Tannoy Revolution XT 6

I’ve been wrestling with my elders about new ways to measure loudspeakers, lobbying for methods that might collaborate more directly with a listener’s experience. And wouldn’t you know? Right in the middle of this Socratic dialogue, I put the fresh-from-UPS, $1000/pair, Tannoy Revolution XT 6s into my reference system, plunking them down on my 24" Sound Anchor Reference stands in the same spot my Harbeth P3ESRs had been sitting. And I freaked! I was using the Rogue RP-7 preamp and the Rogue Stereo 100 (100Wpc) amplifier, and I could never adequately describe how bad the shiny white Tannoys sounded. Imagine sound that’s thin, metallic, herky-jerky, dull, and rolled off completely below about 90Hz.

I repeat: rolled off completely below 90Hz.

I tolerated their horridness for about two hours and then considered the possibility that somehow the oldest, most revered British loudspeaker company had mistakenly put some wrong parts in the crossovers. I was getting ready to call Kevin Deal at Upscale Audio (Tannoy’s new importer) and tell him something was wrong. But I decided to wait.

I figured some break-in would help, so I let them mumble and squeal for a few days. They sounded bad the second day too. The third day, while I was out for the afternoon, I forced the XT 6s to play through all the Ry Cooder albums on Tidal.

When I returned, my favorite Ry Cooder album— (16/44 FLAC, Rhino/Warner Brothers/Tidal)—was playing. Cooder’s voice, on my favorite song on that album, “Nobody,” sounded the way it sounds when it sounds on an expensive hi-fi. When my second favorite song, “We Shall Be Happy,” came on, I noticed a full octave of bass had magically appeared as I was riding the subway and shuffling the streets. Finally, after about 20 hours, the sound was as rich