Tannoy

Tannoy's story begins in 1926 in Dulwich, London, when Yorkshire-born engineer Guy R. Fountain founded the Tulsemere Manufacturing Company in a small garage, initially building battery chargers for early wireless radio sets. Fountain's own rectifier design, made from an alloy of tantalum and lead, proved so successful that the company adopted a new name in 1928: Tannoy, a syllabic contraction of "tantalum alloy."

That early electrical engineering expertise soon extended into loudspeakers, and Tannoy quickly built a reputation supplying sound reinforcement and public address systems across Britain — so thoroughly that "tannoy" entered common English as a generic term for any PA announcement, a rare honour shared by only a handful of brands in any industry. The company's defining technical breakthrough arrived in 1947, when chief engineer Ronnie H. Rackham developed the Dual Concentric driver, placing the tweeter at the acoustic centre of the bass cone to create a true point-source loudspeaker — a design so effective it remains central to Tannoy's flagship Prestige range today.

Now part of Music Tribe and still manufacturing in Coatbridge, Scotland, Tannoy has spent nearly a century earning trust in legendary studios including Abbey Road and Decca, while its Prestige home speakers carry that same Dual Concentric heritage into living rooms worldwide.