HornEd

Right on Benton, I plan to have the 4' false corners end flush to the interior wall of the circle. As for the mounting points, as of now I plan to use the European Standard of O° for the center, -30° for Left Front, +30 for Right Front, -110° for Left Surround, +110 for Right Surround, 180° for the Rear Effects. If I can pick up a single Khorn, I would consider a 7.1 system with the sixth speaker (Left Rear Effects) at -160 and the seventh speaker (Right Rear Effects) at +160. There's a lot more to this than meets the eye! Colin thanks for giving me the most interesting url's. -HornEd

"Hmmm, is wren-ching the avian equivalent of I-ching?" mused the Grate HornEd Owl. PS: Green Heron dropping... "Don't sit under a *** Willow tree!"

Wow, now he's an Audio Flyin' Flynn! -HornEd

Yep, six Klipschorn's in search of a room configuration! I also have four Belles and a pair of Cornwalls for fill as needed. BTW congratulations on the TSCM center find... now if I could only find six of those! My six KLF-30 Theater configuration proved the value of six timbre-matched monopoles for exquisite DVD use... and so I find the extra money for an all Klipschorn Rear Array to be money well spent. Finding an ideal room to build is becoming more of a chore than I thought it would be. Hopefully I will get a few more nudges in the right direction from our fellow Klipschers here on the Forum. -HornEd

Ah, yes, artto, I thought the same way through many years of designing a/v showrooms and home systems for myself... but two experiences rounded out my thinking and has led me on a path that was recently sparked while reading Floyd E. Toole's "White Paper" on the subject. The first round experience was an upscale theater designed and built by Eastman Kodak for their main showroom in the Dallas InfoMart. It was somewhat of a semi-circle with a somewhat bowed flat side where a 30' projection room (to accommodate dozens of automated slide projectors to fill the screen) was situated. the acoustical ceiling (with no-noise A/C louvers) was about 14' high and the floor and walls were fully carpeted. The top of the semi-circle flattened out into an 18' x 9' suspended screen flanked by two enormous JBL theater speakers built into chambers behind the curving wall. To your point, I thought the sound system in this 60-seat theater was awful... and had to be replaced. The slide projectors went out with the heavyweight JBLs and in their place was a heavy duty light-valve ($91k) projector and six strategically placed speakers plus a 15 floor firing subwoofer custom built into a speakers podium to locate it nearer the audience. The results went from awful to awesome and the theater became a favorite place for my employees to gather with their families after hours once a week to enjoy laserdisc movies all that before ProLogic became a household word but it showed that some circles are beyond the square a cube being the worst possible audio scenario theoretically. The second was the 30' yurt theater that now holds six specially modified KLF-30's in a 6.1 system. There are also a pair of KLF-C7's as Front Effects speakers and a pair of SVS Ultras stacked in a false corner. The surround sound is seamless and the deep bass goes right through the layered fabric walls preventing any standing waves. The conic-segment ceiling helps dissapate the center concentration and the multi-channel surround effects make at least forty good seats in the room. Granted it would be a bother to folks outside this free-standing theater but there are plenty of trees and acreage to soak up escaping sound. My current idea is to make a similar round structure inside of a solid wall with plenty of insulation inbetween the inner and outer walls to trap the sound. More detail is available on the "Six Klipschorns in a Circle" thread. As always, your input artto, is most appreciated. -HornEd

Shine on, shine on, (your speaker) harvest mns!!! -HornEd PS: Now, after you get those surrounds just the way you like... and mrs.m00n opts for new digs... how about building a "surround sound in the round" m00n theater for your next audio adventure? I mean something with a subteranean subwoofer... can you dig it?

Jan, in bass is both a fish and the low end of the audible sound spectrum... they are pronounced differently, however, with the sound being pronounced more like "base" as in baseball. Setting up a good two-channel system is a task in itself when you are striving for audio perfection... while your ears are young enough to appreciate it! But setting up for HT means having not only a great music system but also one that can handle the special demands that five or six full-range channels plus a low bass channel can offer. For example, in a two channel music system, the Left and Right Mains are the most important speakers that together create a stereo effect. In a movie DVD, the Front Center becomes the most important speaker with over 75% of the total sound on the DVD aimed at you through that SPL source. In the HT case, the Left and Right Mains supply a stereo support role and all five or six speakers can be included in creating ambient sounds as mixed by the audio engineer. There are those on this Forum who prefer that their rear array spray sound everywhere so they lose their acoustic ability to distinguish direction and timbre of their speakers. Such echo-holics need to be serviced too. At least I am glad that some prefer Klipsch over the Echo-holic Ideal that remains the market target of Dr. Bose & Co. Why toss everything over 2,000 Hz down the fuzzy rain barrel sound when the latest DVDs provide full-range ambience along with the excitement of directionality and the quality of true timbre-matching. -HornEd

In the current version of my Klipsch Legend Theater, the double-stacked SVS Ultras are in the front array just outside the Right Main and just inside the Right Front Effects speaker. The have a custom made false corner that flares the ports toward the center of a 30' circular room. The unit is fairly robust in order to get the doubling effect a solid corner has on bass production. And, now to the point, Kain5! Good subwoofers do not leak harmonics that give your ears a clue to where the sounds below 80 Hz are coming from. However, the rush of air that comes from cones and ports can be so intense at high SPL's that you can feel the direction on your skin... even though your ears cannot determine a direction. So, by having the subs in the front in their own false corner there is more distance to the audience who are back at least ten feet from the big screen. As I have commented before on other threads, your ear will associate the collateral sounds of an explosion (for example) and your brain will then associate the low end collateral sounds as coming from the direction of the high end collateral sounds. In simpler terms, the subwoofer can be in front of you but if your ear picks up the associated sounds from a rear effects speaker... you brain will tell you that the entire sound of the explosion came from the rear! -HornEd

Thanks Klipschfoot & Dr.Who for contributions while I was off writing the last post. The relatively newly established "European Standard" for multi-channel monopole speaker placement puts five speakers in a circle within a 20' x 24'rectangular room. Speakers are placed with the center main at 0° and the left main at -30°, the right main at +30°, the left surround at -110° and the right surround at +110°. One would presume that a sixth rear effects speaker would be placed at 180°. Since I have achieved more success with the round yurt than I had expected, I have been doing some additional research in building a building that would reflect medium and higher frequencies for better ambience but let the bass and low bass into staged infinite baffles that would be comprised of a double wall that would be solid on the outside wall and easily permeable by low waves on the inside wall. There would be no mechanical connection between the inside wall and the outside wall... no electric, water or HVAC lines. Such lines would be buried underground and come up at the inside walls. In fact, I am considering building the theater by digging a hole in this rocky mountain soil and finishing it with gunite when I do the even deeper subterranean sub. The shape of the roof (probably a done) would likely be cast in place using a technique similar to the way that was speculated as how the granary was built at Mission San Jose in San Antonio, Texas hundreds of years ago. Currently, I also have four Klipsch Belles and a pair of vintage Cornwallis that could be pressed into service as Klipschorn friendly Front and Rear Effects. My purpose is to achieve a better sound tribute to the late Paul W. Klipsch in a multi-channel environment. And, so, while it may be more than a little over the top... hopefully there are a few Forum friends out there who will enjoy the read... if not the contribution of a post. -HornEd PS: For those who think I started this thread for my own boastful gratification... you just don't realize that I know the Joy of striving for sound success... and will not wallow in the Misery of trying to avoid failure. I give myself the "Freedom to Fail"... and that allows me to use what resources I have to succeed. Does having the Freedom to Fail work? Well, I believe if I didn't have the Freedom to Fail I wouldn't have the resources or the acumen to build this over-the-top theater. From what I have seen of innovators and entrepreneurs... you can always tell the pioneer by the arrows in his back. Since I have given up shooting down "mini-Klipsch-flaming-Indians"... I hope we can discuss the positive and negative aspects of this project like the adventure it should be. -HornEd

Wow, a lot of good input... particularly the "rubber room" concept since it brings up a whole area of membrane absorbers to dampen secondary low bass reflections. And, Q-man, (my hero) I hope you got some sleep... and yes, I do remember that sketch you sent me... it is what led me to try a circular room with minimally reflective walls. My 30' yurt has a steep conical ceiling with a large (5') Plexiglas dome that raises to provide hot air venting in summer. Acoustically the worst seat in the house is under the middle of that dome. Since the supportive timbers are essentially 2"x3 studs on 18 centers, the amount of reflective surface that faces the room is minimal. The bottom 6 of wall is reinforced by a latticework that does little to impede bass waves. The skin of the building is a hybrid that is essentially a flexible membrane that is a sandwich of two membranes with an insulation layer in the center. Thus, this building provides a somewhat ideal acoustic benefit for those inside but would cause neighbor issues if I didnt own the neighborhood! And even that has its downsides. There were about forty of us in the theater listening to the loudest depth charge part of Das Boot when someone pulled a main switch to create an electrical black out to a portion of our mini-grid causing an immediate cessation to the rumble going through the forest including some RVers camped over a hundred yards away! Since then, I have built some reflective and absorbent surfaces behind the front array and the dual SVS Ultra subwoofer tower and have had happy campers inside and outside the NuDome Theater (Eight Legend Theater to Klipschers) ever since! So, as to the silo effect (a fun one that I remember from my youth on my grandfathers farm), the yurt dissipates sound by being largely non-reflective while a silo, would tend to reflect in a diffuse way kind of like WDST on steroids! Not a pleasant thought for a properly mixed DVD that has carefully calculated ambience apportioned over appropriate channels. Virtually all approaches to acoustically ideal rooms that I have found are based upon rectangular boxes with no in-depth theoretical approaches to round or oval listening spaces. Dr. Floyd E. Toole muses about odd shapes (such as the one advanced in this thread by Q-man) but he holds little hope for an ideal coming out of non-parallel complexities. His thoughts can be researched in his illustrated talk that can be found at http://www.infinitysystems.com/homeaudio/technology/whitepapers/inf-rooms_3.pdf Another issue of room design is the fact that sounds with shorter wavelengths tend to benefit from a certain amount of reflection but longer wave lengths are impaired by reflections that cancel out or reinforce axial waves (the first order of standing waves). Thus, the ideal room would have to have different characteristics for long, medium, and short sound pressure level waves. For example, bottom scraping subwoofers need an anechoic room but the lost mids and highs would make it a definite bad idea as a listening room. The lower you go, the more mass and space have to be allotted to bass traps in fact, Tooles calculations indicate that building an acoustically correct low-bass environment would add 20% to the dimensions of a room in every direction! It is Dr. Tooles presumption that even a bad room can be made to be good if not excellent and that there is no such thing as a room that couldnt be made better and, therefore, there is no ideal listening room. At least not in any home he has lived in to date and if anyone has ever been ideally suited to build the ideal room, it is Dr. Toole. So, despite the high regard I have for Dr. Toole, somehow I think that with the inspiration and support of folks in the Klipsch Forum a better room can be built or at least we can have some fun in trying! Thanks for your support even if it got a little rubbery in one head case! HornEd

I am committed to building a 6.1 Klipschorn Home Theater with a custom subterranean fully-horn loaded subwoofer. The theater will be free standing in a forest glen. It was my intent to build the room to ideal proportions for multi-channel sound. However, all of the approaches to ideal rooms seem to be for a rectangle. I'm looking for a recipe for building a listening room in a circle. The last time I tried it was with the 8 Legend Theater which was built in a 30' circular yurt... and the results were better than I expected. So good that I am thinking of mounting the six Klipschorns in a circle with false walls extending through the walls.. What do you think of a 36' circular mini-concert hall? What should the dimensions be? -HornED

"Barking up the wrong tree" is an interesting choice of words for a warm fuzzy feline... but then again, with the spiked hair... -HornEd PS: What this thread needs is a cluless two-headed cat pic!

I have long used an analog SPL meter and a set-up disk. First it was Video Essentials and now it's Avia. Since I have multiple big screen TV's and several HT's... and very little spare time, lately I have had a pro set-up and fine tune the Mitsubishis. His clear choice is Avia... an no, he doesn't set up the speakers... just the HDTV's... I'm picky as to who fiddles with my Klipsch herd. -HornEd PS: The disk can test out your whole system while the tones are an integral part of it. The clear winner... Avia! And it just isn't that expensive. The most important part of your rig is the acoustic environment that your listening room represents. There's a word of info to assimilate in speaker placement.

Congrats IndyKlipschFan, the first thousand are the hardest! -HornEd PS: In most situations, "false corners" produce a better result than "real" corners. PWK used false corners. My hero, Q-man has built more false corners than most... but I am trying to catch up with six in the making as we connect. False corners allow a flexibility in placement and an opportunity for reinforcement that standard house corners just can't meet. Khorns are an opportunity for false corners to be true.

Well, that's the cat's me-OW! Our very own cluless has started her very own Klipsch Kopy Kat Fill-In-The-Reason Game... -HornEd Cluless was not in the picture because:

Yep, what did I say fini, just like too many notes gets Mozart bumfuzzled... too many feathers gets fini orny... the name of the game is more birds with less feathers... Now with just one fini feather you could get the "birds" to flock together in the all together... free heavenly bodies from wicked weasel constraints! Hmm, thats a fine mesh you got us into that time fini... but I still give you my vote for titular topic twiddler. -HornEd

---------------- On 3/23/2004 12:40:55 PM m00n wrote: I have 4, 99.5% perfect looking condition RS7s. 100% perfect running condition. ---------------- Whoa m00n, I just read your post as 4.99.5% and was m00n-dazzled at what you meant until I got my good specs on and saw you had four 99.5% mint RS-7's that you wanted to turn into RC-7's. What a great opportunity that would be for someone who wants to step up to having an RF-7 in the front center spot to handle the 75% of sound that it must process on a typical DVD. That would free up the dealer recommended RC-7... that could be sent to the m00n... and get a matched set of RS-7's that are just the ticket for tough acoustic environments. I mean, if high end Klipsch WDST is your bag... m00n is your bagman -HornEd

My favorite sub array is a stacked pair of SVS Ultras forming a seven foot tall column in a corner... the units are stacked so the bases are in the middle (the bottom one is upside down)... two subs in a corner make the equivalent of four subs of power... in this case 122 dB @ 20 Hz... that's just enough to be able to play any low note recorded on a Dolby Digital DVD... and their quick enough to take on the hottest music you can find. It's a neat look and stacked like that there are far fewer standing wave problems in my experience. For me, tubes give the best bang for the buck... and no room for boom if set up with an SPL meter. -HornEd

Ah, I looked up an early stereo recording from my bachelor pad days seemingly eons ago. Other Worlds, Other Sounds by Juan Garcia Esquivel was recorded in stereo in 1958 by RCA Victor it was nominated for a Grammy. Esquivel recorded his first U.S. album a year earlier in 1957 a mono job. Esquivels Strings of Flame featuring a 50+ piece orchestra came along year or so later and it set the standard for crass orchestral liberties with the two channel format but it definitely was fun well at least for the first dozen plays. If memory serves, the first Kingston Trio LP was mono in about 58 with a stereo version of the same album available a year later. I bought the mono album because I was overseas in the Army and they were from my own backyard (Stanford University) shortly after I bought it,.. the PX had the same album in stereo which I also purchased. The first fake stereo recording was one with the original Dave Brubeck Trio (another hometown S.F. guy) originally recorded in the mid-50s (Paul Desmond was incredible!) and then later tricked up to be stereo I had bought the original mono as part of my early jazz collection and was really turned off by the intrusive fake stereo add-ons. I heard a rumor that the original album in unvarnished mono has been produced and will be available on CD. So, friend fini, hi-fi started for me in about 1955 and it was all monaural and it was probably 1958 before I bought my first stereo album while working in the American Hospital near the Arch of Triumph in Paris, France. That was the scene of my first outrageous stereo system. I was living in an old stone building and found two recesses in the thick stone walls with thick oak fronts even with the wall surface. The stone was plastered and the whole thing covered with layers of wall paper. .. rendering the wall cabinets as unusable. So, with some careful carpentry and some new wall paper, and some nifty speakers, the empty stone recesses became speaker cabinets. People who came into the room were blown away by the sound that seemed to be coming out of a flat wall. No doubt about it, this whole two-channel and up thing has been a trip! HornEd

Ah yes, the fickle finger of opportunity... Khorn purchases of the last few years... $2,700. A pair of mint Klipschorns (includes a matching Klipsch Belle). $2,000. A pair of fair Klipschorns (includes a matching Klipsch Belle). $1,750. A pair of good Klipschorns (this deal took the NoBelle Prize). Maybe not the best deals in the world... but the key to unlocking Khorn sound in your room is not to knock opportunity... but to be prepared when opportunity knocks! -HornEd

The Joy of Life is striving for success... the Misery of Life is striving to avoid failure. So give yourself the "Freedom to Fail"... it frees up your mental capacity to succeed... and while your on the "Audio Upgrade Freeway" remember the striving isn't done until you are! RIP oh ye undead Bose-zombies! -HornED PS: Make a Joyful Noise al ye Klipsch seekers...

Hmm, if memory serves I was happily monophonic and collecting monaural LP's in 1956... and curiously probing early stereo systems circa 1967 in San Francisco. On that vein, I can't recall the year PWK started his long fascination with "three channel stereo" as described by Bell Labs. -HornEd

Ogee, BBB... I thought you were going to reveal an "s-curvaceous" femme de mystère hidden in your well sea-soned pic that was, in actuality, a bare cluless (i.e., sans avatars!) in cross-focused or saber-toothed tabby form. -HornEd PS: You have delighted us with your cleverness so many times that we have sprouted enormous BBB expectations when it comes to a damp feline.

Isn't it amazing how little the seller knows about something he's got marked all the way up to $10!!! -HornEd PS: If I still lived in the Metroplex I would have doubled your money in my ignorance! Can you show us a photo of your treasure? I agree that getting the speaker refurbished by a pro is well worth it in this case! Then again, I will more than double your money if you will ship it to me in my Northern California mountain retreat.

How right you are, hoggy! Even Paul W. Klipsch, himself, opted for "false corners" for his pair of Klipschorns (with a Klipsch Belle center). Well built false corners (as outlined in "Dope from Hope")can be built more solidly than most "house corners" and provide superior placement dynamics. The difference between properly set-up Khorns and fini's "corner-less family jewels" are HUGE!!! -HornEd PS: I suspect "the fini" has a plan... let his wife enjoy Khorning with out corners... and once her ears are horn broken, he corners the Khorns "fini style" and the wife is even more enchanted with his cleverness!