Don Richard

A good man. RIP.

I own a Fender tube amp for guitars, but the sound system is all SS and has been so for 45+ years. The best sound reproduction that I have heard did not come from tube amplification.

The Yamaha NS-10 came into wide use because of Bob Clearmountain, an award winning audio engineer from that time period. Bob worked with many artists and engineered many albums back then. Because he was in such demand he travelled to different studios, all with different equipment. He began to bring the NS-10s with him to jobs for consistency's sake, and because he discovered that using this speaker as a near-field monitor for recording and mixing worked well when placed on the console's meter bridge. When located there more direct sound and less reflected sound was the result, enabling the engineer to hear detail in the mix better than using the larger soffit mounted monitors . The problem was that other engineers who were not as talented as Bob thought he was using them because they were really good monitors, which they were not. Today, near field monitoring is widely used for recording and mixing, employing small powered monitors such as those made by Genelec and Dynaudio. These days the large soffit mounted monitors are mostly used when the producer and band members are auditioning a mix.

I am not sure if it was in this listening test where I read that the test subjects who were audio professionals (musicians, orchestra conductors, audio engineers) had less variance in test results than untrained listeners. The trained listeners mostly agreed on what they preferred from best loudspeaker to worst whereas the untrained listeners' preferences were all over the place. After some "training" the second group improved with regard to consistency of results. Many double blind ABX tests are not qualitative - the goal is to determine if any difference exists between two devices or options under test.

Or... the source material was not demanding of the electronics, such that no audible differences were observed. Extreme example: Using AM radio with it's limited frequency response and inherent noise and distortion will sound equally bad with either the cheap receiver or the expensive monoblocks.

Many people seem to listen with their eyes instead of their ears, especially members of the audio press. Blind tests remove this bias, often embarrassing the golden ears who find that the megabuck cables they thought they were listening to and gushing over were not hooked up at all.😥

Not unless the dog chewed it.

Make sure that the "Phono/Line" switch on the back of the turntable is set to "Phono" and that the cables are plugged into the appropriate jacks on both the TT and the speaker.

The primary reflection point can be determined by sitting in the listening position and having someone holding a mirror, sliding it against the wall on each side of the speaker's top hat. When you can see the front grille of the top hat in the mirror that is the location for absorption. Use diffusion toward the rear of the room.

You mention speaker mods and electronics but seem to be ignoring the most important factor - the room. A room that is poor acoustically will sound bad no matter what equipment is in it. Room treatments and loudspeaker placement will fix most situations like you describe. Tube amps and wires cannot correct an acoustic problem.

The inductor in the OP could be modified into an "E" core that would reduce magnetic hysteresis, but the other inductors mentioned above are available and are good to go as purchased.

One thing about Klipsch Heritage speakers is that several types of caps were used over the years, from high grade MIL spec oil-filled bathtub caps to poorer quality film caps. My Khorns came with Type A crossovers that used the oil-filled bathtub caps, but I replaced them when the Type AA became available due to blown tweeters. The AAs used Sprague hermetically sealed caps on the squawker circuit on both of the crossovers, using film and foil caps on the tweeter circuit on one of the crossovers with smaller flat oval caps (metallized?) on the tweeter circuit of the other crossover. When the crossovers were new, the speakers sounded identical despite the different types of caps used on the tweeters. Years later I recapped both crossovers using metallized polypropylene caps on the tweeters. As for my original Type A crossovers, they ended up in a friend's speakers, consisting of an EV Georgian bass bin with fiberglass K400 clone squawkers and EV T35 tweeters. I expected that the Type As would need cap replacement after so many years, but the speakers sounded great during listening tests, so we left the original caps alone. The point I am trying to make is that different types and quality of caps were used at different times by Klipsch. A person's experience with updating caps depends on what caps were used to begin with. YMMV

Get some 16 gage brass and make the jumper plates if that's what you want. Hobby stores would have what you need, then a drill and file (or Dremel) and 20 minutes or less would do it.

Did the amplifier go DC and melt the woofer? That would sure do it. An amplifier check may be in order.

You can't check the actual impedance with that meter, but that woofer has a voice coil with 3.2 ohms DC resistance. Should be close to that number.

Accumulated acoustic energy is the most accurate way to match levels for comparative testing of audio components. Here is how it was done to test audible differences between two amplifiers: "I started these trials with just the Bryston and the Crown, and spent a lot of time getting their levels matched, a channel at a time, using the RTA software in the TEF analyzer to accumulate acoustic energy over a minute and adjusting so that both amps yielded the same accumulation to within about 0.2 dB" http://www.moultonlabs.com/more/what_is_the_sound_of_one_amp_clipping/P2/

Yes.

The phase plug is necessary for accurate high frequency response, otherwise you get phase cancellation. Some HF horns appear to not have phase plugs because those horns use detachable compression drivers which have their own phase plugs.

This is a good example of how to run an invalid test. The second example is louder than the first and that difference in level makes this "test" worthless. Levels must be balanced to within .1 dB to get any sort of valid comparative data.

Button head hex head screws are what you want, I think: https://www.albanycountyfasteners.com/Button-Socket-Head-Screw-6-32-Black-Oxide-Stainles-p/12080000.htm?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7tvCpde_3QIVCqZpCh1cNAZOEAQYAiABEgJiDfD_BwE

The rubber in the stylus assembly may have dried and hardened. Try a new stylus.

Sad news, RIP.

I have seen drapery material hung from the ceiling from the corners at four points so that it droops in the center. Multiple treatments were used, each 3 or 4 feet wide in a two layer fashion with the lower drapes spaced about 3 feet apart. It looked pretty cool as if an interior designer had done it. They were effective ceiling absorbers. I believe Romy the Cat used similar treatments in his room.

Your observation appears to be based on measurements of a prototype bass horn that did not have improvements that later production units have (opened up "sinus" cavities, etc.). Also the early measurements, before Heyser invented TDS, captured room modes that are clearly present in the graph of the prototype horn in the frequency range you mentioned. You should know better, so I assume you are trolling.