jdm56

The relative dimensions of your room are critical to the klipschorn's performance. Since they typically sit tucked into the corners, they will excite every resonance in the room. If the room has favorable dimensions, this is a good thing; if not, well you probably would be better off with the KLF20's. That said, the midrange of the k-horn and La Scala is in another league all together compared to any of the smaller format mids used in the klf's, corn's, heresy's Chorus, Forte's, etc. Just my humble opinion.

Times change. In the sixties and seventies, hi-fi was the thing. Then in the eighties video and surround sound started taking off. Then video games and computing come along and the rest is history. There is so much more competition for the discretionary dollar now. The hard thing for me to understand is the apparent fact that just not many people are interested in sitting and listening to quality music reproduction. They say they don't have time. I say if you love it you will make time. Me, I NEED my quality time with my music! The Heritage line is in the same boat with klipsch as the 901 loudpseaker is with Bose. The companies want to thrive and grow and make lots of moolah, but their iconic flagships are just kinda out of style at the moment. I've wondered how long Bose would keep the 901 alive (there've been no "series" upgrades since 1987.) and how long the heritage series would survive. I'm just glad they are both still around.

...and a thousand violins begin to play.[]

I had 901 IV's in the 70's which I sold after I moved to a place w/o a suitable room. Then I had ESS amt-1b's for a number of years. The ESS sounded "maaaahvelous, dahlings". I kept melting diaphragms in the amt, though, and then I blew a woofer. That's when klipsch entered the picture: a lovely pair of oak cornwall's in 1985 (that by the way, I should never have sold). Speaking of 70's speakers and Bose 901 competition, remember the Design Acoustics speaker that was round, made of wood and had about umpteen drivers all over it? I guess the idea was to have an omni-directional radiator. It was designed to hang from the ceiling, too, I think. Shoot, lets just google the sucka...

No drugs or alcohol...unless Nyquil and antihistamines count. Amplification is an Adcom GFA5500 amp and an NAD C165BEE preamp. Sources are digital: CD's ripped to flac streamed wirelessly to a Slim Devices Squeezebox Classic whose analog out is fed to the pre, or CD's played on a Pioneer Elite DV47Ai dvd player or a TEAC CD-RW890 CD recorder. I guess it will be obvious from the drawing that the room dimensions are less than ideal; especially considering the niche in one long wall. The dimensions are either too nearly the same or almost exactly double the room height. When I had k-horns in there, they were in the corners flanking the niche. (The 901's are on the "left" short wall; placed in accordance to Bose' recommendations.) The horns were fine above 125 Hz but from there down they were bad, bad , bad. Too bass much here and no bass there. Moving the couch back against the opposite wall helped, but not enough. On top of the bass roughness, there was no life or sense of air in the room. The music sounded like it was mostly being absorbed by some invisible vacuum. My words to the wise: Avoid these dimensional relationships. It's not enough to simply have dimensions that aren't exactly the same. They must be mathematically dissimilar enough to ensure even spacing of room resonances. This room is in our basement, so the floor is concrete. It is covered with thin office-style carpet w/ no pad. The walls and ceiling are all textured drywall. The room is 16x18.5x8.67', with a niche in one long wall 1.5' deep and 6' wide tapering to 3' wide. It looks kinda like this (drawing not to scale):

OK, so I dredged this up from the vault. I just kinda stumbled on it. Thing is, I actually have a room that nothing sounded good in but Bose 901's. Not klipschorns, not B&W 703's. And yet the 901's ROCK in there. Which is why I now use Bose 901's as my primary 2-channel speakers. Whassup wit dat?

Yep. K-horns sound kind of dumb out in a room. When I bought mine they were standing in the middle of the garage of the little old lady who was selling them. When I hooked them up to the amp I brought they sounded like an AM radio, but once home and in in the corners the magic began. One heckuva BIG AM radio![H]

You'd definitely need to put wings on the k-horns (false corners). Then I'd bet on the k-horns sounding best.

"Had" is the key word. Her car was destoyed. Her and the boys hitched a ride south on Rangeline to the Office Depot store which is on the corner of 32nd and Rangeline, I believe. The good folks there took them in and offered snacks and shelter and even some dry clothes. From there she was able to get a cell phone message out to her husband who was eventually able to get to them and take them home. After surviving one of the most deadly tornados in US history, Franz, her FSE student is probably going to be happy to get back home to Germany come July.

This is definitely "tornado season" in the midwest, and for the exact reasons you mention. My niece was caught in Joplin yesterday. She was in a frozen yogurt shop on Rangeline with her son and his friend, and with her German foreign exchange student. They all took shelter in the bathroom, along with whoever else was there. When it was over and they crawled out of the wreckage, the corner with the bathroom they were in was the only corner of the store left standing. The death toll is at 92 and rising. This will probably be the most deadly single tornado in the US in nearly fifty years.

His show is filthy. Funny, but filthy.

Videos of playing audio systems...I don't get it. What's the point? I mean, if it was a hi-fi recording played back on a high-quality rig, OK, maybe. But otherwise, everything sounds the same. You are limited to the performance of the recording and the playback; and since the recording is generally just the camcorder mic and the playback is through pc speakers, it all sounds identical whether it is klipschorns or pro-medias. I still enjoy the pics, though!

Well, I glad to see you haven't lost your objectivity![] Now, enjoy! ...and let's see some pics.

No doubt! I used to consider myself an audiophile; not so much anymore. I actually fit the strict definition, but I've encountered so much non-sensical bs from the audiophile community that I'd rather be called an a/v enthusiast, or a Methodist...anything other than an audiophile!ps: no offense to any actual Methodists, practicing or otherwise. Some of my best friends are Methodists.[]

I'm partial to dual subs unless you intend to go with a very low x/o. SVS, Epik, Hsu are all killer values. Dayton Titanic III 15" on sale is also very good. The Velodyne DEQ-15R has a bit less output, but is very civilized, with built-in 5-band EQ. More food for thought.

No they do not have to be on the boot drive. I use Squeezebox Touch. You can put the folder on an external drive. It doesn't care. I honestly did not know that. And I thought I knew everything! [] I guess I've put myself through a lot of trouble for nothing. [:S] I will definitely pursue this further!! Thanks Much!

You don't have tp put any money into the old machine. Just buy an External DIsk that plugs in with a USB. You can take the dive with you to a new computer or your music on the road. Even buying an Internal SATA disk could be trasferred to another machine very simply. I stream wi-fi to my Squeezebox Classic. The server software is on the same pc the music is on. I think the music and server both have to be on the boot drive. I could be wrong on that count, though...I'll have to double check.

True, it is cheaper all the time; probably cheaper than I realized even. The pc I use for a server is an older machine running XP. I just don't want to put any money in it at this point. I'd rather ditch it for a new Windows 7 machine. On the other hand, I want to get as much life out of it as possible. Another factor in the decision to rip to mp3 was network considerations. I've got two boys. One plays X-Box live and the other Play station network, or whatever it's called. Then my wife is on her notebook pc upstairs and the daughter may be on the server pc doin' her thing...IOW, lot's of network traffic. I thought the smaller mp3 files might help out, although we've really not had any issues yet... Then there is the Walkman thing: I though it would be convenient to have everything in one format. I use 320kb/s mp3 on my Sony Walkman. But all of my reasoning went out the window when I decided the audio quality wasn't up to snuff. Reading over my original post, one might get the impression that I though I was the first person in the solar system to rip their CD collection to their pc. Nay, nay...I realize I'm almost always the last one to the party. I''m just sharing what's going on in dougyville.

Over the past couple of years, I have been patiently ripping favorites tracks from my CD collection to flac files on a pc (that also functions as a music server). Everything was going along fine and I had gotten into the R's. Then one day I decided it would be nice to have everything in my collection, not just faves, available on the server. Problem was, my collection was too big to fit it onto the 320G hard drive the pc had. So to make it work, I would have to re-rip into a lossy format. A little cipherin' brought me to the conclusion that using 320kb/s mp3 encoding would allow it all to fit comfortably. So I deleted about 91G of flac files and began to rip everything into 320kb/s mp3's. I got through the B's and was ready for the C's and had amassed over 2000 tracks already. Cool! The I listened. Well, I had already listened to samples of varying mp3 rates and to mp3 compared to wave files. I listened using good quality headphones (Sennheiser HD-580's & Bose AE2's). I decided that yes, I could reliably tell the difference between 256kb/s mp3 and wave files of the same music. But I thought the differences were insignificant. But I hadn't really listened like I listen to music. Then I did. I listened to the music, not the sound. The music was uninvolving and coarse. I would liken it to a grainy, low resolution jpeg compared to a fine, high resolution print. And it just wouldn't do. And believe me, I wanted it to do. I wanted it to be good enough, because to admit it wasn't meant scrapping the whole idea and ripping everything to flac a third time. But that is exactly what I am doing now. I'm well into the B's. I'm done with the Beach Boys and ready for the Beatles. And I am ripping more tunes this time. Instead of the top third, I'm going for the top half of my collection, more or less. Maybe before I get done, we will replace the server pc with a new, bigger Windows 7 machine and capacity will be less of an issue. The moral of the story: If you're thinking about mp3's to save space, you've got a pretty good rig and you are particular about sound quality, just don't do it. I think 256-320kb/s mp3 is fine for Walkmans and ipods, and I like Pandora at 128kb/s for background music, but the big toys need high octane!

I love good 'phones! I've got an old pair of Sennheiser HD580's and a new pair of Bose AE2's; plus an even older pair of AKG K270S's. You can't really compare headphone sound to speaker sound, though. I put on the headphones when I want maximum detail and/or I don't want to make a racket. And sometimes, I put them on just because I want to...for a change-up I guess. I can't say one is better than the other (hp or speakers). I wouldn't want to be without either one. I do listen to speakers a lot more than 'phones, though, so I guess that says it all.

Well, I didn't want to just come right out and say it, but...[]

About 15" and 11 degrees here in beautiful Nevada, MO. (yes, we're still waiting for them to perfect that new-fangled color photograpy.)

If I so much as mentioned that idea to my sweet thang, she'd leave me. I'll tell her as soon as I get home. (rim shot)[] Whatever happened to Shecky Greene, anyway?

When I bought my '98 klipschorns -brand spankin' new- the msrp was app. $5800/pr. I bought these right off the showroom floor, in Springfield, IL, for $3800. I kept them about six years, selling them in '04 for $3000. I thought that was a good, fair price but I see older ones today selling for that or more if they're in mint condition like mine were. And of course, if I ever have another pair [H], no telling what I'd have to pay for new ones. But...if we ever have a really good room for them again, look out! []

...and I'm just sick about it. They looked so gorgeous, sitting there in their oiled oak glory! Makes me heart-sick. DANG, I wish I coulda kept them!! But to be honest, I just don't have a decent klipschorn room in this house. Dija ever do that...see an old video or picture with some of your long-gone used-to-be's...and just ache for them and want to kick yourself for ever letting them go? So what's your favorite speaker or other gear that you'd give your left pinky to get back? Mine is a pair of oiled oak / black grilled klipschorns w/ AK-3 x/o's from 1998.