bechboy7

Somewhat related, I was looking into ways to get cheap, honest bass and ran across an article on Fletcher-Munson curves. It seems that they are no longer in vogue but have been replaced by ISO 226: 2003 revision. The relevance of this is a marked difference in equal loudness in the bass area. For example, if you establish a baseline at 1kHz of 80dB SPL and run across equal loudness to 100 Hz, an SPL of 91 is required. And it gets much worse. 30 Hz equal loudness takes a whopping 110 db SPL !! My system surely won't approach that at maximum rated input power. The consensus was that the Fletcher-Munson curves were erroneously generated in the bass area for some unknown reason. No one knew why. WIKIPEDIA under "Fletcher-Munson". Bad news.

Welcome new members. I too am a newbie. It's hard to come up with a question that's not embarrassing or nonsensical with all the guru's out there! Something worth considering is efficiency and acoustic watts and intermodulation distortion. Competitors of Klipsch have argued for years about the merits/demerits of maintaining low IM % (limited cone movement of bass driver). At a given level of acoustic watt output, the bass driver must move accordingly. The smaller the driver, the greater cone excursion. PWK almost eliminated this distortion (much more noticeable than harmonic distortion) in the K-horn. With non-horn loaded bass drivers, it is a physical limitation of cone diameter. With a tightly controlled, critically damped bass driver in a ported bass reflex cabinet, and a 15" driver you have - - - - - a Cornwall of all things! Isn't life great! With a low mid-range crossover, the bass driver isn't forced to over extend itself. Of course you must position the Cornwall vertically without intervening furniture between its mf and hf drivers and your ears. And solid floor contact does make a difference in the lowest bass register (31.7 Hz on the pipe organ, if not 15.85 Hz as in the C.B. Fisk organ at Meyerson Concert Hall, Dallas, Tx.) Just another two-cents worth.

High School in the late 50's: a dance in the gym accompanied by a DJ and an E-V Aristocrat folded horn, horn-loaded speaker system (mono). The Chorus room featuring a home built Bass-Reflex three-way system with University woofer and midrange horn and tweeter. JBL distributed-port speaker system with 15" full range driver demo'd by a JBL agent in his home. At college, a demo by none other than Paul W. Klipsch at an IEEE meeting in an auditorium, featuring two K-horns, an Ampex tape recorder, and a slide presentation of the defects with his competitors speakers. Sitting in PWK's lab and listening to a couple of K-horns melt away in effortless reproduction of music, enveloping us (we were sitting in the horns, literally). Finally, a demo by a dealer in Alabama of the Cornwall II of the record we had brought featuring a lot of tympani. My wife plays percussion in a symphony orchestra so she knew what it should sound like. The Cornwall's sold her and me, gleefully! Two-Channel Audio: If you want the speakers to "disappear" and leave only the music, then get a couple of Cornwalls. They are no Klipschorn but are a magnificent substitute. If it's in the music, the Cornwalls will reproduce it faithfully, transparently, period! Good listening!

My KSF-10.5's (FL & FR) are tagged "Inspected by" & "Tested by" with signoffs by Klipsch, Hope Arkansas. The same for my KSF-S5's (LR & RR). Circa 1998. These units have exceeded all of my expectations while taking a SMALL footprint and obeying Paul W. Klipsch's "Ten Cardinal Rules" for Loudspeaker Design & Placement. What a comfort to have a real product made my real people -- in Hope, Ark. Hope this helps.