Saturday, August 1, 2009

Mordaunt Short Festival 3 Speakers



Edited from a new product announcement in The january 1982 issue of Gramophone magazine:

Mordaunt-Short Ltd., Durford Mill, Petersfield, Hampshire GU3 I 5AZ have launched a range of new versions of their popular loudspeakers. The Carnival 3, Festival 3 and Pageant 3 all employ the company's own DSB208 bass/mid-range driver, with the benefit of a slight increase in internal volume and a change of width-versus-depth ratio to reduce colouration effects. A fabric finish offers some economy over wood veneers with no sacrifice either in performance or appearance. The Festival 3 (£197.80) is a 520 x 255 x 220mm two-way reflex with 25mm dome tweeter.

These sound very promising so far.
Updated 3 hours later:
Very nice british 2 way. Nice tonality, balance, imaging. Bass stronger on lower stands, very tight.

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11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just got a set of these, Can't wait to hook em up!, I've had a Pageant Series 2 nocking about for ages and LOVED the sound of it, but obviously I wanted a stereo pair and this was as close as I could get.

Anonymous said...

My father has sold MS speakers in the 80's here in Belgium. When he stopped, we kept some stock. Now still, I change speakers now and then. I know them all in detail. The festival 3 was one of the best in its price range. I still use them now and I am going to build a case around them to make them nicer (we did the same with Pageant 3 and they sound exactly the same but look much better now).

In my opinion, these speakers can still compete with the high end speakers of today.

Anonymous said...

have you got any specs on them?

Anonymous said...

I had a pair of Pagaent III speakers which looked just like this for many years. It was a 3 way bass reflex design. Sounded wonderful but needed a bit of power to drive them. Sold it only because I bought yamaha NS 1000 monitors. Miss the refined warm sound I got from it. Fabric cover was also really nice and diffferent. The guy I sold it to said he was keeping it for life.

Anonymous said...

Can someone please tell me the wattage of the festival 3 speakers? I need to know!!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

15-80 W

Anonymous said...

anyone know the tweeter fuse spec.?

Anonymous said...

Late response, but re fuse spec. recently picked up some Carnival3's - is it the same tweeter as the Festivals? Anyway the fuses were rather corroded and blown, but the supplied spares (come clipped to rear of speaker) were still good. Hard to read but the value looks to be: F 600mA 250V.

Ari said...

I would put a F 200mA 250V - that's 50W , quite a bit already , for a tweeter .

Anonymous said...

Ari, that's the funniest thing I've seen for weeks.....

The 250v is the rating of the fuse!!!
It doesn't mean there is 250v powering the tweeters, so you can multiply that by
.2A to get 50W!!!!!

Anonymous said...

The fuse originated was 630milliamps
But they were very hard to get so I have used 600mA successfully
Any one replaced the caps on their crossovers - I am finding it very hard to find replacements and Lockwood Audio do not stock any more