Hifi Pig was invited to a private and exclusive first demonstration of the new range of loudspeakers from Tannoy.

The speakers involved are the Prestige GRFs and the new Legacy series: Arden, Cheviot and Eden.

The Prestige GRF looks the same as the ones that audiophiles will know and love but in all honest it’s the Legacy range that piqued my interest the most when we got the invite.

All the speakers in the range are handbuilt in Scotland and the music playing at the moment is Daft Punk, juxtaposing the luxury, and prestigious styling of the new speakers and sounding great. There was whiskey on offer, but as regular readers will no, we never sample that kind of thing until the sun is well over the yardarm but is a nice nod to the Scottish heritage of this iconic brand.

First up were the GRFs and quizzing the Tannoy guys on price we reckon they’ll come in at around the £17K mark (Update: the price is confirmed at ,£16998 per pair) though all prices mentioned herein are pretty speculative.

We managed to have a good chat with Andy Pardoe who designed the new Legacy range and his background in pro audio would seem pretty perfect as these speakers are very much based on the pro-monitors of yesteryear that were used in studios that produced many a record readers will know and love.

The Ardens have a 15” driver with the tweeter firing out through the middle of it. The price is to be confirmed but from the mutterings we pulled from the Tannoy guys, I reckon we’re looking at a sub £10K speaker, which in the grand scale of things seems pretty reasonable. To my ears these are a nicer sounding speaker than the Prestige GRFs (sorry Tannoy) and their studio heritage screams out. I was particularly impressed when the high frequency output was upped a little and the speakers opened out and felt much more expansive. These are front ported and as such pretty unfussy about their positioning – important in the studio, but also important in the smaller home…and this makes sense given the importance of the Asian market for Tannoy, particularly their speakers in the higher ranges.

I quizzed Andy on the driver in the Ardens and they are an interesting design with the paper cone being fatter in the centre of the driver and thinner at the outer extremities…something designed to improve the speakers linear response. There’s a first order crossover on the tweeter and a 2^nd order on the woofer.

We didn’t get to heat the Cheviot or Eden speakers but all look and feel exceptionally well made and the Arden’s we did hear sounded lovely, particularly when cranked up to good sound levels. Tannoy may well be onto a winner here!