Man, sounds like you REALLY hate Tannoy.
Seriously? Go back and read the thread because it's clear you haven't read much of what I have written beyond that last post, which was really more about being annoyed at obsolete and outclassed technology being recycled by cynical marketers as fancy elite luxury shit than anything else. Sell the weakness, I guess.
But am I disappointed at Tannoy's current direction? Sure. I would love to see a couple lines of thoughtfully engineered Dual Concentric based home audio speakers from Tannoy. Also, I'm curious about their new CI line. Some of them look like they were designed with immersive in mind, with angled baffles holding the Dual Concentric driver instead of dumbly firing everything straight down. I have no idea if the execution matches the insight, though.
The Autograph Mini is a relatively “new” design and seems to be a reasonable design with “British voicing”
Autograph Mini is fine for what it is: It's a small speaker designed above all to be pretty. A desktop system with McIntosh MHA150 integrated driving Tannoy Autograph Minis would be hard to beat for desktop audio style points. But yes it is more "voiced" than their better-sounding contemporary Revolution DC4 that used IIRC the same Dual Concentric driver. (The Arena eggs may have used the same motor/cone/coil as well, and the tweeter had the same p/n. However, the Dual Concentric's midwoofer section as a whole was clearly a different part - the egg's baffle and the drive unit's basket were one casting.)
Also, Autograph Mini a lot older than you're making it out to be. I heard them before the Bush global economic crash, so maybe 2006-2007?
(As an aside, one of my audio projects is to hot-rod a pair of
DC4T's - some of the smallest tower speakers I've ever seen - into a hybrid passive/active speaker with better drivers. With a pair of small subs I think they'll be fun in a small room. As it happens the
5" Satori Textreme midwoofer is the same bolt circle as the stock drivers and the flange thickness is the same as the original driver + trim ring, so that was a no-brainer. I also sourced a set of the Revolution XT Mini's Omnimagnet drivers from Speaker Exchange. I think at that size Omnimagnet is better than Tulip - more even and wider treble dispersion due the shallower waveguide.)
Maybe the FR irregularities disappear in room? I would certainly like to see more in room measurements of these Tannoy’s. My comments in the Dynaudio thread apply:
Haven't you learned by now that PIR and "in-room response" are way overrated as indicators of sound quality? If the direct sound is colored a certain way in the statistical region, the perceived timbre will take on that coloration. You can easily hear this by seeking out a speaker with a near-perfect PIR but a large dispersion disruption at the crossover, such as
SVS Ultra. The pretty PIR does not save them!
FWIW,
@Dennis Murphy measured
Westminster Royals a while ago. I don't know if there have been changes to the speaker since then.
I'm sure the Westminsters were big and imposing and impressive and whatever. I remember having a similar experience with one big, imposing, and impressive speaker (and the most expensive speaker I had heard to date by some margin) as a kid, EggelstonWorks Andra. (Tannoy Westminster is probably a better speaker than that one.) As it happens, a second audition which had contemporary Tannoys (D500 or D700, I don't remember except that they was much smaller than the Andra and also well above my budget at the time) in the same room exposed the Andras as an empty suit.
If you want to pick up a Tannoy to play with, I would suggest looking for one of the 10" or 12" Dual Concentric models. None of the 15s, even the massive 15 DMT II midfield monitor, ever did anything for me. I'm sure this next statement will read as heresy in some circles, but the poly cones ones are IMO also better than the paper cone ones. If you want wider dispersion the 8" Omnimagnet driver is probably the one to try. IIRC they never did an Omnimagnet model bigger than 8". The big disadvantage with Tulip Dual Concentrics is ferrofluid cooled tweeters. It's invariably dried up by now so that's a project.
