Arkytype
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I'm having a senior moment--does anyone who was at the Gathering remember the "Rush" album and/or cut that was played during the listening "tests"?
Lee
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Colin is the perfect house guest---he snores louder than I do!!
A great time was had by all at Daddy Dee's. With the exception of young Stream, the rest of us were old farts who acted like they were much younger.
Having not owned vacuum tube audio equipment for 25+ years, it's interesting to see a trend to low power amplifiers.
Thanks to Trey for walking the fine line between being a company man and good ol' boy. I would guess he took back some things to think about product-wise.
Colin's description of my system is very generous. It's a work in progress. At several points during our hours-long listening session, he'd ask if the center channel Belle Klipsch was on. It wasn't. The imaging and focus of the sound field is that good. Part of that is due (I think) to ALK's Extreme Slope crossovers. Soon as I get it tweaked to my liking, I'll post the changes on "Odds and Mods".
I'd like to host the next Gathering (maybe this fall?) and take a trip to Hope to see the PWK museum. Hey Trey, how about Klipsch renting a Class A motorhome to take us all down together????
Lee
Lee
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It might be a good idea for those who plan to attend The Gathering to RSVP this thread in the next few days just to get a rough head count. If there are those of you needing free lodging at the Arkytype Inn, let me know a few days out. I can accommodate three or four (you'll have to contend with a farting dog as well as his owner!).
I'd prefer to be contacted at lclinton@aetn.org or 501-682-4161.
Thanks,
Lee
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Hey guys and gals,
I've got the first two of Al K's Extreme Slope crossovers for my Klipschorns and one for my center Belle Klipsch.
I'm upgrading all three to the Altec 511B, 811B and the Beyma C-25 tweeters. If I don't have the mods finished by the "gathering", I'll bring the crossovers to connect to Daddy Dee's horns.
I live and work in Conway which is about 45 minutes from Little Rock. If there are any of you who need cheap (as in free) overnight accomodations at my home, I can probably handle three or four. I can also provide shuttle transportation to the Little Rock airport the next day.
The Klipsch museum in Hope opened recently. That's quite a drive and might be a good destination for The Gathering II in the fall.
If you think you might want to stay at my home, please e-mail me a week or so from the gathering. Thanks.
Lee
lclinton@aetn.org
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Hey Guys and Gals,
I live and work in Conway, Arkansas (staff engineer at AETN, the local PBS affiliate). Has anyone considered meeting in the central Arkansas area and then driving to Hope for a plant tour? Don't know what's left down there but it might be worth contacting Trey or someone at corporate.
Conway is about 40 minutes from LR and I'd be happy to show off our new digital facility which is currently undergoing system integration. By the end of March, we'll be on line with the new gear and I'd be happy to give a tour. I may be able to host a cookout at my house that afternoon. I've got Klipschorns and a Belle and might have a new product from Al K. for everyone to audition. For those who don't mind where they sleep, I can put up several overnighters.
Lee
Lee
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Al, et al, (no pun intended)
Back in the mid-seventies I worked for an audio dealer who sold both Klipsch and the then-new Advent loudspeakers.
The Klipsch driver replacement policy at the time was to replace them at no charge, no questions asked. If the customer repeatedly had failures, we would make a visit to the home to investigate.
Usually, the driver (almost always the tweeter) failure was due to a POS amplifier or receiver (rated at around 20-50 average watts) being driven into clipping.
The customer (usually a young adult or teenager) had probably just sold his Sansui or Pioneer loudspeakers. With the purchase of Heresys or Cornwalls, he experienced lower distortion and higher output and, as a result, would turn up the volume until the tweeters fried.
I don't think we ever replaced a squawker driver. We did replace a few woofers and those failures were usually due to massive over-powering.
PWK's solution to keep the number of warranty replacement drivers at an acceptable level was to incorporate the Zener diode mod.
He wrote about this crossover change in one of the "Dope From Hope" newsletters.
The Advent loudspeakers were usually sold as part of a 20-40 watt receiver, turntable (remember those?) combination system. Most users were content to listen at moderate listening levels and never experienced driver failure. There were a few customers that would manage to burn out a tweeter on a weekly basis. After the first freebie replacement, the rest were the customer's responsibility.
We examined many so-called defective tweeters and usually found the voice coil or former charred as if you had taken a blow torch to it. This from a 20 watt amplifier? Hmmm.
One of the in-store tests we did to determine why low-powered amplifiers were frying tweeters was to connect a pair of Large Advent loudspeakers to a high-quality, high powered (300+ watt) McIntosh component system. With the tone controls set flat, you could play symphonic music (Telarc?) at levels that were painful and the Advents would never fail. Next we'd take a low-powered (20-40 watts) trade-in receiver and play the same material. Didn't take long for one or both tweeters to fail. Of course, the audible distortion before driver failure was a warning to turn the volume down.
Monty Ross has written an interesting paper on power amplifier clipping. This is RaneNote 128 on the rane.com web site.
Al is correct, the best tweeter protection is to turn down the volume control. IMHO, the best way to reduce driver failure is to keep the amplifier from clipping. Once the clipping-induced harmonics have left the speaker terminal, it's hard to design a passive circuit that will distinguish between a clean and loud signal and a "noise burst".
After previewing this reply, I noticed that only part of the text is there. Apologies in advance if only part gets posted.
Arkytype
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Hobbit--
I started at the North Little Rock store at Northpark Mall in 1974 for a year or two and then worked at the Rodney Parham store until 1979-80?
Are you from Arkansas?
Arkytype
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KhornKerry-
I misspoke about the age of my horns. I checked my records and discovered they were delivered in January of 1976. It may be a few days, but I'll try to send you some pix. With the exception of cane grills, they look identical to yours.
I was fortunate in being able to pick out the Klipschorn fronts and edge veneering at the plant. I ordered them without logos as I had a few of the old style which I installed on the fronts.
Arkytype
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bkrop---
I was working for a Klipsch dealer in Little Rock at the time and bought them through the "salesman accommodation program" most manaufacturers offer to dealer employees.
Getting a pair of Rosewood Klipschorns and center Belle for half of retail was (and is) a pretty good deal! The product ID sticker has (if my memory serves me) "NOT FOR RESALE--SALESMAN ACCOMMODATION". Obviously, this is meant to prevent a sales person from buying and reselling a pair of loudspeakers every year.
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HDBRbuilders's memory might be a little fuzzy when he asserted that all Klipsch Rosewood loudspeakers were made from Brazilian Roosewood.
I believe the early K-Horns were offerd in Brazilian Rosewood but the Rosewood models sold in the '70s were made of Honduran Rosewood.
Bob Moers who was Paul's business manager back then told me that unless Rosewood was in the form of a product, it couldn't be exported from Brazil. I think they had a few small pieces of genuine Brazilian in stock (a carry over from the early days?) but not enough to build anything.
KHornkerry's horn pix look identical to the wood grain and coloring as my K-B-RL (Mine have bamboo cane grills). Note I wrote RL. The early oil finishes tended to look dry and dull unless you were willing to oil them once a week. The veneer on all the Klipsch products is very thin and apparently Rosewood has a very porous wood grain. My '79 horns were initially RO, but I sent them back along with my matching Belle to be lacquered. From about that time forward, Rosewood was offered only with a lacquered finish.
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Q-Man,
You should be able to run S-Video at least 100 feet without appreciable loss. This assumes the cable assembly is low loss and presents a true 75 ohm impedance to the luminance and chrominance signals.
Try Markertek http://www.markertek.com for a good selection of S-video cables and--if you need it, S-Video line amps.
Regards,
Arkytype
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Dougdrake,
To answer your question re determining SPL "fall off" with distance, SPL falls off in accordance with the inverse square law. This means for each doubling of distance, the SPL will read 6.02 dB lower than the previous measurement.
Mathematically, you can easily compute this sound pressure level if you start with a known reference (SPLref) and a known distance from your loudspeaker (Dref). The SPL (SPLnew) is . Now for indoor measurements this inverse "law" only applies in the free field of your listening space which lies between the near field and reverberant field. In the non-free field areas, the density of the sound energy is pretty uniform.
Of course, outdoor SPL measurements (away from boundaries), follow the inverse law from the cone of the driver to as far away as you care to measure.
Hope that helps.
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Comments on the Bose "TRUTH" paper:
By my count, there are seven incorrect uses of the word "it's" in this paper. "It's" is either a contraction of "it is" or "it has" and is not the possessive form of the pronoun "it".
Under "THE COLD HARD NUMBERS (PART TWO):", we read, "...total continuous wattage of root-means(sic)-squared power...". Despite the writer's best intention, this is a meaningless term. There is no such quantity as "rms power". You won't find it in any electrical engineering or physics textbook or in the National Electrical Code.
Unfortunately, you will find "rms power" used by many power amplifier manufacturers to rate their product's output power. The correct (and only) term to use is continuous average sinewave power.
"But I'm using a true rms voltmeter and ammeter and rms voltage times rms current (in amperes) equals rms power" you might say. Close, but no cigar. The product of rms voltage and rms amperes is average power expressed in watts. What we want to measure is the equivalent DC heating effect of the AC power from the power amp and that is expressed as average power.
The writer also states, "...the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) created a regulation standard recently in which all devices have to be rated...". This "recent" standard is known by the FTC as The Amplifier Rule and was promulgated on May 3,1974(39FR 15387). There probably have been more recent regulations issued covering powered loudspeakers and automotive electronics, but those covering consumer electronics power amplifier rating disclosures are almost 28 years old.
Under "Bose and the patent system", the writer states, "...their patents are so unoriginal that they've never even TRIED to sue someone for infringing upon them." With just a little basic web searching, I found that Bose successfully sued JBL for infringing on their patent #5,714,721.
Amar Bose's acoustical research at MIT showed that only about 11% of the sound arriving at the listener's ears in a concert hall was direct sound and the remainder was reverberant energy in the form of delayed reflections from the room's surfaces. The Bose 901 (remember that twenty-foot wide piano sound?) was his (IMHO) misguided attempt to re-create the acoustical properties of a concert hall in one's living room.
Having owned Klipschorns for 25 years, I'm no fan of Bose products. I'm in agreement with most of the writer's objective and some of his subjective arguments. However, if one is going to invest the time and energy to write nine pages of the "TRUTH", you'd best be advised to have both your grammar usage correct and your facts straight. Otherwise, your arguments, no matter how valid, will lack over-all credibility.
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Forresthump seems to be confusing markup, profit and percentage.
In my example, I bought the loudspeakers from Klipsch for 50% of MSRP. Now, if I then had immediately sold them to someone for MSRP, the percentage markup would have been 100%. (this is the only point forresthump made I don't dispute)
However, the price (or percentage of MSRP) I paid was NOT the same as the dealer I worked for (or what a Klipsch dealer today) would pay for the same loudspeakers. Most high-end manufacturers offer their products to employees of authorized dealers through a sales accommodation program. In my case, Klipsch sold their products to salespeople for 50% of MSRP. The serial number/data sticker on my K-Horns and Belle have a red stamp which reads, SALESMAN'S ACCOMMODATION--SAMPLE--NOT FOR RESALE.This was intended to discourage dealers from fraudulently buying Klipsch products through the accommodation program and reselling at MSRP.
As I indicated in my earlier post, A Klipsch dealer's markup from cost varies from about 54-67% depending on quantity purchases, specials, etc.. BTW, most high-end audio products have less profit margin percentage-wise than the mass-produced imports.
Forresthump's statement that, "...the MSRP is 100% of dealer cost (twice the dealer cost)." is self-contradictory. If, "...the MSRP is 100% of dealer cost...", then the MSRP IS the dealer cost. The MSRP is NOT, "...(twice the dealer cost)." If the dealer cost is 65% of MSRP, the MSRP is not twice but 1.54 times the dealer cost.
This lengthy explanation is making my hair hurt, so I'll stop.
A Klipsch dealer is (usually) carefully selected and also carries complimentary product lines to help the end user get the most from their Klipsch loudspeaker.
I never sold a Klipsch loudspeaker at a discount because I didn't have to. Properly demonstrated, a Klipsch product will sell itself.
I don't think you will find a fanatically-driven bulletin board like this on the Yamaha web site!
Regards to all, Arkytype.
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As both an authorized Klipsch dealer (1972-74) and as salesman for a Klipsch dealer (1974-1980), I can state with some authority that Klipsch dealers have never enjoyed a 100% markup as Messrs.forresthump and mdeneen claim.
Dealer profit on Klipsch loudspeakers varies between 35-40% which works out to a markup of 53.85% and 66.66% respectively--not 100%.
Back in 1975, a pair of Rosewood K-Horns and center channel Belle sold for $4,082.00. As a salesman,I bought the 3-piece set for $2,041.00!! Still have them. Cheers, Lee
LAST CALL Arkansas Gathering - This Saturday - May 8th
in 2-Channel Home Audio
Posted
Dean,
Thanks for the info--I've got it on order as well as "2112". I preferred jazz and classical recordings during my formative years and never "got" the rock and roll genre. Nowadays, my musical tastes are a little more ecumenical and the Rush recording might start another row on my CD shelf!
For all you Heritage owners, Bob Crites pointed out that about half the K-77 tweeters he repairs have the magnet assembly installed backwards. That means the red and black terminals are reversed. Now, whether you can hear a polarity reveral at 5,000 Hz is a topic for another forum.
To check your K-77, get out your Boy Scout (or Girl Scout) compass and SLOWLY bring it near the rear of the tweeter. A properly assembled K-77 will attract the north seeking end of the needle. Don't get the compass too close as you might cause damage. If the K-77 attracts the south seeking end of the needle, just reverse the crossover network connection.
Lee