pinnegar

Quotethe DC2000s are on mounts to speak near the top of the case (which sound maybe a bit distant from the console but quite realistic, and absolutely awesome from the centre of the room).

. . . .

So a really big thanks for the Tannoy recommendation - they are absolutely superb even if in your library the XXX blows them away.

Hi!

There's another pair of DC2000s near you  . . . http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tannoy-DC-2000-Speakers-/280802830602

Best wishes

David P

Contrabombarde

Ouch I can't believe I missed seeing those! I have to say, since starting the whole Hauptwerk melarky, the Tannoy DC2000 speakers I picked up for the cost of a couple of tanks of petrol are totally epic. I gather the latest 8 inch dual concentric Tannoy speakers of similar size retail for around 4 grand, but the price of the old 1980s Tannoy DCs on Ebay has started to climb, maybe David has begun a trend!

I opted for a pair of modest bookshelf speakers for my rear surround on the grounds that I didn't need anything so clear or loud as the front speakers. But the Tannoys absolutely shame the competition. Hopefully I'll find a smaller Tannoy dual concentric bookshelf speaker to replace them in due course - I suspect that suspending two more large floorstanding speakers high up in the corner of the room would raise eyebrows, notwithstanding that hidden in the case of my Hauptwerk organ I've already mounted two DC2000 just shy of the ceiling.

I'm playing them through an equally antique Yamaha TAN55ES amplifier which I'm assured is a classic in its own right, and a sub that goes down to 18 Hz for the big stuff. Absolutely incredible sound. Now I just need to figure out how to tame the bass stops and get around the various nodes that the room displays at certain notes.

David Pinnegar

Hi!

Glad my recommendation there turned up trumps. The competion to the DC 2000s are the 611s which are more exciting on trumpets, so one pair of 2000s and another pair of 611s might be all you need.

However there is a difference for home reproduction and performance presentation. For home reproduction the pretty good flatness of the 2000s scores greatly together with a general liveliness. For instrument provision in large spaces other approaches are appropriate.

Yesterday I visited a friend with a chamber style brand electronic instrument in a domestic room and speakers at the rear and the experience was significantly satisfactory. Such arrangements do make very good prectice instruments.

Best wishes

David P


AnOrganCornucopia

What would these Tannoy speakers be like for reproducing organic and orchestral sounds in conjunction with a hi-fi stack in a typical Edwardian semi-detached house's front parlour?

Contrabombarde

I live in a Victorian terraced house so keep volume low. The Tannoys don't reproduce the organ they deceive you into thinking it's there in front of you. And vocals if blindfolded you'd not know it was a recording!

David Pinnegar

Oh dear!

We won't be able to buy Tannoy DC2000 speakers for love nor money now!

However, there is a difference between speakers flat in the frequency domain, and in this regard the Tannoys compare well with Manger speakers for flat reliability for monitoring purposes, and speakers accurate in the time domain. This becomes important with orchestral percussion as well as gutteral syllables of singers where, with poorly designed speakers the woofer cone will have a different momentum and acceleration to the tweeter cone which in the worst, and this includes in particular certain well known brands of powered monitors, the syllable will be split into a click-tick or even thud-tick double sound which personally I find very annoying and unacceptable. The Tannoys are well designed and, whilst not being (quite) perfect, do a very good job for extraordinarily good value.

I have a theory that with many conventional speakers putting a crossover right in the area where the ear expects most detail, there is a confusion of sound in that critical area where the sound from one unit melds with the other. This is not sorted out by active crossovers as even if the crossover is sharp, the division of a whole sound made up of a spectrum of harmonics between multiple units as multiple sources gives confusion to the sound.

The effect of this is that in order for our ears to be given the sort of detail that we expect to receive, we have to turn the volume up in order to hear the inner detail of the sound at all.

For this reason expected volumes of reproduced music have increased and increased, as that has been the only way to add saccharine to the sugar, and we have listened less, and discerned less in the music.

Meanwhile the mechanically equal spacing that we have ascribed to notes in our musical instrument tuning for the past 130 years has removed yet another dimension and source of interest to the sound of our music, reducing the available numbers of permutations of patterns of sound by a whole dimension. This has the effect making it less worthwhile to listen more because there is less detail to discern.

When we combine the two effects of increasing volume and decreasing intrinsic interest, in its ultimate extrapolation we arrive at the sort of noise constructed by computers for robots to entertain humans as robots.

Best wishes

David P

HughG

This might be a bit late for this thread, but you might like to know that, following the high praise for the Tannoy DC2000's, I've just managed to win an eBay auction for a pair for £155. Now I need a suitable amplifier. I'll do some more research, but I'd appreciate any comments/recommendations.

At the moment, I am just using the St. Anne's organ. My setup is based round a Roland KF7 digital piano and I don't have room for a separate installation. So I've made a table for it, used the original stand to make an organ bench, and connected a separate 61 note keyboard as Swell, midified 32 note radiating pedals, Boehringer FCB101 for swell & crescendo pedals. It's all set up for easy extraction of the Roland when I need to use it elsewhere. The original intention was simply as a practice instrument, especially for pedals, listening through headphones. However, there's been so much interest from family and friends that I want to make it audible to more than one person at a time.

Hugh

David Pinnegar

Hi!

Welcome to the forum!

As this thread is about room acoustics,
http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,836.msg6238/topicseen.html#msg6238 may be of more general interest than specifically in the Lancaster Priory thread.

For amps . . . oh dear, it's going to be the end of me ever being able to buy any more affordably ever again, I like the Technics SU series of the sort with power meters. This is a really great way to monitor the number of multiple outputs one might have on an electronic organ as one can see on the meters whether a signal is at the amp and not getting through to a speaker or whether the signal is not getting through to the amp.

In the past, I have succeeded in picking them up for not much more than £20 plus postage a time - so it's a good idea to bid not much more than that and wait for one to drop your way rather than simply to bid ever higher and higher. Some of these amps are "New Class A" and some of the speakers I use work really deafeningly on only 1/2 to 1 watt . . . in which Class A operation at low output gives a beautiful clarity.

With the DC2000s I guess you might be using 5 watts a lot of the time . . . From memory I think they are around 90-92dB per watt efficient?

If you want a slightly more exciting sound on trumpets, then the Tannoy 911s have an edge. For the Tuba stop on the Makin part of the Hammerwood instrument, I use a dedicated pair of DC2000s, of which one has a specially treated cone, and in parallel with another unit of a different make using a high flux magnet and lightweight paper cone. The sound is both spacious and realistic.

Best wishes

David P

HughG

Hi, David,

Thanks for your useful comments.

Best wishes,

Hugh