ClaudeJ1

You have Jubilees?? Did you build them or buy the theater version. If so, what top end do have for them. How do they compare to Khorns?? Inquiring minds want to know. I'll start a new thread if you want. Claude

Well I suppose that, if it's true, it's a reasonable and respectful answer. but a 1/2 octave is a 1/2 octave, so there must be some other overrriding technical reason for not doing so, or one asssigned by management. Claude

OK, so why woudn't they use the CT-125 instead?? Why leave out the last 5K??? I mean for a pair of speakers that cost $5,500 to $7,500 not have as good of a high end as their cheaper counterparts of yore, makes no sense to me. claude

I would love to see a twin pair of modified K79-K tweeters on modern Khorns and LaScala II's. K77's completely ignore the last 1/2 Octave between 15-20Khz and the K79's get there, but with about 3 db less efficiency, so why not twin them up and get the extra volume AND better dispersion. I don't think cost would be an issue, just "tradition." Claude

I would love to see a twin pair of modified K79-K tweeters on modern Khorns and LaScala II's. K77's completely ignore the last 1/2 Octave between 15-20Khz and the K79's get there, but with about 3 db less efficiency, so why not twin them up and get the extra volume AND better dispersion. I don't think cost would be an issue, just "tradition." Claude

"The article was intended to be an advertisement." John Warren. Your last sentence is the best one out of the 126 posts. Since I got to spend a good 10 hours mono y mono (my wife understood) with PWK in 1985 and I spoke with Jim Hunter for at least an hour (his beer bottle collection must be huge by now), I got to ask lots of questions. One of them was about Dick Heyser and TDS. PWK mentioned that while "phase coherency" was not the strong suit of a Khorn, it was deemed to be very low on "things to achieve" when it comes to human detectability on speech and music. I also asked about monster cables and PWK's reply was "it's and expensive way to supply current to a 30 AWG voice coil." Even as far back as 1985, PWK (he was 81, remember) was not as intimately involved in every day details and he didn't seem to trumpet (pun inteded) too many decisions made by marketing and sales. But even he was somewhat surprised at how large the company had gotten. Let's face it, the Heresy saved K&A from going broke and it's the smaller/cheaper speakers that pay the bills not the Khorn. He did have a lot of respect for the Dick Heyser, but Dick LIKED the Khorns, even though they may have been at odds with the quasi-religious meanderings of the lay press at the time, concerning the relative importance of TDS in speaker design. Without getting too romantic about it, it's simply just another way (on the list of many) to test things and shows unique forms of data, but it's not the be all to end all. As a magazine author in 2 different fields, with over 150 published articles, I have had a chance to review many products, hardware and sofware wise. If I didn't like something, it never made it to press. If I did like something I wrote it up and it got published. That is not to say you can't offer opinion on your own perception of product flaws. But, overall, when advertizing pay the bills, you can't trash a product AND ask for money. It has been 20 years or more since I read that arcticle, and what I got out of it was that Dick found the TRANSIENT response of horn bass to sound more REAL than his custom subwoofer designed to go flat to 10 Hz. Bottom line? Paul was RIGHT!!! Claude

So doing a quick capacitance to ESR ratio on the second capacitor (mid?) I get 150.87:1. Doing same on the other, and comparing them, the bigger cap is 4,000 times better. Assuming for a minute that my Xover has the same "faulty" components, at that gross of ratio of "badness" it's a wonder there's any sound coming out of it at all. Yet, just plugging in new tweeters in the same "bad" Xover a huge improvement over the K77 and matches the timbre more closely of the chorus, whose Xover is probably 10 years younger than my old AA's in the Khorns. So the big question is what is the SONIC benefit of having lower ESR, or closer to a pure capacitance, as you suggest and what is the detriment of NOT having it. What is the test frequency of these components? That should have a bearing on the ESR numbers, right? Basically I only spent about $250 for used tweeter motors and lenses. If you break it down by $$per pound and multiply by sonic improvement multiplied by low labor content, I got a hell of a deal. Now I have no doubt that you have done your homework when it comes to quality capacitors, but how can I possibly make THAT much difference by spending the same amount of money on Caps? I guess I am in need of serious further enlightenement, so please be my guest. Claude

They are yellow like those, but but they say 200 volts, I think, and they are round. Does the ESR lower the decibels of the Tweeter? If so that may be why they sound fine in place of the K77's. I have a metal capacitro. just like the other one in your photo is that a 20 Microfarad. Maybe I should just replace those if that's the case. Lemmeno. Claude "one step at a time for me" Jodoin

I agree wholeheartedly, Mark. That's why they have salt and pepper shakers on the table. Your soup should taste good to you. You own the taste buds. As do I in my domain. Klipsch get us 90% there. The rest is up to us.

A big thank you to all on the forum who steered me toward JBL Baby Cheek tweeters, indirectly and directly. all it took was 16 square inches of foam padding for R&L front chennels to protect the WL sufface of my Khorn tops and 2 pieces of speaker wire to create it. The K-77's are disconnected. I just listened to Diana Krall Live in Paris on DVD in 5.1 DTS, my front channels' HF performance finally matches that of the Chorus rears. Man, what an amazing revelation of detail. Why K&A deosn't upgrade the HF sound of Khorns and LaScalas to match that of Cornwall II, III's, Chorus, Chorus II's, Forte, Forte II's, Heresy II's and Heresy III's I'll never know. Why not use a few of THOSE tweeters in parallel if need be instead of replicating the K-77's anemic performance in the last, supposedly inaudible last octave? Thanks to Jim Hunter for creating a better high end for the non-PWK speakers of the 80's, 90's and beyond. Even though it wasn't as bad as being a Bose listenener, I suspected, now verified that I was missing a whole bunch of music up there. Claude

I just overlaid the grids from the literature shots I found posted here, and added the Chorus II from my own printout/digital camera. There may be some very slight inaccuracies, but I'm sure it's tighter than the tolerance window of the measure curves at the factory, based on unit variations. I used the Klipschorn Grid as a base and painted/traced the other (zoomed in using Photoshop), added the color coded text, and flattened the layers, then made a Jepeg. A man from Vermont was once asked: "How's your wife?" to which, he replied: "Compared to what?"

What came as no suprise was the "Slam" everyone talks about with the Cornwall bass is hump from 60-80 Hz. Otherwise the surprise was how much more efficient the Chorus II's were than the Chorus. The Forte has the best broad band response but needs 4x the power of a Khorn. The brown curve is actually a Cornwall II, not a Cornwall, since there is not K-77 dip a 20kHz.

I have made a composite of several Klipsh heritage speakers, which might be of interest. Claude

If you look at my current system, it took me a long time to find sub-bass units to work semlessly with my Khorns and fill in the very last octave that is missing (other magical claims to the contrary). I find Active Subwoofers, the servo-driven "air pumps" to be less than adequate for musical listening, but fine for movies. The idea was to keep distortion LOW by having LOTS of cone area, motors, etc. to keep the cone excursion to the Khorn's 1/16th inch Xmax (inside the horn). But how do you make up for 10 db less eficiency?? You need 10X the power, but more motors and cones to keep the push on the drivers equivalent to the attacks (dynamics) of a bass horn. These VMPS things really do it, and form a solid 13 foot wall of speakers against concrete in total. I use the DTS canons from the Master and Commander movie as a demos, where you feel the flesh on your legs wiggling when shty go off, but, without touching any controls, you can still listen to regular CD's without boomy bass. I don't change any settings ever on my system. Unlike my brother who has to stuff a nerf football his subwoofer ports to make music listenable. I got a steal deal on Ebay....$400 a pair, including the amp, but it was local pickup only in Sacramento (probably $2-3K new). Turns out I had done some consulting close to there just one week prior and made a few new friends. My new friend agreed to pick them up and box them for me. $300 shipping (300 punds on a pallett) they were at a local trucking company. The old VMPS Large Subwoofers are entirely passive with a 12" and 15" Active driver, a passive 15" (drone cone) in a large port near the floor. They are dead flat to 23Hz and halfway between my Center LaScala (which I have had since I was 23....almost 30 years) and the Khorns in height. Surround sound is a new thing for me and find the Onkyo power amps in the reciver to be wonderful. Yeah, I had tubes, blah blah blah, but SS is so good nowadays, ever since Matti Otala found all the TIM bugs in the seventies, all SS amps being produced in Japan today are good enough. If you examine the response curves of the Khorn vs. LaScala, the LS's have a better upper cutoff to the mid-horn and don't suffer from the 300 Hz dip. I have given up on pure 3-channel (2 channel + bridged mono, same as PWK's home system) stereo and have managed to get really nice sound from my cheap Onkyo 5.1 receiver using the Neo6 (DTS) setting (refurb on the Net for $183 to my door). In that world, all the LFE information for movies or otherwise occurs at 80 Hz. based on both the DTS and Dolby D specitications. After much experimentation to the contrary, I decided that an 80 Hz. subwoofer crossover point was optimum for both movies and music (I used the Avia DVD and a sound level meter for setup in MY room). I have owned just about all the other Klipsch speakers at one time or another. My wife has had Heresy's since 1983, which I got for her for Xmas after she cashed in a small life insurance policy to get me the first CD player ever made....a Sony........she's a keeper alright.....we have been together for 31 years, now with 3 adult kids. My son has Klipsches also. So, now that I am sold on subs, even for 2/channel listening at work, I find that LaScala Bass Bins will work just as well as corner horns for the purpose, with a superior mid-bass definition, and will cross at 500 Hz to my newly acuired Altec 511B/902's.

OK, you guys have given me an old disease back. I just got a pair of 511B's and 902 drivers. I originally had a pair with 808-8a drivers when I was 19 years old, mated to a Speakerlab X-over). I made 20 cubic ported boxes with Altec 421-8H woofers and an EV-T35 tweeter that was the best sound I ever had at the time, but I had been dreaming of Khorns since I was 14. To get the cash for my honeymoon (poor boy and girl get married), I sold those DIY Altec speakers in 1977 for $650 to a friend (I had a grand in just raw components). The deal was my fiancee would co-sign (she had credit, I was a cash and carry boy). The Khorns arrived about a week after my honeymoon, so we had a beer drinking/listening party with 2 buddies after kicking my new bride out for the afternoon. She understood. Anyway, fast forward to 1985. She arranged a surprise visit to Hope for me to tour the factory in private. I maled a letter to PWK and he agreed to meet with me. We discussed many things that day in his living room, including the false corners he built, the lone Belle Center channel, an how he had to shorten the K-400 to a K-500 make the Belles. Here's the quote, and this is important to DIY tweakers at large: "After we measured the K-500, I was conviced that we had made the K-400 a lot LONGER than it needed to be." So the K-400 could be made somewhere between the depth of a K500 and a K400 (K450?). So now it looks like I will be building some LaScala bass bins. I have twin JBL 2404's, twin 511/902's, and a friend of mine pulled K-33's from his Cornwalls and put in some heavier duty motors......he's an EQ freak. So It looks like I will be buying lumber and X0over parts pretty soon..............................

I just found this on Ebay. I guess PWK used to do this very thing in production for the mono folks at the time, eh? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220061454973&indexURL=0&photoDisplayType=2#ebayphotohosting

I can definitely relate to that statement. I used to have several mall Santa photo operations. Little kids are cool. I appreciate what you have done with your Khorns here. If it may serve as a bit more support for your project, aside from the sound improvement you speak of: I just watched Cars today on my system which is similar to yours. The THX sound of that movie is amazing. FYI: I spent an entire day with PWK back in 1985. My wife arranged for a private factory tour and I wrote a personal letter to PWK. He and Valerie treated my wife and I like royalty and he invited us into their home. I did a shot of fine scotch with PWK as he played some of his own recordings (reel to reel tape) for me. The false corner plans he published were exactly the ones he built for himself. His Khorns and Belle were in a great big living room which also contained two grand pianos (Bohsendorfer and Steinway). The 3-channel stereo was to the left of that. Those false corners were absolutely solid sounding. I had built some myself back in my old living room. He also recommended a rubber seal in the back. So PWK practiced what he preached, that's for sure. His personal recordings (Little Rock Symphony) sounded excellent as they were done with only twin spaced omni mikes, similar to the excellent Telarc recordings of the day.

OK, thanks for the clarification. I do appreciate it. So sticking with a 3-way system, would rather use a 2404 with a Klipschorn rather than a 2405? Same driver, better dispersion, better horn/bandwidth? I just bought a single 2404H used to try. Should I not bother with trying a single 2505? If so what will I find. Seems to me I'd be better with 2 more 2404's and git 'er done with along with new caps on the AA's. Claude

I don't know you from Adam's off-ox, since I'm new here. The only thing others said about you was that your high frequency hearing was bad, which rather than help me make a decision, came off as some private banter and I'm not sure if it's true or not. If that's the case, how can you give tweeter advice? I'm just trying to understand. I can only base my reaction on what you write. It you don't like 4-way, you didn't say why. Based on your post I can't possibly take your recommendation seriously since the tweeter your recommended costs over $1,000, which quite frankly ticks me off a little. I'm sure it would do the same for your if the situation were reversed. All I'm trying to do is to improve the treble response of a K-77 to give the highs between 10-20 khz a little lift as economically as possible without cutting up my Khorns or LaScalas. Seems to me that the Foxtex super tweeters, at $100-145 ea. might work economically since they can sit on top of my horns. Seems like everyone here is pre-occupied with building bass horn cabinets, which is fine by me, but I can only thank people for offering useful suggestions, otherwise, silence is a perfectly acceptable alternative. I will seek my answers elsewhere. Claude

Looking to, perhaps using the Fostex bullet supertweeter (100 or 106 db models), about $100 to $146 each respectively, crossed at 10k, they go to 35k. Yeah, I know I can't hear it but just in case, I'd like to extend the high end without touching the K77's. maybe a first order at 12-15k, even whatever way to aligna and blend with the K77. That's what it should almost be called an Ultra Tweeter. Claude

So what about a Beyma slot tweeter, anyone tried that? Seems like it's the same price new as a used JBL..

OK, so between all the Xover posts, re-capping AA's, etc. reading about BEMA tweeters, etc. I just won ONE Baby Cheek (JBL 2404) and am bidding on ONE JBL 2405 Slot tweeter to test. may the best super tweeter win. Even though it's only about 3 Khz. more than my K-77's, and slightly lower effeiciency, the high end in my Chorus II's seem a lot crisper than my Khorns or La Scala. So I will probably start with BEC's capacitor replacements, to see if that has any impact (can't hurt), then I will try out the Baby Cheeks vs. the Slot JBL with a small capacitor (first order only) on both the JBL's with pink noise. Then I will have a single channel audition of the K-77 vs. both of the JBL's, via an ABC switch. At that point, I will decide which of the horses I should use to pull my upgrade wagon, times 3. At that point I will sell the loser JBL, and buy 2 more of the winners on the used market since the damn things are so expensive to start with and no longer manufactured (isn't that true of anything good??), where "new improved" isn't always the case. So, this may turn out to be an futile exercise, but I must satisfy the curiosity which was created by all the intelligent posts I have read during my short time here. Can anyone address my issues with similar experiences with details as to why it measured or sounded better? I suspect that having the higher frequencies represented has been nothing more than a slight EQ for my 52 year old ears, where I'm betting that the JBL Slot tweeter will win, but we shall see. Claude

I have had 3-channel stereo since I was 20 years old. Having built my own 15" woofered, bass reflex cabinets with VOC horns and EV T-35's back in the mid-seventies. When I saved up enough "paper route money" I got to my goal of the PWK classical Array of Twin Khorns and a La Scala in the middle using PWK's passive mono center box and 3 amplifiers. Over a quarter century later, I "upgraded" to a surround sound receiver from Onkyo and added the compulsory sub for the Dot One channel. I found a TWIN set of VMPS Large Sub-Woofers (passive) with a free 200 w/ch. Amplifier for $400 on Ebay. A steal by any standard, for 2 boxes with a 12" and 15" with a 15" passive in a big bottom port in each box. My thoughts were that I would need lots of cone area in big boxes to make up for the inefficiencies of Low Frequency Bass Reflex/Drone cone design. My thoughts proved correct as I find this combo to fill in the missing bottom end I never knew about all these years. It took a Radio Shack SPL meter and the AVIA test DVD to get the system tweaked, but I'm happy to say that listening to music has added another dimension. This is what "Quadrophonic" should have been, but they didn't have the Digital Signal Processing standards to do it at the time. I can watch Pearl Harbor or Master and Commander with bombs and canon shots rattling the flesh on my legs, while without changing any settings listen to CD's in Neo6 mode or DVD concerts without any exaggeration of bass at all, which I hate to have in music. This, as opposed to people who need to use 2 different sub settings, one for music and one for movies. Good subs help complete the picture, even on Khorns, but until the birth of the LFE channel made it a must, there was never much signal there to justify it, unless you were a pipe organ freak.

I have noticed the the extreme high end of my Chorus I and II's (and in former Heresy II's), in 2 channel listening, appears to be extended up a tad when compared to my original K-77's in my 1977 front Khorns and center La Scala (which was for 25 years used with the PWK's passive resistor box and 1/2 of a stereo amp). Being new on this board, I'm not sure about the tweeter evolution that happened here in the past. Is there a cheap easy way to extend the highs to sound more like the Chorus Tweeters and maintain efficiency close to the K77's to augment the 10K-20K band?? Claude