hsosdrum

Back in the late 70s I re-oiled my KB-WOs using only Casey's Tru-Oil, as recommended by Klipsch at that time (they said that Casey's is what they used to oil the speakers at the factory). Apply the oil in a fine, even coat using an old cotton T-shirt. (I can't stress enough that the coats must be evenly applied.) After each coat dries thoroughly you need to feel all of the freshly-oiled surfaces for rough areas and sand those areas gently with 400-600 grit wet-dry sandpaper (I used the paper dry, which produces dusty residue that's easier to clean-up in a living room than the residue produced by wet-sanding). The first couple of coats will raise a fair amount of grain in the veneer and the speakers will feel a bit rough, but once you get three or four coats on the speakers the grain will no longer raise and they will require very little sanding. By the time I had my 10th coat on the speakers the finish had taken-on a deep, rich glow and every surface looked like it was coated in glass. And once oiled in this manner the finish NEVER changes and requires no rejuvenation or periodic maintenance (beyond dusting). This is a long-term process (it took me over a year and several bottles of Casey's Tru-Oil to get the 10 coats applied) but once you complete it your speakers will have a finish that will last a lifetime and will look like a piece of fine furniture. P.S. I sold those K-WOs about 10 years ago. Wish I could still use them, but my room then didn't have useable corners (neither does my current home). 20 years ago I replaced the K-WOs with C-WOs, and 10 years after that I converted the 2-channel system to a 5.1-channel home theater system and replaced the C-WOs with KT-LCRs and KT-SURs. I'm still using the C-WOs (modified to Cornwall II standard) as studio monitors in my recording studio. Life is good...

T2K said (amongst other things): "I personally think that all the talk about the 'perfect match', that is a like speaker being the only way to go, is horse hockey." All you need to do to prove how important using 3 identical speakers as LCRs is to play unfiltered pink noise through each one. ANY tonal variations you hear in the center speaker will be there on dialog and music as well. When dialog or a Foley effect is moved across the front soundstage, that tonal difference you'll hear when it hits the center speaker will tell your subconscious that you're only watching a movie, which draws you out of the experience. Filmmakers endeavor to draw you INTO the experience. If your system subverts their intent, it's wrong. Don't forget: The purpose of a theater system is DIFFERENT from the purpose of a music system: A theater system's job is to reproduce the film exactly how it sounded on the dubbing stage. Since most film dubbing stages sound either identical or extremely close, (if you listen to the same film or music on 500 different dubbing stages they'll all sound very close to each other) there IS a reference for how it's supposed to sound. It doesn't matter if your home theater system sounds better to you: the more different it sounds from a calibrated film dubbing stage the more WRONG it is. Music recording studio control rooms have no such reference. Listen to the same film or music in 500 different recording studio control rooms and you'll hear 500 VERY different things. There's no consistency. Therefore, all we can shoot for at home is for our home music systems to sound good to US. Or if you're stinking rich, you could re-configure your system each time you change recordings to best mimic what that recording was mixed on (Tannoys for Beatles recordings, Altec 604Es for Sinatra's Capital catalog, etc.). Bottom line: When listening to a music recording it's a total crapshoot as to whether or not you're even in the ballpark of accuracy to what the music's creators intended it to sound like. But there IS an objectively correct way to reproduce a film soundtrack, and part of that is using 3 identical speakers for the LCR channels.

Although I don't use hearing aids and can't speak to your central question, I can tell you that if you continue to "crank up the volume so as not to miss the highs and lows" you'll exponentially increase your hearing damage and accellerate the loss. The classic hearing loss cycle is: Small hearing loss --> Increase volume to compensate Increased volume = Accellerated hearing loss Accellerated hearing loss --> Further increase volume to compensate Further increased volume = More rapidly accellerating hearing loss And the whole thing spirals out of control exponentially. I wish I could offer a solution, but as far as I know there is none. This type of hearing loss is permanent. The only way to minimize its accelleration (assuming that you're no longer in constant close proximity to extreme forms of trauma like operating aircraft engines) is to not compensate for it by listening at ever-louder volumes. I realize that that's not a very satisfactory solution, but as far as I know it's all there is. Don't forget: we hear with our brains, not our ears, and we can re-train our brains to be satisfied under a whole new set of incoming stimulae.

I bought a pair of K-WO Klipschorns in 1978 (autographed by PWK himself) and back then Klipsch did not use boiled linseed oil on their oiled walnut speakers, they used Casey's True Oil, a gun stock oil that can be found in gun stores. They applied the oil directly from the bottle to the wood. (I got this info directly from Bob Moers, who was the President of Klipsch at that time.) When I got my speakers I also bought a couple of bottles of Casey's True oil and over the next year ot two rubbed an extra dozen or so coats into them using an old T-shirt, sanding lightly between coats with 400 - 600 grit wet-dry sandpaper. When I was done they looked simply gorgeous -- the fronts looked like they were covered with glass and the finish was deep and luxurious.

In my experience the Belle and La Scala do NOT sound the same. They have different midrange horns, different woofer horns and different crossovers. Don't assume that because you like the La Scala you'll also like the Belle -- it sounds different (and IMHO, not nearly as good). Also, the notion that "fully horn-loaded beats half horn-loaded" only applies if the fully horn-loaded speaker has a bass horn that's large enough to reproduce all meaningful musical fundamentals. The La Scala's and Belle's bass horns are too small to put out a fundamental much below 65Hz (do the math). The Cornwall puts out an honest 35Hz. No matter what type of music you listen to (unless you listen strictly to small solo instruments like viloin) there's an awful lot of information in the 35Hz - 65Hz range, and unlike other types of speakers, a horn simply can't be made to reproduce wavelengths longer than it's design can handle. Although at first you may not notice what's missing, over time you certainly will, and you'll look to add a (non horn-loaded) subwoofer. Beyond all this, to my ears the Cornwall just plain sounds better than either the Belle or La Scala, no matter what amps you drive them with. Not just in the lower octave, but all the way up through 1kHz or so. Fewer compromises in its design (using a direct-radiating woofer up to 500Hz sounds more natural than a folded horn. Those mid frequencies don't like turning all those corners). And the Corns can reproduce a more 3-dimensional soundstage than the Belle or La Scala. Of course, if you have a chance to listen to both, do so and make up your own mind. Personally I would NEVER buy any speaker that I haven't thoroughly auditioned.

---------------- On 2/14/2005 7:18:28 PM D-MAN wrote: there is INDEED time-delay between the bass horn and the midrange horn but its only apparent at the crossover point overlap where both drivers are producing the same frequencies. ----------------- Actually, it's apparent whenever you're listening in stereo, because it prevents the K-Horns from creating a life-like 3-dimensional stereo soundstage. They image like a b*tch from side-so-side -- with pinpoint precision -- but that huge soundstage is as flat and thin as a gossamer curtain. And having the bass voice coil more than 5 feet behind the squawker voice coil, which is 2 feet behind the tweeter voice coil is a chief cause. The "shuffleboard" experiments described in the Dope From Hopes (where the mid/high section was separated from the woofer and moved forwards and backwards until blindfolded listeners could hear a difference) were performed with a single speaker. Monaural listening is quite forgiving of time-arrival errors. If one speaker is reproducing the attack of a piano hammer smeared over several milliseconds, no big deal -- the piano's timbre may change slightly. But when locating the piano in 3-dimensional space depends upon sounds from more than one speaker reaching both ears at a precise moment in time, that several millisecond smear destroys the brain's ability to reconstruct the acoustic environment in 3-dimensions. (Remember -- directional hearing is a temporal phenomenon.) There are dozens of speakers on the market designed with minimal or no phase error at the crossover points (it is possible to do this in a passive network, providing that the amount of compensation isn't extreme -- the huge differences in the depths of the 3 horns in a K-Horn generate phase errors too large to be addressed in a passive network), and they blow K-Horns out of the water when it comes to creating a believeable 3-dimensional soundstage. (Of course, the K-Horns blow those speakers out of the water in terms of dynamic accuracy at all volume levels, freedom from IM distortion, and depending on the room they're in, flat frequency response and bass extension, but I'm only talking about the stereo soundstage here.) Sonance (the company I work for) is about to release a set of cabinet speakers that produce a frighteningly realistic 3-dimensional soundstage -- one of the very best I've ever heard in my nearly 30 years in the industry. It rivals the soundstage produced by any speaker made by Wilson Audio (some of the most expensive on Earth). Even our higher-end in-walls do a very credible job of creating a 3-D soundstage, and those speakers can't be angled towards the listener (which improves soundstage depth). It's not impossible to do this when the depths of your driver voice coils are only a couple of inches apart and you know how to design a good dividing network. But if we moved those voice coils several feet apart the soundstage would completely evaporate and no amount of network tomfoolery would bring it back. I've never heard tri-amped K-Horns with time delay compensation, but with all of the K-Horn's other great sonic attributes, I think such a system could create one of the most realistic 3-dimensional soundstages ever heard in the history of music reproduction. -hsosdrum

On 2/14/2005 2:13:55 AM Audio Flynn wrote: even though you bee a bit of a buctt kicker in experience; some will mess with with you. Do not get torqued and go away just ignore the dolts. ----------------------------------------------------- Audio Flynn: Thanks for the warning. I like it when things get heated in on-line forums -- that's when you really have to think about what you believe and why, and if you can keep an open mind you always come-away from it knowing more than you did before you joined-in. After all, we're just a bunch of audio nerds having fun. Compared with the unmoderated drummer's newsgroup that I subscribed to 8 - 9 years ago (alt.music.makers.percussion) this forum's downright genteel. Back in those days the Internet was way more wild and wooly (kind of like the wild west) than it is now. Lots of name-calling. And like now, it was fun stuff. -hsosdrum

---------------- On 2/13/2005 4:09:19 AM jdm56 wrote: Whew, I just read this whole friggin' thread! Welcome to the club, hsosdrum! A newbie going toe to toe with TomB - can you say "baptism by fire"? Anyway, I enjoyed your posts and the experience and perspective you bring. JDM56: Thank you. Although I may be a newbie to this forum, I've been working in the audio industry since 1977 (for 3 different manufacturers: Nakamichi, Kenwood and now Sonance), owned Klipsch speakers since 1978, and was honored to be able to have a private lunch with PWK when he was in L.A. to receive his AES Silver Medal in 1979. (1978? I can't remember. Curse this getting old thing.) During that lunch I asked PWK what the depth of the K-Horn woofer would be if it were a straight horn, and he worked-out the exponential sections mathematically, drew them on a piece of notebook paper and let me make a copy of the page. (BTW, the length is 93" -- 7' 9".) He also let me make copies of the frequency response graphs for the K-Horn, Heresy and LaScala that were in the book he always carried with him. And of course, I have a bound copy of the "Audio Papers" that Klipsch offered back in the 70s, and copies of all the "Dope From Hope"s that Klipsch offered from the beginning through 1980. I've read-through these dozens (if not hundreds) of times. BTW, I highly recommend that anyone with more than a passing intrest in audio get their hands on the "Audio Papers" collection, particularly Bell Telephone's original "Symposium On Auditory Perspective" and W.B. Snow's "Basic Principles of Stereophonic Sound". These are the basis for all current knowledge of stereophonic sound reproduction. Vital stuff if you want to know why things sound the way they do in 2-channel music reproduction systems. So I don't consider myself anything close to a newbie when it comes to audio in general, and Klipsch in particular. I'm comfortable talking about speaker design with anyone. -hsosdrum

---------------- On 2/12/2005 10:53:29 PM Trey Cannon wrote: BTW: remember that the Khorn, Belle, La Scala, Cornwall all use the K-33. As a driver, it is not the best in the wrold...It only moves a short distance. In the 3 speakers that are horn loaded, it works in a sealed cabinet as a compresion driver. moves a short distance in a seald cabinet, this is about as easy of a job that you could ask from that driver. In the cornwall it has to work harder. going up to 700Hz (rolling off at 12db per Oct.) So if you have 100db @ 500Hz you should still have 88db @ 1000Hz. Whitch is a lot of mids coming from the woofer.... Wait, someone said that was bad...but they like the way the Cornwall sounds... Trey: I think I'm the one who "said that was bad". I own Cornwalls and I like the way they sound, but as you said earlier in your post, every crossover point is a chance to mess things up. The further away you can get those crossover points from smack in the middle of the midrange (where our ears are the most sensitive) and the vocal range (where our ears are most likely to hear anomalies), the better the speaker will sound, all other things being equal (although they never are). As you say, asking the K-33 driver to be equally adept at reproducing 40Hz and 700Hz both at the same time is indeed asking a lot. IMHO, a good rule of thumb would be to ask each driver to cover no more than a decade: 20Hz - 200Hz, 200Hz - 2kHz, 2kHz - 20kHz. Both of these crossover points are well out of the vocal range. Of all the Klipsch Heritage speakers, the K-Horn comes closest to this (35Hz - 400Hz, 400Hz - 5kHz, 5kHz - 17.5kHz, with slight variations depending on the vintage). I'm sure that having the squawker cover such a wide range is one of the big reasons it reproduces voices so well. While I have you on the line, Trey, since 1978 (when the K-Horns I used to own were built) has Klipsch made improvements in the K-Horn network that compensate for the time arrival differences caused by the 3 different horn depths? Having the woofer's acoustic point of origin almost 5 feet behind the squawker's and the squawker's 2 feet behind the tweeter's plays havoc with the speaker's ability to deliver a convincing 3-dimensional soundstage. Side-to-side imaging is pinpoint specific, but I've never heard K-Horns do much at all with front-to-back, and I know that's gotta be caused by some pretty extreme arrival time differences due to the horn depths. There's been a lot of work done by pro speaker companies to deal with this phenomenon in speakers used in very large arrays. (Those speakers are all driven by digital processors, which use delay to properly align the acoustic origins of the driver elements in the horizontal dimension. EAW's the only company I've seen that also has addressed misalignment in the vertical dimension.) -hsosdrum

---------------- On 2/12/2005 1:13:57 PM bsafirebird1969 wrote: Nooooo ...Mr. Drum ! there are tons of JBL SM's that use horns over 500 hz forget the 4311/ 12/ 13 .. there are 6 or 7, in pro cases that meet this condition the Cabaret, Summit, etc. ---------------- BSAFirebird1969: I guess I wasn't making myself clear. JBL absolutely made tons of monitors that used horns above 500Hz. The point I was trying to make was that with such a high crossover point (see below) they really can't be called "horn speakers", since most of the acoustic energy they produce is created by the direct-radiating drivers. I have 3 JBL pro catalogs in front of me right now (1976, 1980 and 1998), and the lowest any of the monitors in those catalogs crosses-over from direct radiators to horns is 800Hz, in the 4331 and 4333. Except for the 4333, all of JBL's big 3-way monitors used direct radiators (15s or 12s) from 30Hz or so up to 1kHz. The 4-ways crossed-over from 15s to 10s or 8s at between 250Hz and 350Hz, and the smaller cones carried the load up till 1.2kHz or so before the horns kicked-in. I was just on the JBL pro site last nite and their 2005 pro catalog doesn't show any large studio monitors at all -- just 3-way boxes a la the 4311 (which was a really, really bad-sounding speaker -- woefully inaccurate midrange frequency response in that sucker). I guess Genelec has sewn-up the big box studio monitor market. The store I worked at during the late 70s carried JBL and Klipsch, and we would A/B the Cornwall and the JBL L300 (home version of the 4333 monitors) and watch customer's faces when the big, clean, spacious, dynamic sound from the Klipsches collapsed into a harsh mass of confusion when we switched to the JBLs (which retailed for 50% more than the Cornwalls), especially on orchestral classical music. Sold a fair number of Cornwalls that way. Never sold an L300 (or an L200, which was the home version of the 4331 and was closer to, but still higher than the Cornwall in price). Fun stuff.

TBrennan: Well, I'm envious. Although I've owned K-Horns I stopped using them in 1985 (before home theater happened), so I never had the chance to play movie soundtracks through big horns in my home. I imagine a pair of A5s would make awesome home theater speakers (although using one for a center channel presents formidible logistical challenges in a home). KT is clearly in the dark about studio monitors. You're totally correct that practically all monitors horn-load the top decade (2k - 20k), and many use horns down to the 500Hz - 800Hz range (mostly Altecs -- I think the last time JBL made a monitor with horns below 2k was the late 40s). I think I remember that same article about Emmylou Harris. If you go on Wendy Carlos' website (she's the Moog synthesizer player/composer who recorded "Switched-On Bach", the soundtrack for "A Clockwork Orange" and tons of other stuff) she talks about using 4 Cornwalls as monitors in her studio in Manhattan, of all places! Now I'm beginning to miss my K-Horns. I'll say this: In the 2 rooms that suited them well (about 2x wider than deep, with one natural corner and one easily formed by placing a large, heavy bookcase perpindicular to the wall), with the K-Horns along the long wall and the Cornwall in the center (powered by 3 Luxman MB3045 triode tube amps), that system did many, many things right -- absolutely unmatched dynamics, extreme musical detail, pinpoint side-to-side stereo soundstaging, and a sense of just plain "fun". I would bring friends over and play the drum solo from "Tank" off the first ELP album just to see their faces when the phased bass drum came-in at the end -- it would pressurize the whole room. My current system does everything right that the K-Horns did (except for the extreme dynamics), is flatter and has much more 3-dimensional stereo imaging (having the midrange 2 feet behind and the bass driver 7 feet behind the tweeter plays total havoc with the phase alignment between the 3 drivers in a K-Horn, making it impossible to accurately reproduce anything approaching 3-dimensional space), and it doesn't require corners (my home has no useable corners). But it's not that same unbridled, effortless sense of 'fun' that the K-Horns were. Take care, -hsosdrum

---------------- On 2/11/2005 5:43:26 PM TBrennan wrote: Drum---You're quibbling. I know where various Altecs crossover (604s crossed as low as 1000hz). And regardless of what you think the various big Altecs though partly direct-radiating are referred to as horn speakers. Horns have been used in monitoring for a long time and on all kinds of music. You can see the A5 in the reconstructed Stax control room and in photos taken at the time. TBrennan: Calling a 604E in a 620 enclosure a "horn speaker" is just plain inaccurate. When a multi-way speaker uses a horn to cover part of the audio bandwidth and a direct radiator to cover the remainder it is a hybrid, not a horn speaker. Altec always accurately referred to the 828 enclosure (the one used in the A7 and A5) as a "combination" enclosure, never as a "horn", because below 200Hz it is NOT a horn. Period. If you want to make a case for calling a speaker that uses both a horn and a direct radiator one term or the other, the logical way to determine which it should be would be to determine how much of the speaker's total audio energy is radiated by the horn versus the direct radiator. Since the vast majority of energy contained in music exists in the range below 1kHz, it would certainly seem fair to call the 604E a direct radiator, since that's how it delivers most of what you hear from it. But in reality, it is a combination type, as are over 90% of studio monitors. A proper analogy would be talking about colors. If an object is painted both red and green, referring to it as "red" would be inaccurate, even if is 80% red and 20% green. It is still both. You could accurately say that it is "mostly red", just as it is accurate to say that the 604E/620 is "mostly" a direct radiator. But it certainly isn't "mostly" a horn. The A7 and A5 are "mostly" horns, although a lot of the total energy in music exists below their horn's 200Hz cutoff frequency, and is reprodued by a direct radiator. The K-Horn is a true "horn speaker", as is the LaScala. And the Belle (which, in spite of it being all-horn, I must admit is truly awful-sounding, or at least it was back in the early 1980s, the last time I heard a pair). If Stax used an A5 for monitoring (in mono, if they only had one), then they were certainly the exception. Were the contemporary photos you're referring to of the control room or the studio area? I can imagine A5s as studio playback speakers, but you'd need a downright huge control room to fit a pair of A5s (the multi-cell doesn't fit inside of the port like a 511 does, making the A5 a good deal larger than an A7.) Reconstruction photos are unreliable -- they could have moved one of the studio playback speakers into the control room during the reconstruction (if they originally had 604s I wouldn't at all be surprised if someone swiped them). Oh, and I think mentioning that some 604s used a 1kHz crossover point (rather than one at 1.5kHz) meets the standard of "quibbling" far more perfectly than anything I said in my post. Bottom line: it's no less accurate to call a speaker with a direct radiating woofer and a horn tweeter a "direct radiator" than it is to call it a "horn". In fact, it's almost always closer to the truth.

TBrennan: Cool pic, but those A7s are NOT studio monitors -- they're playback speakers, a very different animal. Those A7s were used to playback takes to the musicians so they could judge their performance -- they definitely weren't used by the engineer and producer to make judgements about sound (mic choice, mic placement, mic level, etc.). After all, they were located in the performance area, not in the control room. Chances are that inside the control room shown in that photo were a pair of Altec 604E duplexes in a pair of Altec 620 utility enclosures. THOSE were the monitors (the ones Altec was talking about in 1974 when they ran their ad stating that more studios used Altec monitors than all other brands combined). And they were only horn-loaded down to 1,500Hz. The 604E was a direct-radiator below that. The A7s were horn-loaded down to 200Hz. Below that the 15" acts as a direct-radiator in a bass reflex enclosure. (The horn in the A7 is too small to effectively load the driver below 200Hz. Check Altec's voluminous lit on the speaker.) The Altec 9846 monitor (the one with the 511B and the 15" sealed woofer) crossed-over at 500Hz (as did the A7-500), which is more than an octave above middle C (266Hz) and is square in the middle of the vocal range, a terrible place for a crossover point. You're much better off getting the crossover up above 1kHz, where it keeps inter-driver phase errors out of the voice range. That's one of the big reasons the 604E sounded so good -- it used a single driver for almost the entire voice range. Now, it's true that when you're pumping lots of 40Hz through a 604E you're gonna get a fair amount of modulation distortion at 1kHz, but back in the late 60s and early 70s there were very few synthesizers, and most engineers were still in the dark ages when it came to accurately recording frequencies below 80Hz, so in practice modulation distortion was pretty low. Once engineers learned how to record real high-energy bass in the 40Hz - 80Hz octave, the 604 series was quickly replaced by 3-way and 4-way monitors that crossed-over to their 15" woofers below 300Hz. Those monitors usually used 10" or 8" cones for the 300Hz - 1kHz range, keeping the crossover points farily well out of the voice range. None of 'em used horns in that frequency range (too damn big, which is why you very rarely ever saw an A7 inside a control room). So before all you "horn-eys" go talking about horn-loaded studio monitors, you'd better check your facts.

DeanG: Thanks for your kind words. I've been a Klipsch fan since the day in early 1976 that I first heard a pair of K-Horns. -hsosdrum

Keith: How much for just 2? I'd love to replace my Cornwall II studio monitors with them (I'll use one of the Corns as a subwoofer). Please contact me off-chat. -hsosdrum

".. it would seem that non Heritage products are really no better than inexpensive mid-fi these days." I own/have owned the following Klipsch speakers: 2 x 1978 K-WO K-Horns (personally autographed by PWK, sold ten years ago) 2 x 1984 H-WO Hereseys (still being used by a family member) 2 x 1985 C-WO Cornwall IIs (still using as studio monitors) 3 x 1996 Klipsh KT-LCR + 2 x KT-DS (still using in home theater) The KT-LCRs and KT-DSs are "non-Heritage products", and they by far have the greatest tonal accuracy of all the above sets of speakers. And I'll tell you how I know this... As I said, I'm using my Cornwall IIs as studio monitors, but I can't rely on them to accurately tell me what I'm putting down on tape (I play and record acoustic drums). If I get things sounding great when played on the Cornwalls and burn that mix onto a CD, that CD does NOT sound like my drums when played through most other speakers (I work in the audio industry and have access to all sorts of different speakers.) BUT... if I take that CD into my home theater, audition it through my KT-LCRs and then make changes in the mix based on what I hear through those speakers, when I burn a new CD it sounds MUCH closer to how the drums sound in the studio through all sorts of speakers (hi-end, mid-fi, car stereos, boom boxes, you name it). In short, the Corwall IIs DO NOT TELL THE TRUTH nearly as well as the KT-LCRs do. While it's true that the Cornwall IIs have about 5dB greater efficiency and dynamic range than the KT-LCRs, that difference doesn't impact NEARLY as much as the KT-LCR's much flatter frequency response, lower inter-driver phase error and greater sonic consistency throughout their specified listening area (CD horns as opposed to the Cornwall's old exponential horns, which ain't CD, let me tell you). And the subwoofer I'm using with the KT-LCRs goes flat to 32Hz with the same distortion and output as the Cornwalls, (which only go flat to 35Hz). It's just a better sounding, more accurate system -- period. If PWK ever got a chance to hear the KT-LCR/KT-DS system (they introduced it in 1994, so he may have heard it) I'm sure he would have been proud to have his name on it. P.S. I sold my autographed K-Horns because I wasn't using them. They sounded absolutely awful in my home at the time (K-Horns are incredibly room-dependent -- after all, you sit inside of the bass horn), and their corner placement forced a room arrangement that was barely liveable. At that time I was using one Cornwall as the center-channel speaker in a L/L+R/R 3-channel stereo system with the K-Horns (read your Audio Papers and Dope From Hopes for more on this), so I bought a Cornwall II, upgraded my original to Cornwall II to match, used the Cornwall IIs in regular L/R stereo and stored the K-horns. Sounded light-years better than the K-Horns ever did in that room (or in most rooms I ever had them in). After 10 years of not using the K-Horns, I put a few more coats of Casey's True Oil on them, replaced the top grille cloths that my cats had scratched-up (an all-day project, not recommended for the faint-hearted) and sold them. And I'm not sorry I did. They were exciting to listen-to, but they were also a total crapshoot when it came to integrating them into a listening room. (The smaller the room, the more likely you'd lose the game.) I had them in 6 different listening rooms, and only 2 rooms produced sound that wasn't severely compromised in some way (wide frequency response variations, or terrible deep bass performance, or lousy stereo imaging and soundstaging, or to some degree a combination of all 3). If you get lucky with the room, or are willing to put major time and $$ into changing the room to accommodate the speakers, K-Horns can sound great. But short of that, you're really taking your chances.