How The Tannoys Eventually Achieved World Peace

Mr. Tannoy is quite pleased with himself that his little loud-speaker company -- started on the side in his college dorm room thirty years ago -- not only became his full time job years back but has now taken the lead in the ruthless hi-fi speaker market segment that in turn has made him and his wife, by extension, fabulously wealthy and in general able to satisfy any whim and/or desire that might find its way into their collective minds. The idea of kids came and went as Mrs. Tannoy was never so hot on the idea as she imagined that it would only bring back grim memories of her less than jubilant childhood when she was essentially forced, along with her younger sister, to care for her abandoned-by-husband, unfortunately disabled, and severely pain-killer-addicted mother who was a sorry case even before the abandonment and the disablement and the addiction which all happened not in that order but were all tightly coupled in a short window of time which led directly to the unfortunate childhood that now psychologically prevented her from having children of her own. This initially presented no problem of any kind to Mr. Tannoy as he was, and always had been as far back as can remember, interested primarily in three, and only three, areas: (1) building kick-ass speakers; (2) building kick-ass speakers; and (3) building kick-ass speakers. The problem is that now that his speakers are so good and so kick-ass, he has little to strive for anymore. And so he kind of wants to have some kids.

Tannoys

In the early 90's when he single-handedly invented reverse-deep-attenuating-split-frequency-light-induced-anti-modulation, the incredible increase in loud-speaker quality was so pronounced that the sheer sound was so infinitely better than any competitor for a number of years that no self-respecting audiophile could be caught dead without at least a pair of Tannoys somewhere around the house. When the competition finally had some semblance of an answer somewhere around '96, Mr. Tannoy was already well on to the next-next thing in speaker technology. When one afternoon in the Fall of 95 he stumbled in his basement lab across a little idea known as triple-attenuated-reverbial-double-split-coaxial-fibre-based-tone-boosting, it took him less than six months to turn the speaker world upside down for another time and literally obliterate any hint of competition in the high-end segment for another five years. Thanks to industrial espionage, the corrupt US patent system, and probably the Russians (though he's not 100% convinced on the latter), the competing speaker makers finally chanced upon a technology that by no means equaled but at least finally gave consumers a choice if they wanted a different aesthetic (but why would you?) the amazing kick-ass sound quality available in a Tannoy.

And so, as he had done on two previous occasions, Mr. Tannoy would again come to re-invent the world of high fidelity audio when in 2001 he invented not a new breakthrough in sound quality, but something never imagined before in home or industrial electronics: an enclosure and speaker system that was invisible and that weighed nothing. The Tannoy Phantoms* were like nothing ever seen before not only in the home-audio market, or the electronics industry, or really any other industry in recorded human history: everyone had to have a pair of Tannoy Phantoms as it solved so many problems. No cables, no space loss, no having to sacrifice the fullest sound possible because the room can't quite handle floor-to-ceilings (a speaker term), no downside at all. Well, to be fair, at first the purists weren't at all convinced. Somehow Mr. Tannoy had achieved a speaker set that was essentially invisible and took up no space at all -- of any kind -- but that still produced the best sound-reproduction product that money could buy, but a stereo system just didn't look like a proper stereo system without a beautiful pair of wood-encased Tannoys framing it. What finally convinced them (the purists, that is) was the inclusion (thought up by employee #2 at Tannoy, Mrs. Tannoy) was a Tannoy name-plate, essentially, that you put beside your stereo system to make sure that all of your guests knew exactly what kind of speakers you were sporting (it was a little strange that it took this for them to be swayed because even the least-refined trash-pop-listening-pre-teen raised on iPods and cheap earbuds could tell after a single note when Tannoys were in play because they're just such a damned good product and listening experience).

Tannoy Phantoms in front of a grey wall

And so Mr. Tannoy is pleased, but he is bored. The loud-speaker market is literally locked-up tight and most of the competition has full-on given up. While minisculaly pleasing, but ultimately somewhat depressing, Mr. Tannoy's former idols Castle Speakers have even recently thrown in the towel, laid off all of their audio engineers, and turned their UK-based factory into an indoor paint ball arena for loathsome 13-year-old boys getting rage out at birthday parties. His speakers are invisible, they take up no space, and most importantly of all to him -- what has driven his passion for loud-speakers for all of these years -- is that they sound perfect. Literally, in every sense of the word: perfect. It would be a contradiction of the laws of physics for a speaker to sound any Planck-limit-defined delta, iota, smidgen, or any of those teeny-tinily-imagined amounts better. So what more can he do, and what more is there in life?

Each day, Mr. Tannoy wakes up in his 50 million pound (weight and currency) mansion on the shore of Grasmere Lake in the Lake District of North-West England. He walks downstairs, his sensor-aware "smart"-house knows he's awake, fires up the stereo, and begins -- through the magic of pervasive-surveillance and machine learning -- to play exactly the best possible choice of music for him at that very moment to achieve a maximally-optimal state of musically-incuded happiness. The musical reproduction is A-one, of course. He sits at his kitchen table and eats his favourite breakfast: disgustingly-prepared bacon the way British people like it, along with equally disgusting brown sauce the way British people like it (though of course it's not disgusting to him because he's British if you haven't figured that out yet. Hint: his name is Mr. Tannoy). As he is enjoying his bacon and brown sauce sandwich, Mrs. Tannoy joins him. He thinks about how bored he is and how much fun it would be to either push loud-speaker quality a little further (physically impossible as we've just discussed) or maybe to raise some kids.

Just then, Mrs. Tannoy, after taking a "bite" of her morning Appletini, announces that she got over all that stuff about her childhood when she was listening to this amazing version of Cat's in the Cradle reproduced immaculately by a pair of Tannoy Phantoms in the backyard during her morning swim and so she wanted to have kids. They go upstairs, the house AI comes up with the perfectly machine-learned mood music for optimally creating a baby, and nine months later out pops little Nigel (remember, they're British). Then they live happily ever after and Nigel wants to become a sound engineer just like his famous Dad but there's really nothing left to do in sound engineering so he instead takes on the problem of over-population and disease and he cures both but then he gets bored since both those things are solved so him and his wife Kate (like most British girls born post-2010 or so she's named Kate) have kids to help them not be so bored and that kid grows up to solve the whole non-world-peace problem and then everyone's truly happy because he also came up with something that makes it impossible to ever be bored and that's called a Bicycle. It turns out it already existed but people forgot about them around the start of the 21st century because everyone became so enthralled with listening to their invisible speakers that sounded oh-so-good that they forgot that bikes existed and so no one rode them anymore and that's probably why people got so bored in the first place but if they hadn't then all this other stuff wouldn't have happened and the world would have ended because of over-population and disease and we wouldn't have bikes anyways.

* Having amassed a veritable fortune from his speaker empire and not being able to imagine a name other than the Tannoy Phantoms, when the Rolls Royce Motor Company came threatening to sue Mr. Tannoy and the rest of his 2-person conglomerate for the (as they argued) infringing use of the name "Phantom", Mr. Tannoy could do nothing but hire the highest-priced lawyers he could find and echo former President George W. Bush when he was quoted by numerous news sources as not only referring to Rolls Royce and its executives as "terrorists", but urging them and their lawyers to "bring it on". Mr. Tannoy expended many millions of pounds but eventually won the right (out of court) to go ahead with the Phantom brand name.