boom3

Ah yes. I heard this in Louisville in 74. All the loudness one could want, with no hot spots. Utterly mellow, no ear-ringing. Got too expensive to haul around. When I saw the Dead for the second time in DC in 90, they were using a traditional two-stack with fill. Sic Transit Gloria.

Well, this is Mcintosh, after all, and they have always overbuilt. If I was paying for the Mac name, I would expect, no, make that demand, that this build quality be present. This comparison is not quite on the mark...Mac products, even speakers, are fairly rarified...the CF4 is more of mass market product.

Amen to what John said. We have the same 1812 DVD-A and it really shows off the four Corn plus-homemade-center HT. The Capriccio Italian is my fave of the disk, though.

Bose and B&O cannot be really compared since they are products of different cultures and business mind-sets. B&O is a much older firm than Bose (or Klipsch for that matter), and is more comparable to the old Zenith company in the U.S. before the Lucky Goldstar takeover. B&O products have been rather advanced for their time, if compared to mass market products. Linear-trackers, quad cartridges, passive radiator/"phase filler" speakers and other products of the analog era reached some of their highest expression at B&O. The B&O SP-12A cartridge was one of the best high-ouput mag carts ever made for two channel, and their quad carts were superb too. Unlike Bose, B&O has never tried to use pseudo-science to sell. True, many of their products had average performance +sleek styling+higher than normal prices, but at least they were/are intellectually honest about it. I'd love to hear one of their new flagship speakers. Klipsch will adopt interactive DSP for speakers someday, as B&O has, and I'd love to hear the results mated with a revamped Heritage line-up. So, comparing the two is no more defensible than comparing Yugo and Mercedes-Benz.

I think if you are pushing any amp to the point where distortion is audible on a repeatable basis, it matters not whether it is second or third harmonics. With Heritage speakers, if your amp is near, or at, clipping, you either have a chronically undersized amp, or, your SPL is dangerously high. I presume we all know that amps in clipping tend to blow tweeters, and maybe other drivers? I'd say with efficient speakers it should be a non-issue. The main component of "tube sound" is the low damping factor compared to solid state. Some people like that big, bloomy sound, I prefer tighter bass.

Thank you!

Frazier made a folded horn speaker called the Dixielander, which appears on the JBL Heritage site...I recall advertsing for these in the late 60s...anyone know anything more about them, such as horn folding scheme, comparison to Klipsch products, etc?

My tomcat posing regally on one of the Corns. His eyes are really blue. His sister also thinks the Corns are a nice perch.

I think Paul was talking about a horn in infinite space, in other words, without baffling effects from any walls or the ground, in the case of an outdoor installation. The 66 figure also shows up in his Eight Cardinal Points of Sound Reproduction paper, where he says that a direct radiator, to have the same bass extension AND efficiency as the Klipschorn, would have to be 66 inches in diameter.

Classic bi-wiring requires a crossover with seperate inputs to the woofer and tweeter sections. A seperate cable is run from the amplifier to the appropriate input. Some speakers are set up for this with a jumper between the high and low sections to allow use of one cable. I agree that it's snake oil, as are all exotic cables, regardless of brand. The best approach is to use an appropriate gage of ordinary, household wire, in one cable set, and be done with it. In my case I use 14 gage low-voltage outdoor lighting wire for runs up to 50 feet. With speakers as sensitive as my Corns, the gage of the wire becomes less critical, but 14 gage is the right combo of wire size and compatibility with the terminals on either end, via bannana plugs.

The new crossover looks much better, and sounds better I am sure. WRT the soldering problems, the larger the connector, the more of a heat sink it is. I used gold-plated bannana plugs on my speaker cables. I removed the plastic sleeves, put them on the wire, put the 'bannana" end in a vise grip (just tight enough to hold) and then stuff some fine gage solder into the sleeve. I then preheat the plug with a butane lighter (the Bic Aim & Flame, used for lighting gas appliances, works great) and then, while the first course of solder is molten, put the stripped wire in and then apply the solder iron, withdrawing the butane flame. I feed more solder into the side hole until the end of the wire is surrounded by molten solder. Then I remove the iron and wait a few minutes, holding the wire still. The plug will still be hot as the dickens, so wait until it's cool to slide the plastic sleeve over it or it may melt.

Craters & Freighters do a great job, then sent my CW IIs to me without a scratch. They're not cheap-motor freight for 2 CWs was about $250.

Prove the 'problem' first and then address it. If you have an electrolytic in the signal path, it should be replaced with good-quality film unit. Forget 'bypassing' it's a chimera. If it is in the power supply or is part of the turn-on circuit, leave it alone unless a problem surfaces. Yes, many people over at AA claim to hear things...mostly voices in their heads..which is why I rarely even look at AA anymore...

I am using Firefox right now. I had a prob at first but a later version of Firefox fixed it.When was the last time you upgraded?

I'm going home to cut plywood shortly, and move my Corns away from the patio doors!

My cats love mine too. My avatar is my tomcat sitting atop my left front Corn.

If we consider a direct radiator, the theoretical usable upper limit is that frequency whose wavelength is equal to the actual diameter of the cone or dome. At this point, dispersion falls to a 60 degree cone. For a 2.5" driver, this point is about 5400 Hz. This "maxim" is not often observed in the commercial world. Many systems cross larger drivers over higher, and just accept the narrowing of dispersion. This is another of those "all things being equal" maxims, so we must also consider the breakup behavior of the cone or dome, as well as amplitude response, distortion-all the usual factors. Pursuing these permutations could take a lifetime, which is why I stick with horns.

I have a Scott 333B circa 1964 tube model, professionally aligned by an engineer pal. Wonderful audio quality for the few FM stations around here worth listening to.

I had an experience with an e-bay seller that also involved a USPS money order and a month after I mailed the payment, I got my item. I had pretty much written off the $220 involved and was pleasantly surprised when he sent me the tracking info AND the item arrived undamaged, just as described. However, for the month of excuses he put me through I left neutral feedback with the bare fact that the fulfillment took a month. My moral (YMMV) is never ever again am I going to pay for anything with a USPS MO.

Theaters used to have "cry rooms" which had a glass wall and a loudspeaker so the parents could still "enjoy" the movie while the kid screamed. The last three Catholic churches I've been in also have these rooms, so the idea is not passe. However, I can't see the dodecaplex (thanks to Mike Nelson for that word) at the mall being retrofitted with this. It's real estate that would not sell extra tickets, and with stadium seating, it would have to be at the top of the ramp. I also wonder if today's parents would even use it. Movie theaters are going the way of the drive-ins; they are pretty much the province of the 14-21-year-olds that 90% of all movies are now made for.

Make the remodelling fit the Klipschorns! Don't sell them!

Besides the DC to AC mentioned, before solid state frequency changers were available, dynamotors, sometimes called motor-generators, were used to convert 60 Hz to 400 Hz for aircraft and ship use. These were still in use in the 80s because they were pretty reliable. Yes DRBILL, some of us got the hash remark! In-line inductors were often used to control the noise placed on the AC line by the dynamotor, hence called hash filters.

The return on investmemt with a 'high end" crossover is not the "capacitor of the month", but the experience and talent of a skilled designer (like Al K) in a modified crossover topology. The chance to correct the compromises that the factory made in the design, and to permit inclusion of modern drivers. The notion of "bypassing" in the audio range is, as I've said in this and other forums, absurd. The high frequencies do not magically jump to the 'trendy' cap. In any event, a 0.01 uf cap will have a frequency point, at 8 Ohms, of about 1.8 MHz.

These appear to be LDL speakers, which appeared a year or so after the 901s came to market. Circa 1971. It was they who ripped off Bose, not vice-versa. High Fidelity tested them and found they had a response curve humped between 200 and 5 KHz and rolled fast at either end.I don't know for sure, but I'd bet Bose sat on them and made them stop making these abortions.

Sure, Boom. But I also think that B&C know what they are doing as well. http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/pshowdetl.cfm?&DID=7&Partnumber=294-650 And I think Klipsch had them on the Preomiere series that hasn't come out. Why spend the money if it is only cosmetic? That's not really the Klipsch way. Do we nees a BS button here? _____ Yeah, we do-for B&C, Tangband et al and if Klipsch uses "phase plugs" on direct radiators, for them as well (gasps of horror from the assembled faithful) Cosmetics sells. Like the "coppery" look of some Klipsch cones, like phase plugs, like spoilers on econoboxes, like racing stripes on my mother's Buick...it's the sizzle, and not the steak. When Paul published his first list of Major Breakthroughs, he included his Shorthorn. "Yup, we did it too" he admitted. Marketing vs. engineering...guess who wins? A manufacturer's high reputation for one product line is not a nimbus of credibility that covers all they do, they get pulled along by the tide of fads just like everyone else.