Islander

Although I have not heard any tractix horns, the exponential horns on my La Scalas and Heresy IIs don't sound nasal, honky, or hollow, to me or to anyone who has ever listened to them. Listening to a tractix-equipped speaker might be an eye- and ear-opener, but my current stuff sounds pleasant and realistic to me. I must admit that I wasn't impressed when I first got the La Scalas, but with the usual tweaks (Dynamat, new Sonicaps, CT125s, etc.) plus some grille cloth experimentation, they now sound really good, even at quite low volume levels.Just for curiousity, which other companies are currently making affordable horn-loaded speakers, especially those honky ones that keep getting mentioned? I don't count Avant Garde as affordable, even though they probably sound great. As for the missing octave at the bottom end, that's definitely true, but a good sub fills it in nicely and should be a part of any La Scala setup.

Max isn't kidding about the MX-D1's build quality. According to the review in Stereophile, "The MX-D1's overall construction and parts quality appear to be extremely high; the heavy, copper-plated chassis has extensive magnetic shielding and vibration control."... ...Inside is a true dual-mono design, including separate power supplies, that Yamaha calls Twin Monaural Construction. Although the list price is US$5000, John Atkinson, Stereophile's lab tester, stated: "Summing up these measurements, the beautifully finished Yamaha MX-D1 offers both very high power and very high dynamic range at a very attractive price." In the review in the UK magazine, Hi-Fi News, the reviewer wrote: "As you might expect from a product at this price, the standard of its construction, inside and out, is meticulously detailed. Mono channels are the order of the day with independent power supplies and even independent, screened chambers for the input amplifier, the output filtering and switching supply. No expense has been spared - even the output filters are exclusive, low-impedance toroids with double cores." It's definitely not a mass-market item like most Yamaha gear. A Yamaha USA tech told me that only about 200 were built. Happily, all that effort resulted in a very pleasant-sounding unit that provides high levels of presence and clarity when listening to music.

Good one, Bob! Was the runt a production model or a one-off? One of those might make a nice center channel match for a pair of La Scalas. I wonder if Klipsch ever considered that?

Just couldn't look at "Vynal" anymore...

When you put it that way, Fritz, I wonder how a Scala would sound if it was made using 2 sheets of plywood, for example if the speaker was the same width but was deeper, with a taller bass bin? The horn opening doesn't need to be square. If a La Scala was a foot taller, it would still be shorter than a Khorn.I still respect how manufacturing efficiency was an integral part of the design. It makes the speakers closer to affordable and keeps the business on a more solid footing, two good things.

It's much simpler to just add a subwoofer to a sensible sized pair of speakers. The 30 Hz horns work, but they're huge. Here's a picture of a pair of them, with a door to give a sense of scale:

To get really low bass with a horn-loaded speaker, the horn needs to be really big. The La Scala was designed to be portable, assuming you have roadies available, so it's not that big. A horn that can go down to 30 Hz looks like this:

If you like Yamaha gear and it's in your budget, you could look for an Internet dealer who's carrying the MX-D1 amp. 500Wpc of clean class D power, and it's happy to run at a fraction of a watt.

In the Yamaha AV receiver manual, it says that all the digital processing in some of the new TVs causes the delay, so the receiver has adjustable delay so you can set the audio to match the screen action.

I wouldn't go smaller than 12 gauge in any case. It's not that bulky and won't restrict transient response the way smaller cable can.

Gold-plated connectors don't oxidize, but uncoated speaker wire does. Oxygen-free copper is better than the cheaper type for conductivity reasons, but as for oxidation, there's plenty of oxygen in the air, so oxygen-free copper wire oxidizes as quickly as any other kind.The wires inside your speaker (and most other places as well) have insulation on them, which keeps the electricity in and the oxygen out, so you don't need to worry about oxidation there. The only insulated wire that seems to corrode is the cheap Home Depot stuff that you can see turning green through the clear insulation over time. That doesn't happen all the time, but it has been reported a few times. If you use bare wire to connect to your speakers, you might want to snip off the exposed part and strip back the insulation so you can re-connect with non-oxidized cable. Depending on the local climate, that would be at most twice a year, or possibly every few years. Connectors can help shield the wire from the air, so that's another reason to use them, as well as the convenience.

I use crimp-on mini-spades, crimp them, then for good measure solder them as well. If the solder fills in any air gaps, that should improve conductivity and almost eliminate any oxidation of the cable within the connector, plus it makes it less likely that the connectors will ever loosen up. With very fine-stranded wire, it's hard to get it to stay in place on a binding post, so it's much easier and more convenient to use some sort of connector.

I had the sub before I had the Scalas, but I wouldn't be without it. On my Yamaha receiver, there is a 'Pure Direct' setting which bypasses all the extraneous circuitry and turns off the display, for the least possible interference. The sound is nice and clean, but unfortunately it also turns off the sub and the music sounds quite thin. Acoustic guitar with no vocals sounds pretty good, but I usually switch back to 'Straight' mode within a few minutes. With my particular setup, I get the best, more realistic, fewest dips and peaks, sound with the sub crossed over at 150 Hz. Naturally all the speakers are set at 'Large'. If you put your ear near the sub during speech, some male voices, or at least parts of them, come out of the sub. I'd never have thought voices could go so deep, but some do. The deep bass is the foundation of the music, so if the bass is not solid, the music sounds thin and "canned". As Mike pointed out, the improvement that a good sub provides seems to go higher in the frequency range than you would expect.

Just this afternoon, I picked up some closed-cell foam (1/8" thick) to put around the tweeter cut-outs to absorb the early reflections and perhaps moderate the diffraction effects. I'll see if I can hear any difference. Perhaps cymbals will be more clear and defined.

Bob, what type of horn does the CT125 use? Is it exponential, tractix, or something else? Just curious.

On my La Scalas, the CT125s (mounted from the rear in the usual place) were about 1/8" too high for the removable cabinet lids to go back on. The solution was to chisel a 1/4" deep relief, 3" wide and 2" from front to back. The lid is 3/4" thick, like the rest of the cabinet, so I didn't worry about it causing any problems. It's less simple with the usual non-removable top, but if you can see in and mark it carefully, you could do the job with a Dremel tool or something similar. The very noticeable sound improvement the CT125s give make it well worthwhile to do a little fitting.

In Toronto, the police would say they got a "tune-up", well-deserved in this case (not that I advocate violence).

Exactly! If you're willing to forget your ethics and morals to save a few bucks, you pay a price. In this case, the price is obvious as soon as you listen to your "bargain" speakers.

You're missing it altogether. These aren't thieves or delivery drivers at all. They're trained salesmen pretending to be thieves, who are selling fancy-looking junk at apparently great prices. You'll notice that the driver and helper usually have laminated flyers describing the merchandise, so you can see what a great value it is. Doesn't that seem odd? They have a number of brands of speakers, all poorly made of the cheapest possible components, often with brand names that look or sound similar to quality brands. It's a speaker marketing company that has no public location and no return or warranty issues, since the sucker customers think they bought from thieves and have received stolen property, something they'd never normally do, but "It was such a deal!"

Using seatbelts in a car and wearing a helmet when riding a motorcycle or bicycle is only common sense. The laws are only needed for those folks without common sense. BTW, the number of helmet-wearing accident victims who wind up in a vegetative state are very likely greatly outnumbered by the helmet-wearing accident victims who suffer little or no head injuries, but would have been badly injured or killed without a helmet. That PA story really sounds like an urban myth. I know a little about motorcycle helmets and the protection they can provide, having ridden on the street for 28 years and on the professional racing circuit for several years in Canada and the US.

You have to hit Shift-Enter instead of just Enter. It's one of the new "improvements". Your idea of assembling a high-performance speaker out of whatever drivers you have lying around, some kind of box and some kind of crossover makes speaker design sound very easy. I don't believe it's easy at all. For starters, you may have noticed that there are very few, if any, 7-way speakers on the market. Breaking down the audio spectrum into 7 segments may seem logical, but it would introduce more complications than any experienced designer has so far wanted to deal with. I'm sure some of the other forum members can point you to some informative reading that will be helpful for you.

test test test Just used this posting to see how to separate the paragraphs in the previous posting.

I'm not liking it at all. Too much white, then the black screen, then back to white. It makes for a lot of glare with low-level lighting in the evening. It also gives a low-budget look to the forum. As well, there's no indication of who posted each thread, no indication of how many have viewed each thread, no way to quote someone (that was very useful at times), plus you no longer see "Signed on as", so you have to think twice as to whether you're signed on or not. This should be the third paragraph. I haven't memorized the new trick, so I'll see if simply using the Enter key will suffice to produce a posting that looks like what I just typed. Oh, this is interesting. Now the field I'm typing in is wider than the window, so some of the letters are off the edge. Has anyone else noticed that the new layout is wider than a 1024x768 screen? See how the left side of the Klipsch logo is off the screen? The indication of whether a posting appeared yesterday or today was a useful feature that seems to have disappeared, along with the indication of how long ago, in minutes or hours, the entry was posted. It appears that the number of postings is down. The site is less pleasant to use. It's not an improvement in any way, IMHO. I'm using Internet Explorer, if that makes a difference. EDIT: Using Shift-Enter does what Shift alone did with the previous-style forum. Two strokes are better than one?

Yes, the concept totally makes sense, but as in many things audio, logical doesn't always mean audible. Does anyone know if you can hear the difference between front-and rear-mounted tweeters and is one clearly better than the other?

Nicely done! I like it.