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High-Voltage Entertainment in the Home Speakers
My primary speakers are late-90s vintage Tannoy 12" DMT II studio monitors. The DMT series features a coaxial design, meaning the tweeter uses the 12" woofer as a horn. The resulting speaker has fabulous localization, and, as suits a studio monitor, is unforgiving to the mix. The tonal balance is pleasing, and they're reasonably efficient. But, on the 18 watts supplied by the two SET amps per channel, they cannot really rock. So, each monitor sits atop a Tannoy PS350B powered subwoofer. These units (yes, there are two of them) each have 350 watt class AB solid state amplifiers, and, since they are marketed to the professionals as studio monitors, have a rich array of bass management options that I mostly do not use. I originally tried the built-in high-pass filters for the primary amplifiers, so that the pre-amp output passed through the subwoofers and then on to the power amplifiers. While this combination resulted in really good low-frequency integration with the main speakers, I felt that the pre-amplifier's sparkling high end was compromised; while my pre-amp is very wide range (I know for a fact that it is less than 1dB down at 11 MHz, measured at the final output stage of the power amp), I believe the op-amp network in the subwoofer has been optimized for low noise, using copious feedback. This, of course, is not a Sound Practice. Now, I drive both the main speakers and subwoofers from different buffers in the preamp, where the subwoofers are fed by the full range outputs and the main speakers get the buffers with the high-pass filter. The ports of the monitors are stuffed with Tannoy-supplied foam plugs, which improve the interface between the subwoofers and the monitors. To decouple the speakers from one another and from the floor, each of the four speakers sits atop four Sorbothane hemispheres, available from W.M. Berg (look under VIbration & Damping).
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