Напольная акустика — Tannoy CANTERBURY GR-OW

The Canterbury GR-OW is the oiled walnut version of the Canterbury GR, a large two-way floorstanding loudspeaker in Tannoy's Prestige Gold Reference range, intended for large rooms and designed and manufactured in the UK. Its Gold Reference driver uses technology passed down from Tannoy's Kingdom Royal development project. In the OW finish, handcrafted oiled walnut is set off by inlays of burr walnut picked by hand and by precision-machined aluminium trim anodised in gold. The original UK price was GBP 32,990 per pair.

Key specs that matter

A single 380 mm (15 in) Dual Concentric unit covers the whole range. Its paper pulp cone runs on a twin-roll fabric surround, and the tweeter at its centre has a 51 mm aluminium-magnesium alloy dome driven by an Alnico magnet system. Frequency response is 28 Hz to 22 kHz at the -6 dB points, and sensitivity is 96 dB measured with 2.83 V at 1 m into a nominal 8 ohm. Power handling is 140 W RMS continuous and 600 W peak. The enclosure holds 235 litres in a cabinet 1,100 mm tall, 680 mm wide and 480 mm deep. Each speaker weighs 63 kg, rising to 79 kg in its packing.

Engineering and use context

The compression tweeter's alloy dome is held by a Mylar surround and fires through the PepperPot WaveGuide inside the bass cone, so high and low frequencies share one axis and spread symmetrically from a point source. Crossover filters work at 1.1 kHz, with a time-compensated second-order slope on the low side and a second-order slope on the high side, and the network is assembled from film capacitors, thick film resistors and inductors wound on low-loss laminated cores. A shelving control lets the owner raise or lower the treble by up to 3 dB over the band from 1.1 kHz to 27 kHz. Dense birch ply forms the cabinet, braced throughout according to Tannoy's Differential Materials Technology, and the Variable Distributed Port system allows the low-frequency output to be adjusted. Bi-wireable posts are joined by a fifth post for grounding, intended to reduce radio-frequency interference, and Tannoy supports the model with a 10-year warranty programme.

Pairing

Tannoy recommends amplifiers from 50 W to 275 W, although the high efficiency also lets modest valve amplifiers reach useful levels. Separate cable runs to the low and high sections are possible through the bi-wire panel. The large footprint and heavy cabinet call for firm flooring and at least two people during installation.

Alternatives

The Westminster Royal GR is the more expensive Prestige floorstander from Tannoy, sold in the US at USD 35,000 per speaker against USD 20,000 for the Canterbury.