JohnA

Howard, you will have to experiment with placement to find what works best. Mine are about 2 feet from the side wall and 3 feet from the back wall. La scalas will have the best, deepest bass pushed into the corners. I don't because I have subwoofers for the deep bass and they need the corners to match output.

I use a Heresy I center with my La Scalas. I helped my brother design a dual woofer center with Heresy parts that works well, too.

Davis, I don't think anybody recommended replacing the woofer. New K-horns are $7500 a pair and sell for less, often enough. They sound much like always, but are smoother than I remember. The voicing has changed little from the '70s to the 2003s. I never tried the K-55-M drivers with my Type AA crossovers. With the Type AL, the sound is truely awful and certainly NOT the Klipsch classic sound. I have been told the K-55-M sounds "honky" through the Type AA by people I trust. I have been told the K-55-M has the same sensitivity as a -V. When I changed my -Ms for -Vs, the mids seemed slightly lower, but that was in the rear channels and they were difficult to isolate for critical listening. If I were you, I'd replace the Type ALs with Type AL-3s, ALKs, or build my own hybrid of the Type AA/ALK networks.

What's wrong with a CD changer? Maybe even 2? If they have digital out, the sound quality should be pretty good.

Your tweeter is toast. You will have to replace it; that will be cheaper than fixing it. Ebay usually has several for sale. The K-77-M is an E-V T-35A. Go ahead and buy one; it will be less than $100. You will be much happier with your La Scalas if you change the crossover. We have the schematics for the older types and you can build it yourself. As an alternative you can buy prebuilt crossovers from Al Klappenberger or Bob Crites. I have a pair of Al's crossovers and they are great, but expensive. I'd recommend the Type AL-3 first. The simpler Type AA should work, but should be modified slightly to reduce the overlap of the squawker and tweeter. You will not damage either the speaker system or amplifier if you use it with the tweeter removed. Oh Yeah, my opinion? You're ugly and your feet stink.

The voice coil is attached to the diaphragm. One gets the other. It is rare for the magnet to be bad, but not impossible. Why do you think you need a new magnet? If you do, the tweeter is scrap. Buy another. I'd start with ebay. More than likely you need a new diaphragm at $25 or less. You can buy a diaphragm/carrier assembly for really easy assembly for $60 or so.

"LOTR on an all-Klipsch movie theater system? I'm there!" Been there, got the ROTK T-shirt! It was in IMAX, too!

Not just an idea, a great idea!

"the only band I really don't get is THE DOORS... I guess maybe you would have to have grown up in that era?" You need more dope! I don't get Nine Inch Nails.

The K-400 came online in 1963. Before that it was the K-5-J. There is an early K-5 variant that had vanes near the throat. It was used sometime in the 50s with University SAHF drivers. The K-5-J was used with SAHF and Klipsch K-55-V (Atlas PD5-VH). If yours has the vanes, it is pretty rare.

Buy another sub! Really. Buy 3 more, or 2 RSW-15s and put them in a corner. The hook up is pretty simple. Amp the Sub with speaker wires, Sub to speakers with more speaker wires. Set crossover to 70 Hz or higher. One SW-15 is not enough to keep up. I have 2 VMPS Larger Subs, with woofer upgrade, rated at 93 dB/w/m, powered with 450 wpc, placed in corners and they barely keep up when I crank it. They are -4 dB at 16 Hz in my room, but they are bigger than La Scalas.

What do you make of the Rebel 3B?

Greg, I disassembled my tweeters to mount them from the front and one fell apart in my hands! I did it anyway, but I won't do it again. Z-brackets are the way to go.

You're welcome. Bridging is a way of using 2 power amps (or both channels of a stereo amp) to apply twice the voltage to the speaker. Each power amp sort of handles half of the audio wave. It halves the effective impedance the amp sees and it has to be made to do it or damage may result. It is also not necessarily the best sounding configuration, either. To bridge an amp, one channel is fed a normal signal and the other is fed the same signal, but reversed in polarity (phase). The speaker wires are connected to the 2 positive terminals and the 2 negative terminals are tied together, if they are not that way internally. Lots of pro audio amps are made to do it.

You can do it 2 ways. My old Yamaha had seperable preamp out/power amp in connectors. Obviously, pull the jumper and connect to the power amp in. If you can't do that use any line level input (AUX, CD, etc) and adjust the output with the Yamaha's volume control. Try 12 o'colck to start. The output voltage of the Marantz can probably be calibrated so it doesn't overload the inputs of the Yamaha. There's no way to know until you try. If it can't it will only sound like crap on loud passages. Neither amp will be damaged and your speakers are also unlikely to be damaged. Oh yeah, that is NOT called bridging. What you are doing is so normal it has no name.

AlNiCo is a high energy magnetic material made from, guess what. It is powerful enough the magnet structure can be much smaller for the same field strength. Many people think it sounds better than modern ferrite slurry based magnet material. More likely any difference in sound is due to the care used in manufacturing.

Damn! It would be a misdemeanor, or worse, to molest those K-horns. If you have K-33-Js and they are AlNiCo, I'd recone the bad one and be polite to the whole system. Make sure it is not loose rather than damaged. Your K-77 tweeters have a 2 watt continuous rating and the 1RB crossover has little protection for them. If you really want to hammer the K-horns, you need to change the tweeters, woofers and crossovers. If you want to REALLY hammer them, change all of the above, but use K-43 woofers. You'll lose a little low bass, but raise the power limit to about 250 watts.

The crude answer: The cone in a compression driver is little different from one in an inverted dome tweeter. The Horn is attached in front and it "concentrates" and controls the sound to "focus" it into a narrow angle that increases efficiency. In addition, the horn loads the cone, aka diaphragm, so that it pushes on a long column of trapped air also improving efficiency. The 2 effects, primarily the 2nd are so effective that extreme efficiencies of 110 dB/w/m or more are possible, compared to 93-ish dB/w/m for a cone mid or tweeter. There are complexities of horn operation and design that are still the subject of PhD theses. Obviously, I skipped over any of that.

Give us more detail about your K-horns. What SN, woofer, squawker, tweeter and crossover do they have. With that we can make better recommendations. If they are 1963 models, there are a few things you should do (or will have to do eventually) to give them higher power handling capacity. The newest woofer is the K-33-E. It has not changed since the 70s, or before. It has a paper cone and pleated surround and is capable of lasting for more than 30 years in normal service. The K-33-E has been optimized for Klipsch bass horns, there is nothing as good. There are 2 other high dollar alternatives that are acceptable and can absorb much more power. One is sold by Klipsch. The K-33-E is nothing like the woofers in the KLF-30, nor should it be.

Since the mass of the woofer cone far exceeds the mass of the other drivers, and damping factor is a measure of the amp's ability to control come motion, damping factor is mostly applicable to bass frequencies. Damping factor is the speaker impedance divided by the amp's output impedance. The mass of the woofer's cone pushing the voice coil can act as a generator. A shorted generator is difficult or impossible to turn (move). The lower the output impedance, the closer the amp gets to a "short". Some say more than 400 is pointless.

Excellent, Doc!

My Parasound power amps are dead silent through my La Scalas. I had too much hiss from my original ACT-3, but after I had it upgraded, to make it essentially a Stage One, it is nearly dead silent. I have to be less than 6" from the tweeter to hear anything. HT Pre/pros are noted for the hiss, even high-end ones like the Proceed. My ACT-3 is dead silent on analog pass-through.

Hi, Keri Lynn, welcome. K-horn produce 104 dB for one watt and 1 meter. That's extreme and they will show up *every* problem with any electronics. So, only one channel makes the noise. The noise is constant and not related to the music, correct? It is a "hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" sound, correct? And it does it with all inputs disconnected from the power amp/reciever. This indicates only one of 2 problems. The amp is going bad or it is in a strong magnetic field that causes the hum (induced internally). If the noise was coming in on the powerline, it would be most likely in both channels. It is extremely unlikely that the hum is being induced in the speaker wires. Repeat your testing again, with the amp on and nothing but speaker wires connected. If you get a hum, move the amp several feet from it's location. If it still hums, reverse the polarity on the power plug, if you can. If you can't, get a 3 prong to 2 prong adapter the try it both ways. Note anything that changes the hum. If none of that eliminates the hum, get/borrow a known good quality, good condition amp and try it with no inputs. When you get a condition without hum, start plugging in sources. I'll bet the power supply of your amp is beginning to fail and the extreme efficiency of the K-horn shows it. If the hum does not vary with the music, it is not the speaker. I've had a LOT of trouble with hiss and ground loop buzzing with my La Scalas, all traceable to my preamp/processor.

I used Dynamat. You can get rope caulk at Home depot; it will work just as well. Look in the weatherstripping area.

Anarchist, We're just going to have to disagree; at least in the area of rights and their limits. The other things you've said I seem to agree with. Being a libertarian at heart, I've attempted to understand the Constitution and some of the contemporaneous writings of the time about it. It is the "contract" between the government and the population. It was written primarily to restrict the power of the government. Please check for yourself.