ClaudeJ1

You wouldn't be able to say that anymore after hearing some Jubillee Khorns. It took PWK 50 years to improve on the Khorn, and he did.

I was blown away the first time I heard one of those Sonic Impacts with the 2020 chip. Now I have some with the 2024 chip, which was rated in the top 10 most important IC's produced in the last century by Electronic Engineering Times magazine...........very prestigious. I used the Sonic Impact to demo my Walnut Khorns to a buyer about 5 years ago. He was impressed. I brought the little sonic impact to Indy and one of the engineers tested it for me. It's 6 clean watts and I wish Paul W. Klipsch would have lived to see and hear it because he always said the world needed a good 5 watt amplifier. They have been here in the form of Tripath chips for a while now.

Cannon----, I must apologize as I completely MISSED your question, back in January. I am very glad that you have had your amp repaired amd with the fan, should last you a very long time. For future reference, there are several parts that compromise the trouble. It is most always, a part that was not rated for the internal and constant temperatures that are inside the box. The fan is an easy fix and anyone that owns a Pro Media and a Bash amp, should look into it. It will make the amp last indefinately and it would have seemed that Bash would have picked up on this idea..... The Pro Medias are some of the finest sounding computer speakers out there and it is a total shame that a couple of parts that cost a few dollars, fail on a regular basis. All of the fixes that I have seen use higher rated temperature parts, which seem to solve the problem, even without the fan option. If you used the same guy I did, I am confident that the repair was a good one and I seemed to outlive the return of the amp, which took four months.

Or build your own Tapped horn for $300 that goes to 15 Hz. See this fellow canadian, quoted above prior build thread. Tapped horns go lower for a given amount of cubic feet of lumber, but not as efficient as a full fledged horn. The Tuba HT, according to Bill Fitzmaurice is an 11 foot long horn with a 25 Hz. cutoff. Mine is an 18 foot tapped horn, with a 16 Hz. cutoff. It's also a coffee table since it's profilte is 30x60x14" high

The numbers I work with are the ones embraced by Tom Danley, who I have dubbed the "King of Bass." Since sub woofers gobble up the majority of the power in any audio installation, whether home or stadium, the rules are the same. Only the orders of magnitude differ. If you believe that, then the answer is 10% of rated power without thermal compression in a voice coil. Conservative operation and horns are the answer to this physical limitation.

I heard a few of PWK's master tapes in his home (2 Khorns in false corners, 1 mono Belle). I asked him about his miking technique........2 spaced omni mikes, not sure the spacing, but I think about 20 feet is what he said. I remember asking PWK about the Blumlein miking technique (do-incident stereo mikes). He said they had too strong of a mono component. I didn't think of it until much later, but having a center channel LaScala (Belle in PWK's case in his home), fed by a PWK designed resistor box CREATES a mono component between two flanks. But different is not the same, eh?

You have stated the problem very well. Back in PWK's day, I believe he stated his speakers were for the 1% of the market who wanted the closest thing to live music. That number has shrunk to 1/10th of that or less, I'm afraid.

It is my sincere hope that whatever digital medium is chosen for PWK's master tapes, that it will contain the purest rendition of the original possible at a reasonable selling price. I would vote for Blue Ray with uncompressed DTS Master codec.

Theoretially, for dogs and other animals with superior high frequency hearing yes. For people, probably not. When I test my hearing, about the time I got Khorns at 23, I was good up to 17.5 Khz.. 35 years later, I can't hear past 12 Khz. When I got the very first CD player on the market in 1983, it had to be Sony, because Philips (the inventors) hadn't come out with theirs yet. Sony used some steep analog filters which had some anomalies as you approached 20 Khz. Now with cheap and sophisticated digital oversampling and filtering techniques, good Digital to Analog conversions are child's play for modern integrated circuits. Also, many of the early CD's were made from analog tapes that had a 12 Khz. boost to compensate for some of the inadequacies of vinyl. Instead of going backwards up the chain towards the original master tapes, many of the record companies merely took the same tape as the LP and threw it onto the CD. Bad move for bad sound. So the ultra flat, ultra low noise, ultra dynamic MEDIUM took the blame for the bad sound, when in fact it totally exposed all the flaws in the recording and production chain. Today's digital stuff is 1,000 times better. But I still listen to my 1983 CD by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan fame as one of the best studio recordings ever and it's digital throughout. So it doesn't sound good, don't blame the medium, blame the producers.

Funny co-incidence you should mention Linda Ronstadt's Simple Dreams LP because I was thinking about that an Hasten Down the wind as the WORST pressings I ever owned on crap vinyl, had to take them back a few times before I got one that didn't look like the Himlayas on the TT........never mind the noise and distortion from recycled vinyl. This is about the time Mobile Fidelity started offering Virgin Vinyl pressings of remasters for best sound from select pop recordings. There was a small HQ market just for us types. Sheffield labs and other direct disc recordings were good as well, but no with mainsteam artists. Made great Khorn demos though.

In my situation I had to balance the bass section with the treble. Thankfully, only one capactitor of the "correct" value gave me good response from about 300 to 18 Khz. from the 2-way top end. Then I EQ the bass with a single 6 db boost at 60 Hz to compensate for the bass horn's rolloff at about 100 Hz. The setup sounded pretty darn good and measure good with the mic in the center of my sweet spot from 50-18Khz. and is very listenable that way with the "pure Audio" button depressed on my Onkyo receiver. The sub bass Tapped horn is flat from 20-60 Hz. at the mouth and goes down to about 15 hz. at the same microphone position I used for the R and L channels, analyzing with Room EQ Wizard frequency sweep. So when I get speaker component tweaks and positions where I want, as good of a curve as possible, only then do I turn Audyssey loose to do it's thing. What I learned is the moving my REW microphone even a few inches left or right give me a RADICALLY different curve, which means the room modes have taken over.........lots of peaks and troughs in the response. When I have used all 6 sensing positions spread way out like in the manual, I get an improment with bad imaging. When I only use 3 postions, center, right and left only about 8 inches on either side of where my head will be, I get rock solid imaging AND overall sound improvement. Other people I know have had similar experiences.

and that's the way it should be.

Seems like this Gjallerhorn sub would make the guys who built the Tuba HT horns drool just a little, since it's only a cubic foot bigger than a 3x3x3 foot max size THT. I'd like to see what happens when someone puts a 21" driver in it.......................geez. I still think 3 SPUDS would do a better job of placment to cancel room modes, but this is, so far, THE real MacDaddy TH design for DIY freaks, that's for sure.

I believed you the first time as to availability. I'm just not totally buying the "reasons" why they don't sell the kits anymore. I met a woman who claims to be unskilled that assembled TWO kits without any trouble. Never underestimate the complete inability of a sizable percentage of the public to follow simple instructions. I include myself in that statement, but I can usually go back and figure out where I f***ed it up. LOL. Very funny. Reminds me of the age old proverb: Nothing is foolproof because fools are very ingenious people, they WILL find a way to screw up even the simplest of things.

Exactly. This has been borne out by others who have tried Audyssey according to the generic directions in their poorly written receiver manuals. Worse yet, some of them have tried to EQ by ear using the manual settings, which kills all time domain adjustments that are part of the "chip Voodo math" that Audyssey provides so well. Without exception, once they all narrowed their mike sampling for a single listener location (one cubic foot), the sound got really tight at the sweet spot, which, is mostly how we all listen anyhow. Where really fancy room design comes in, is where we want to have 6-12 seats in a custom build home theater, where most of the $$, time, and effort should be spent on the room anyhow.

I like what Audyssey does for my speakers and room. It's the ultimate global feedback system built in to mid range receivers. Since I only use milliwatts to listen in 5.1 or 2.1 from my receiver source selector, power is not an issue, but signal compensation is. The key for me, has been to limit the mike placments to strictly around my head in the sweet spot, resulting in amazing sound correction. I won't listen without Audyssey on.

Well, I guess for those who don't want to pay for an assembled DTS-10, they can build a Gjallerhorn, or maybe 3-4 SPUDs for less money than Danley is asking for one DTS-10.

I just inherited about 500 Classical LP's. Some of the recordings go back to the 50's all the way up to 80's. Before this, I only had about 6 Classical LP's and 12 Telarc CD's. Before I start going though these, what are the best labels in terms of recording quality and performance? London, RCA, Time/Life, what??? Signed: Clueless

I believed you the first time as to availability. I'm just not totally buying the "reasons" why they don't sell the kits anymore. I met a woman who claims to be unskilled that assembled TWO kits without any trouble.

As to MP3's, 320 VBR comes pretty close to CD quality. The compression ratio is reasoanable when you want to convert CD's or LP's to save space on Ipods. The reason the compression ratios are so high for the "downloaders" is because Apple and others want to crank as many $$ as possible per second, so the faster the downloads, the faster/more money they make...........product quality be damned.......................hmmmmmmmmmmm reminds me of the recycled vinyl used to make warped and noisy pop LP's in the 70's. I don't care how many Aphex Aural exciters they used on Linda Ronstadts voice, it still sounded like crap on those bad pressings, cusing many returns to get one that didn't skip right out of the new package.

I don't think it's the medium as much as the care and feeding of the mixing boards from good miking techniques. Steely Dan has ALWAYS had good sound from great muscicanship and good recordings/mixes. A true benchmark for pop recordings. Even though "early digital" CD's were supposed to be bad, I still enjoy Donald Fagen's (1/2 of Steely Dan) "The Nightfly" which was made in 1983, and one of the first all Digital recordings. It's ain't the instruments, it's the players. It ain't the technology, it's the practitioners. The best Signal to noise ratio from an LP, is about 60 db. CD's have had over 90 db S/N ratios since the beginning. That's 1,000 times better and allows for WAY more dynamics. Now that we have 24 bits instead of just 16, the number is up over 120 db, which makes the digital medium 1,000,000 times better than LP or tape. 96 and 192 Khz. sampling provides resolution even dogs and bats can appreciate. For me one tick or pop piece of dust/dirt on an LP completely kills the illusion. I was the first one in Michigan to order the very first CD player (Sony or nothing back then) because I had experienced a DBX master tape on Khorns and I wanted that for my Khorns, having been 'digital ready" since my teens. For analog purists, it would be very easy to sample the tape hiss from various Reel to Reel machines with various Ampex or Memorex tape formulation and inject those into the recordings, thereby bringing down the S/N ratio to nostalgically acceptable levels.

BTW, the best of the digital medium far outperforms the analog in terms of resolution and Signal to Noise. So putting those master recordings on Blue Ray's format DTS Mater being my fave, should capture all of the analog data, what is left of it, with no problem. Trouble is. No one does this because teen agers don't give a crap about fidelity, only being able to put 10,000 songs in their pockets.

I heard a few of PWK's master tapes in his home (2 Khorns in false corners, 1 mono Belle). I asked him about his miking technique........2 spaced omni mikes, not sure the spacing, but I think about 20 feet is what he said.

Of course, which is why I bet the theaters equipped with this stuff probably sound good despite the obvious copies. Also, adding stiffeners to the cabinets is an improvement over the old, but not by much. A friend of mine is a good friend with Klipsch's current Chief Engineer in the Commercial division (fishin' buds). He asked why Klipsch wasn't concerned about this. He was told because they are small potatoes in the Pro Marketplace, so they don't care about them using old technology, PWK passed over 10 years ago, so there's no one left to care. They are too busy selling and installing the newer, better stuff.

Is this shyness or indifference? Or, perhaps a warning to others? LOL. BTW, I like your avavatar. What is you Xover frequency to the big Altec? Does it do 300 Hz. like a 311? Now I found your "shyness" possibility interesting. Cut-throat has never been known to be shy in the past. My guess is he might be tired of wearing his finger tips raw from typing the same basic information over and over again. I find it interesting that you are from Michigan and use the British term "valve" with your PWK derived Avatar. When PWK gave me a tour of the museum back in 1985, (orginal Klipsch building where Khorns were measured and the C.P. Boner Polycylindrical surfaces abound), I noticed a Marantz 8B in the glass case. I said: "Mr. Klipsch, you can't put that amp in there, I'm using one on my Khorns!" to which, he replied: "That's a very good amplifier." Are you the one I hear about that does wonders for old tube amps??