Tannoy Speakers & Bi-wiring

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.

I have also read the internal wiring on the Canterbury SE is Acrolink. I am using Auditorium 23 speaker cables with my Canterbury SE & like the combination very much with my 300B amps. Auditorium 23 is designed for high efficiency speakers, you can find many good reviews. Can't really comment on the bi-wire question of OP as I have not tried this yet. However I would strongly suggest trying the grounding cable option offered, if not done yet, as this yields noticeable reduction in hash picked up; makes the sound smoother & cleaner.