Don Richard

Don, that's quite a bit of bass boost. The Patricians IVs (1950s) had an 18" bass driver in a folded horn very similar to the Khorn bass horn. That's what I compared to the Khorn, in the same room. Those speakers had L-pads for the mids and highs, and were probably turned down. The 30 inch woofer was in later versions of the Patrician. I have a PDF of home construction plans for the earlier version on my desktop computer where I used to work. I get called back to help out from time to time, so next time I'm there I'll copy the plans and post them here. Found the plans in this thread:

I have heard Khorns and the EV Patricians with the 18 inch bass horn. The EV had more bass and the Khorn had a clearer midrange and high frequency sound . I measured the Patrician and discovered the bass was 10 dB higher than the highs. The Khorn measured much flatter.

The Klipschorn was the first commercial Klipsch product, and it looks very much like the Khorn that is sold today. The midrange and tweeter horns, all of the drivers, and the crossovers have changed over the years but the basic design is the same.

I have heard of some Klipsch models doing this because of EMI. Maybe light dimmers or another piece of electrical equipment in the house. Try moving the speaker to another room or even out of the house to see if the noise changes.

A friend had a pair of Khorns hooked to a Phase Linear 400 that went DC on one channel and took out a woofer. That's the only time I ever heard of someone losing a Khorn woofer

Resistance is futile.

For one thing it likely means the stranded wire will have less skin effect than the solid, thus better for audio use.

Panduit makes forked terminal lugs, crimp type, that will take #10 and #12 gage wire and fit #6 screws on the Jones type blocks used by Klipsch. Other brands may fit the screws and the wire, but the forks are too wide to fit between the barriers.

You would have to have a tube preamp with a high output impedance hooked to a solid state amplifier with a very low input impedance to get problems. Most solid state preamps have an output impedance of 200 ohms or less, most solid state amplifiers have an input impedance of 20,000 ohms or greater. Tube amplifiers usually have an input impedance over 100,000 ohms. As long as the amplifier has 10X the impedance of the preamp or more, it's good.

Wilson used to make their enclosures out of a high density material similar to concrete. If this device is made of the same stuff it could weigh 500-600 pounds. Maybe they are selling these by the pound or something. That might explain the price.

The best part - they only cost $685,000. When I look at these the word that comes to mind is "monstrosity". When I look at the price the word that come to mind is "ripoff". http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/first-listen-to-the-new-wilson-audio-modular-monitor-wamm/

Yeah, when I had LaScalas I liked them because I could move them around the room and locate them where they sounded best.

I am unfamiliar with the 396, but I would say if they are time aligned it should be possible to get them to 3D image with proper placement.

Loudspeaker placement and/or acoustic treatments are necessary to get consistent 3D imaging. Time aligned speakers seem to help greatly, along with source material that has been recorded properly and/or mixed properly. The easiest way to get 3D sound is to use mini-monitor type speakers in a nearfield setup in a 6 or 7 foot equilateral triangle , away from the walls, facing forward with no toe-in. What I have found to be unnecessary are tube amplifiers, analog sources or fancy cables. I base my opinions on extensive experiments using a pair of old Boston Acoustics A150s I have had for over 30 years. I had them hooked to my TV but rarely used them and decided to play around with them. I hooked them up to a Crown XTi 1000 with some old 14 gage "speaker wire" I bought at the same time as the speakers. Source is a $179 OPPO DV 980H player. I played around with all sorts of configurations - speakers elevated, on the floor, with a riser in front, toed in and aimed various ways, against the walls, away from the walls, until I settled on the nearfield configuration described in the previous paragraph. Set up in this manner the 3D imaging is stunning, ranging from good to OMG, depending on the source material. These speakers are a 3 way design using 10 inch woofers, 5 inch midrange, and I inch soft dome tweeter. They are time aligned and have features designed to reduce cabinet diffraction. I have no idea what the crossover points are, sensitivity is 90 dB for 1 watt @1 meter, 80 watt recommended power, 8 ohm load. In the past I had found these speakers to be boomy with one note bass. Pulled 5 feet away from the wall the boom is gone and the imaging really pops. I can move the listening position towards the back wall to increase the bass without getting the boom, but imaging suffers past a certain point. There seems to be a sweet spot where it all comes together with fast, articulate bass that goes fairly deep and spectacular imaging. With about 200 watts "RMS" this little system will play far louder than I want to listen. The total new price for the speakers, amp and CD player is a tad over $1000, including the high end "speaker wire". My theory as to what is happening is when a loudspeaker is located away from any room boundaries it enables a person to locate the source of the sound in 3D space, and in the case of stereo, the stereo image also floats in 3D space. Any ensemble recorded acoustically will have instruments in the rear of the group acoustically delayed by a few milliseconds, which pushes the perceived image of that instrument back. Multitrack recordings achieve the same effect by delaying the channel that the mixdown engineer wants to move rearward by enough milliseconds to move the phantom image toward the back of the group, thus increasing the 3D effect. The reason time aligned speakers seem to image better is that they do not have the time smear from multiple arrivals interfering with the recorded delays that are critical for 3D imaging.

I think it's like glossolalia in that if one speaks that way they prove they have the true religion, and are thus more likely to buy cable elevators and other worthless high dollar tweaks. This must drive sellers of this stuff to advertise in these magazines, which their target market reads and believes.

If a person is interested in uninformed opinion, TAS is the magazine of choice

I'd love to see the polars on that one.

But there is a free appetizer or dessert with the reduced DSP distortion from XTi type amplifiers.

The frequencies, per se, don't have anything to do with it. DSP amplifiers are pro sound devices designed to be run hard. Whenever one drives a loudspeaker of high sensitivity with one of these, the internal DSP isn't using very many bits and, in the case of the Crown XTi there is no way I can find to alter the gain structure of that amplifier to correct this issue. 8 bit audio doesn't sound very pleasing to me. I have recently been experimenting with a pair of old Boston Acoustics A150 floorstanders (90 dB sensitivity) I bought about 30 years ago when I moved to a house that had no corners for the Khorns. I was never impressed with them because they had a rather boxy, boomy, one note bass but I wanted to play around with them a bit before I got rid of them. I hooked them up to one of the XTi 1000s I had. I played around with loudspeaker placement for about a week and ended up with a nearfield system in the middle of a large room, with the speakers on the floor, no toe in, with the listening position about 6 feet back. Wow! This setup will throw a 3D soundfield that sounds absolutely stunning. These speakers, 33 inches high and sitting flat on the floor, create an image taller than the speakers and outside the spacing of the boxes. I can hear the separation of the instruments and vocals in 3D space and it sounds so real that it seems I can get up and walk between the performers. My speaker wire is some old stuff I bought around the same time as the speakers, clear PVC with one wire bare copper, the other tinned. My dog chewed on one of the wires so there is some exposed copper for an inch or so, hooked to a $500 prosound amplifier, and an OPPO player. This setup will play much louder than I want to listen, clean and with no audible distortion. The bass from the 10 inch woofers is fast and articulate, similar to Lascalas except the A150 go a little deeper. At a 90 dB sensitivity they require ~20X the power a Khorn uses, but there's plenty enough available power to hit over 100 dB SPL, C weighting slow at the listening position, 110 dB peaks. Using more DSP bits is the big bonus, I think, as these speakers have never sounded so clean and precise as they do now, nor did this amplifier sound this good when it was driving high sensitivity compression drivers. BTW, I did this late last year and haven't been in a big hurry to hook the Khorns back up. Still listening through the music collection.

Lack of drapes or any other sort of acoustic treatment on the walls is likely causing most of your problems. I am reminded of the times I moved - the stereo was playing while moving out and was the last thing to be moved. Moving into the new digs, the stereo was the first thing brought in and set up so we would have music for the rest of the move-in. In a completely empty room the sound was a mess until the drapes and soft furniture were placed in the room. That, and you might have to run Audessey or another EQ program for home theater after you put in some first reflection absorption.

Out of all the freebie magazines I got when working, NASA Tech Briefs was my favorite. NASA was (is) required to publish all projects and techniques they developed and make them available to the public. I adopted more than a few of these cutting edge technical gems into my own work projects.

You appear to be using a resistance measurement where impedance is what is important. Impedance varies with frequency, resistance is a DC measurement. I am not sure how inductance would be affected with a magnet inside the voice coil.

Refers to the digital filters in the CD player, probably some oversampling choices also.

The skies are not nearly as crowded as our roads so there is less for the autopilot systems on aircraft to contend with. Automotive vehicles have to stay within the two dimensional roadway, aircraft have more options in 3D space. Yep, aircraft autopilots are a piece of cake in comparison. I just saw where an AV 18 wheeler just completed a coast-to-coast test trip. This is a Level 3 autonomous vehicle that self drives only on highways with the driver taking control in town. The article I read said the truck went off of auto few times, but did not give a number.

Harleys haven't had carburetors for years, currently using Delphi fuel injection.