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Tannoy Definition DC10 Ti

Tannoy Definition DC10 Ti

If you read a lot of audio equipment reviews (who, me?), you’re aware that it’s de rigueur to note that: (a) the Scottish manufacturer Tannoy Ltd has been in business for a long time (since 1926); and (b) the word “tannoy” has been used in common parlance throughout the UK and elsewhere as a term equivalent to loudspeaker or, especially, public address system. At least in Dundee, Dover, Dublin, or Delhi, tannoy is a household name. That said, I wouldn’t recommend putting a couple of drivers in a box and marketing it as a “tannoy”—you’ll most certainly hear from the intellectual property department of the Coatbridge-based company. Well, the $9998 DC10 Ti, the next-to-the-top-of-the-line model in the Definition Series, is very much a Tannoy with a capital “T,” embodying the engineering experience and values that derive from 90 years of building loudspeakers for both railway platforms and domestic home environments.

Tannoy’s Revolution XT 8F, at $2600 a pair, got very high marks from both Dick Olsher and Robert Harley in reviews last year, plus positive mentions from Jonathan Valin and Julie Mullins in their Munich High End Show reports. It was designated a TAS 2015 Product of the Year at the “Affordable” level in the floorstanding loudspeaker category.

At twice the mass and roughly four times the price, the Definition DC10 Ti is aiming for a considerably higher level of performance. Unlike the trapezoidal form of the XT 8F, the cabinet of the DC10 Ti (and other models in the Definition range) is curved, which, in addition to aesthetic considerations, results in a more rigid enclosure. While the XT 8F is “hand finished with real wood veneers,” the DC10 Ti is constructed with high-grade birch plywood, and a proprietary methodology grandly called Differential Material Technology is employed to attach the drivers to the enclosure. The speaker sits on a substantial plinth, wider in front than behind, that’s equipped with an ingenious system of top-adjusted spikes with locking thumbscrews. As a result, leveling these babies is a breeze.

A consistent design feature of Tannoy loudspeakers for six decades has been the coaxial driver—they call it “Dual Concentric”—with the tweeter (in this case a 1″ titanium dome with a Tulip WaveGuide) positioned at the center of a mid/bass cone (a 10″ treated-paper driver with a fabric surround). A second 10″ bass cone is positioned below the Dual Concentric driver. Tannoy, of course, is not the only speaker manufacturer to use a concentric/coaxial design, but it has been quite persistent in this approach, steadily refining its implementation over many years. The point-source behavior of the Dual Concentric driver has contributed to Tannoy loudspeakers’ popularity in recording studios. Compared with the drivers in the Revolution Series speakers, the Definitions have a more robust magnet system, and the chassis are cast aluminum rather than plastic. The specifications for all the loudspeakers in the Definition Series list a -6dB high-frequency response of 35kHz, a manifestation of Tannoy’s Wideband Technology. Tannoy doesn’t have much to say about what Wideband Technology is but notes that extending high-frequency response to a range where only your Cocker Spaniel can hear it has a beneficial effect on “time and phase response within the bandwidth of normal human hearing.”


Tannoy Definition DC10 Ti

The tweeter and mid/bass driver are crossed over at 1.4kHz using a second-order low-pass/first-order high-pass filter; the crossover point for the Dual Concentric cone and the bass driver is 200Hz. To improve conductivity, the crossover assemblies have been cryogenically treated—“super-cooled” to –190ºC and brought back to room temperature in a controlled fashion. This process is said to especially benefit the solder joints in the crossovers. The internal volume of the entire enclosure is 76 liters (2.68 cubic feet) There are two ports on the speaker’s rear surface that measure 3.5″ in diameter where they meet the outside world. Below the ports is a panel sporting two pairs of speaker terminals. The DC10 Tis are bi-wireable but arrive with very substantial link bars in place for using the speakers in single-wire mode. A nice ergonomic feature is that the binding posts, which happily accept banana plugs, are offset and angled outwards, which makes typical bulky audiophile cables easier to manage. On a less-user-friendly note, it’s not clear what tool to use to tighten down the terminal nuts, as finger-tightening is definitely not sufficient, especially with big spades and the link bars in place. A standard hexagonal nut driver won’t work. The nuts do have a knurled edge, so it’s possible to grab them with pliers. I also discovered that the center hole in the nut (where a banana plug would go) will snugly accommodate a 5mm flathead screwdriver blade and turn easily. There’s also a mysterious fifth binding post, a “ground” terminal that’s unique to Tannoy products. Using a shielded or “screened” speaker wire, each DC10 Ti can be hooked up to the earth connection on an amplifier. Why? Tannoy observes that there are elements in every speaker—the voice-coil windings, for example—that are susceptible to RFI. Frankly, this wasn’t a problem I knew I needed to solve. I didn’t try it, but if you’re hearing the BBC between cuts while listening, knock yourself out.

Unlike the XT 8F and other less expensive Tannoy products that are manufactured in China, the DC10 Ti is made in Scotland.

As was mentioned previously, there is another loudspeaker model “above” the DC10 Ti in the Definition line. The DC10A, which runs $16,000 a pair, has a single Dual Concentric driver with an aluminum-alloy tweeter and an Alnico magnet. A special cone material is employed, the enclosure is larger, and the speaker has a “phase-loading cavity” to facilitate adjustment of bass output. Tannoy insists that the DC10A is more suitable for European and Asian audiophiles who, because of the size and construction of their listening environments, typically require less “low-frequency energy” than bass-crazed North Americans. Given this assertion, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that, on the spec sheet at least, the DC10A’s -6dB low-frequency response point is actually a little lower than that of the DC10 Ti.

The DC10 Ti’s are available in three high-gloss finishes—black, cherry, and dark walnut. My review sample was the cherry option and was gorgeous to behold. The grilles are, acoustically, fairly transparent but the owners’ manual advises zealots to leave them off. (Hidden magnets keep the grille covers in place, so reinstalling them when company comes is quick and easy.)

In my 15′ by 15′ listening room—ceiling height varies from 11′ to 13’—the Tannoys replaced my usual Wilson Duette 2s, which are designed to work well close to room barriers. The recommendations for placement of the DC10 Ti’s are somewhat inconsistent: The owner’s manual suggests that the speaker be placed at least 0.5 meters from the front wall, whereas the instructions packaged with the supplied port bungs (more on those later) specify placement of at least one meter from that boundary. The Tannoys are quite sensitive to small changes in position and, for optimal spatiality and bass performance, a great deal of experimentation was required to find the best locations for them in my room. In the end, the front plane of each DC10 Ti was 9.5′ from the listening seat, toed in with their acoustic centers 8′ apart. The speakers were placed 26–27″ from the front wall, and the middle of the Dual Concentric drivers were a minimum of 3′ 4″ from the nearest sidewall. Ancillary equipment for this review included my usual Anthem D2v pre/pro, Pass XA 60.8 monoblock amplifiers, and recent-vintage Transparent Ultra interconnects and speaker cables. An Oppo 103 served as a transport for CDs/SACDs/DVD-As, and a Baetis Reference played digital files. DSP room correction by the Anthem was utilized, with some tweaking of right/left balance using an SPL meter. The Tannoys, presumably fresh from the factory, were run in for 100 hours before any critical listening was undertaken.

 

The DC10 Ti’s single most enticing sonic attribute is the coherence with which the speaker reproduces instrumental and vocal signatures. This has a great deal to do with the behavior of the point-source coaxial driver that assures that sounds produced by two very different transducers maintain their phase coherency above and below the crossover point. It’s particularly apparent with instruments with a wide usable range, where the relative contribution of fundamental and overtones varies across that range. A good example is the bassoon. This member of the woodwind choir has a range of fundamental pitches from approximately 60 to 1000Hz, all well within the range of the DC10 Ti’s mid/bass cone. But the harmonics the bassoon produces extend to well over 8kHz, the domain of the Tannoy’s titanium tweeter. Those harmonics are what give the bassoon its resonant flatulence at the bottom of its range (as heard, for example, with Grandfather’s theme in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf), its perky jocularity in the middle tessitura (as with the “Dragoon’s March” that begins Act 2 of Bizet’s Carmen), and the alto-sax-like cry of the very top (as in the introduction to Part I of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.) The Lyrical Bassoon, a 2L SACD or high-resolution download from HDtracks, offers an exceptionally well-played and well-recorded recital of works for bassoon and piano featuring Per Hannisdal, principal with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. The program includes pieces that exploit the full range of the instrument, and with the Tannoys you always felt as if you were hearing a single device with a continuously changing tonal character, as melodic lines rose and fell.

Another musical “instrument” with which a true point-source transducer can be expected to excel is the human voice, and the Definition DC10 Tis were truly extraordinary in this regard. All the nuances of the young jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant’s astounding technique were revealed, as were the plaintive inflections of Lyle Lovett’s every vocalization on his 1989 gem, Lyle Lovett and his Large Band. A classical voice type with which I’ve had a vexed relationship is the countertenor. Recordings from the 1950s and 60s are often smirk-inducing, but I’ve found that many—though not all—more recently trained practitioners bring a nobility and lyrical grace to the Baroque Era repertoire they specialize in. Why do some countertenors annoy while others amaze? I assembled a playlist of selections by ten singers, the goal being to understand why their sound did or did not appeal to me. The artists included David Daniels, Andreas Scholl, Drew Minter, Alfred Deller, James Bowman, Max Emanuel Cencic, Robin Blaze, Michael Chance, Lawrence Zazzo, and Bejun Mehta; the music ranged from Dowland to Vaughan Williams. There were clear winners and losers. The late Alfred Deller still had me thinking “female impersonator,” while my favorites—Zazzo, Scholl, and Blaze—moved me with the power and control of their singing. What the Tannoys taught me was that the artists I preferred had a seamlessness to their vocal production, a consistency of color and texture whether they were singing high or low, loudly or softly. The DC10 Ti could show me this because they themselves manifest a seamlessness throughout the relevant frequency range that is both revealing and enjoyable.

With careful positioning and leveling, imaging and soundstage representation was quite good, if not in the class of the best line-array and panel designs, or even some especially well executed two- and three-way speakers with dynamic drivers. The Tannoy’s sonic perspective is relaxed, with natural orchestral detail. The presentation was never etched, but also lacked the last word in transparency. Instrumental images were stable and the scaling of individual instruments was realistic—when the recording captured that sort of information. The DC10 Ti’s maintained intelligibility with the most complexly eventful music—an observation that sunk in listening to Steve Coleman’s recent jazz ensemble masterpiece, Synovial Joints.

 I can’t say if it’s Tannoy’s “Wideband Technology” that’s responsible, but the speaker’s treble is extended, sweet, and beautifully textured. Violins on the Tokyo String Quartet’s 2005 recording of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 7 in F major were non-fatiguing, convincingly reproducing the kind of overtone structure you’d hear close-up in life and the natural-sounding decay when a loud chord is followed by silence. And how about piccolo? It’s surprising how rounded, full, and harmonically rich this diminutive instrument can sound when expertly played. (Check out Lois Bliss Herbine’s performance of Philadelphia Portraits, a succinct five-movement work composed for the soloist by Cynthia Folio and included on a chamber music CD entitled Inverno Azul from BCM+D Records.)

Tannoy Definition DC10 Ti

The DC10 Ti’s bass performance, alas, was problematic. RH, DO, and JV all commented on excessive midbass energy in their write-ups of the XT 8F, and I hear the same phenomenon with this Tannoy. There was a tubbiness to the orchestral foundation of Classical Era symphonic music, and electric bass lines sounded slow, poorly articulated, and dissociated from the rest of the band. I played a number of my usual reference tracks for judging bass guitar sound—“Big Noise, New York” from Jennifer Warnes’ The Hunter, “Wrapped Around Your Finger” from Kevyn Lettau’s Songs of the Police, “Blues Beach” from Steely Dan’s Everything Must Go, and the title track off of Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band’s Act Your Age (which features the versatile bass virtuoso Nathan East as soloist). With all these superbly engineered selections, I heard significant overhang and a lack of tunefulness in bass lines. Robert improved things by inserting a rolled-up pair of socks into the 8F’s port and Dick tried some acoustic foam. Both reported that Tannoy would start shipping foam “bungs” with the speakers and, indeed, four were included with the review pair of DC10 Ti’s. These round, grey discs are 2.75″ in diameter and 2″ thick, and fit snugly in the ports. I tried using the bungs to block the upper ports, the lower ports, or both. The foam did help, but even with all four ports obstructed, the midbass bloat persisted. Overall bass output wasn’t really excessive—but electric bass lacked heft, lift, and a sense of the initial transient joining that of the kick-drum to give punch to well-recorded rock, pop, and electric jazz. With pipe organ music (Jean Guillou playing César Franck’s Pièce Héroïque, for example), there was plenty of low-frequency rumble when pedal notes energized the large space of St. Eustache in Paris but little in the way of pitch definition.

What might be considered a drastic intervention achieved a very consequential improvement. I added in my Wilson WATCH Dog subwoofer, employing the bass-management menu on the Anthem to roll off the Tannoys at 75Hz and run the sub up to that same value, 75Hz. Much more articulate, tuneful, and propulsive bass guitar was apparent and pedal stops on the Franck organ piece produced tones with identifiable pitches. With Mozart, instead of an overripe and diffuse bottom end, it was possible to resolve cellos and doublebasses playing an octave apart. Adding one set of foam bungs (to the upper ports) tightened the low end up a bit further, and that’s where I left things.

So, with the sub dialed in, I had a world-class loudspeaker system on my hands—though for reasons both philosophical and financial, I’m not sure how I feel about it. The subwoofer was not added as much for additional low-bass extension as it was to save the Definition TC10 Ti from itself—to correct the distracting midbass hump that I couldn’t eliminate with speaker placement, DSP room correction, or Tannoy’s port bungs. On the other hand, the DC10 Ti’s treble and midrange are so good that it may be well worth chopping off the speaker’s lowest octave-and-a-half and fixing the resultant deficiency with a sub. Maybe you already have a good subwoofer in use with a pair of quality stand-mounted monitors that fall short in handling the complex sonorities and dynamic power of large-scale music. Swapping out those monitors for the DC10 Ti’s could actually be a substantial (and cost-effective) upgrade.

The price range of $7000 to $10,000 for floorstanders is a real high-end marketplace sweet spot. Over the past ten months, I’ve lived with three speakers in this class—the Reference 3A Taksim, the PSB Imagine T3, and this one. The Taksim got my Golden Ear Award for 2015 and the T3 was touted in the 2016 Buyer’s Guide. With the PSBs, especially, the bass quality was so good that I rarely felt the need for a subwoofer. And the PSB is $2500 less than the Definition speaker without a sub. Of course, high-end audio isn’t all about the quality/dollar ratio. If it were, we’d all have Tivoli table radios as our reference system. Audiophiles often have a specific sonic goal in mind and sometimes the path to get there is circuitous and a little crazy. Tannoy has been steadily refining a notable design for decades and has achieved some remarkable results, especially in terms of the faithful reproduction of instrumental and vocal sonorities. If you’re making a short list of loudspeakers of moderate cost to try, that list should include this Tannoy. With a capital “T,” that is.

SPECS & PRICING

Driver complement: One 1″/10″ coaxial tweeter/woofer, one 10″ woofer
Frequency range: 30Hz–35kHz (-6dB)
Sensitivity: 92dB (2.83V/1m)
Power handling: 30–250 watts
Nominal Impedance: 8 ohms
Dimensions: 17.125″ x 45.5″ x 12.625″ (without spikes)
Weight: 94.6 lbs.
Price: $9998

TANNOY LTD
Rosehall Industrial Estate
ML 4TF Coatbridge, UK

TC GROUP AMERICAS INC.
(U.S. Distributor)
335 Gage Avenue
Kitchener, ON N2M 5E1
Canada

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