Taterworks

Just my opinion, but for future years it would be nice if all this information could be collected in one forum thread instead of being spread through multiple separate threads that need to be reviewed.

Hi, new question. I've submitted payment to the Klipsch Pilgrimage PayPal account, and in the comment I gave my name so my registration could be recorded. I read that I should expect to receive an acknowledgement and a discount code for something, but I haven't received any email from the gmail account associated with the pilgrimage at the gmail account I use for my PayPal account, apart from PayPal's own confirmation. Will I receive a confirmation email from the event, and should I expect that sooner or might it come later as part of a bulk emailing?

I found the schedule for those events in a different thread that I didn't notice before (the itinerary). Thank you.

Hi, Is this a complete list of events? Are there any events on Friday between the Thursday early check-in, dinner, and socializing, and the Friday evening dinner and concert? Thanks, Rory

So I met Lou near Cincinnati today and received the RC 35. It was a pleasure meeting him and doing business -- highly recommended. It's always great to meet someone for the first time and find out they're a very decent, nice person (not always guaranteed on the internet). Putting the Klipsch RC 35 and RB 25 into my apartment-sized home theater (same 6.5" midwoofers and tweeters between them) made a massive improvement over the mini-center I was using before (Mordaunt-Short Alumni 5), and the RB-25 are better home theater speakers than my Def Tech SM350, which are happier at my desk (but will probably go to my brother so some of my DIY speakers can live on my desktop). And everything is much more harmoniously matched. Very glad I made this purchase.

I knew the gentleman who designed the RSW-10d and RT-10d/12d woofers and passive radiators, and originated the triangular subwoofer concept, Deon Bearden (no longer with us). He based the triangular subs on his own DIY home subwoofer -- he was a sort of "extreme" hobbyist. However, he told me he was never quite satisfied with the RSW-10d and RT models because their amps weren't brawny enough to give the drivers all that they could withstand. He would rather have seen them powered with 1000 watts. It seems to me like Klipsch is missing the kind of home theater hardware that satisfies today's home theater buffs. While it's sort of a niche market (high end home theater speakers for installation or DIY), this sort of "prosumer" gear would fill the hole between the existing consumer gear and the professional cinema gear. I think that the best way to integrate prosumer gear into the line would be to add smaller models to the existing pro cinema lineup, then allow dealers for Klipsch's home products to carry a limited selection of the pro gear for installation into serious home cinemas including those smaller models. The THX Ultra2 speakers are nice, but they are still "consumer" gear for sale through boutique high end audio/HT stores, not true "prosumer". For Prosumer gear, you try to build a pro product in the form factor demanded by a home application, and fill it with all the pro features and performance you can. Prosumer gear is low volume (and should be built in Hope AK) but high-margin.

Question for Scrappy: What are you using instead of this?

I have the space. In a few days I'll have the funds. And I've already got the RB 25 which use the same woofers and tweeter. Trigger finger is getting itchy.

Yes and he owns the rarest pair of Jubes as well as a warehouse full of Klipsch speakers. Amazing. He says there's too many tire kickers out there and not enough real buyers. Just my 2 cents. i have emailed spencer chao back and forth a hundred times and I haven't even bought one thing from him. I asked him one time about prices and ten months later asked a second time and he even remembered me. If you're serious about buying something, a hundred emails shouldn't be necessary before putting down money, unless you are creating a custom product for your needs. This is one thing that tips a salesperson off that someone is likely a "tire-kicker" and not really serious about making a buying decision, and if I were the salesperson I'd stop returning emails after the fourth or fifth one. Buying something involves risk, and both parties need to realize and accept that. It's up to the buyer to do their research* beforehand and make as few requests of the dealer or seller as possible. For the part of the seller, it sounds like they may need to add qualifying questions to their repertoire early in the selling process. This is one of the well-known Seven Steps of Selling. *Forums like this are a great resource for doing research. This is not to say that research is unnecessary or annoying, just that it is not the job of the salesperson to answer product questions one after the other, ad infinitum, in hopes of making a sale that never comes.

These tiny houses interest me. I don't think I'd be all that happy living there for too long, because I'd certainly find a way of filling it with stuff. However, I could see vacationing in one as long as there were things to do outside. Some tiny houses are pretty cool, with modern design and furnishings, and I've even seen one that fits in a full-sized kitchen. I think I'd still like to have a full-sized house, with separate bedrooms, an office, a living room, dining room, and kitchen (and it doesn't need to be huge), but I'd have a tiny house like this in the backyard for guests. My grandparents had an estate with a guest house for many years before deciding to move to be closer to their kids and grandkids, but I had a great time whenever we would visit. Hence the idea for using the tiny house as a guest house. I could also rent it out and make some money. For audio in a tiny house, I'd have a pair of RB4 and a SW-311, but I'd probably just take my RB-25 and Velodyne MiniVee, which I already own, so I wouldn't need to buy anything. Audio would be fed directly from my PC via an external DAC with volume control. Simplify, simplify, but don't give up on deep bass.

About Klipsch and American brands vs. Chinese products: Modern manufacturing isn't really about the manufacturing any longer, because of how easy it is to get something made with acceptable to good quality, which is what the majority of customers expect. Modern manufacturing is about designing a product worth talking about, and then telling its story to the public in such a way that the public will want to be a part of the story, and will become a customer. There is no room for any kind of dishonesty in marketing any longer - only authenticity and honesty, and anything other than that will create a backlash. I say this because yes, if something becomes desirable enough, there will be imitators and copycats. The Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese have been making knock-off products for as long as they've had industry. It comes from the view that if multiple sources offer the same product, and if the product is cheaper than the original, then that is better for the world (neglecting that people buy a brand as much as a product, so cheapening a company's brand by copying its products doesn't really work because it is viewed by the global consumer as dishonest). So you need to design a compelling product, and then you need to be better than anybody else at telling the story of your product to the world, so that your brand will be the most desirable. American companies can do this by "living" their brand story so that it is the true story of their brand, then their marketing becomes honesty itself. Klipsch has a great brand because it has such a great story to tell, of technical expertise and great sound, and the other people who have made that sound part of their lives (cinema-goers, home audio consumers) and their livelihoods (cinema owners and live audio techs). It's also helpful that the technology Klipsch uses, the horn-loaded loudspeaker, so easily crosses over from the home audio world to the cinema and pro audio worlds. The Klipsch brand is something that the Chinese won't be able to duplicate anytime soon, since the Chinese only seem to understand how to manufacture products, and not nearly as much about how to create compelling products and market them in a compelling way.

When it comes to replacement parts, many audio manufacturers (probably Klipsch included) want to prevent their own proprietary parts from simply being sold to non-owners so that they don't become part of non-branded products that might be marketed as containing their components. If you manufactured and sold speakers, you wouldn't want a competitor taking your respected name and appropriating it to their lower-priced product simply because they could buy the same custom-designed and custom-tooled component your speaker uses. A great deal of money goes into designing and tooling special parts that enhance the performance and uniqueness of Klipsch speakers, as well as many other commercial speakers, which is why this sort of restriction is necessary - to protect that investment. This also ensures that parts from a company like Klipsch would only appear in speakers where Klipsch is able to control how those parts are integrated into the complete system. To obtain replacement parts, you may need to first get serial numbers from a pair of speakers that are owned by their original purchaser, since many warranties are not transferrable (and I haven't investigated this with Klipsch so I don't know for sure whether theirs is transferrable or not). However, many manufacturers keep records of what replacement parts were ordered for speakers with a particular serial number, so even if you have serial numbers, you might raise red flags if you order a pair of horns, then order another pair of horns next week for the same pair of speakers. If you just need some horns, many other manufacturers of raw pro-audio drivers sell some good ones. JBL and EV are perhaps most well-known for their horns, but Eminence, B&C Speakers, Faital Pro, PRV Audio, and Dayton Audio all sell horns.

Poll: Which Eastern European Country Are You?

If you're now in Mishawaka, you need to get some Crown power for those La Scalas. And maybe a used JBL Pro powered subwoofer to fill in the bottom end outdoors a bit better than the black-vinyl home theater thing in your pic. Still, I'll bet it was fun.

It looks like the horn size is directly tied to the angle of the walls needed to maintain a certain coverage pattern, not LF cutoff. A larger horn will have a lower LF cutoff, but they probably aren't trying to get the horns to play lower to meet the midwoofers they are using, since the midwoofer cones look pretty light and probably capable of decent midrange extension. So the 12" model just has the 90 x 90 coverage pattern.

I visited that room. The only parts I liked were the bass (Lab 15s in dipole) and some of the midrange presentation. I didn't like the shouty upper midrange or indistinct highs. I have two sets of full-range driver speakers at home that are my own design (TB W4-1052 and Dayton PS180-8), so I know what full-range drivers applied well can do. But I have never understood what people see in the Lowthers that they can't get elsewhere, better, and for less.

And extreme off-axis HF comb filtering. Thankfully they don't do this anymore.

For an example of something similar, look at the Tannoy VQ boxes. The VQs are using 2"-exit coaxial compression drivers from BMS. But now B&C (maker of the 1.4"-exit driver used by Klipsch) also has a 2"-exit coaxial compression driver (DCX50). It seems like if Klipsch wants to do something similar for a large-format trap box speaker, there are choices for the compression drivers to be used.

Interesting to see that the compression drivers are B&C Speakers units, and not custom-branded Klipsch units. Not that it's a bad thing - the B&C compression drivers are recognized among designers as very good drivers. Also the LF drivers look like Eminence-made units, built in Kentucky, USA. I remember when I once installed some Community iBOX pro cabinets, they were using Beyma 1.4" HF drivers with a ferrite magnet that had to be 8" diameter all by itself. Those were some phenomenal sounding drivers on the Community fiberglass horns, but I'll bet they'd also be superb with the Klipsch horns. Not that you'd want to mess with a good thing, but if new optimized crossovers could be built I'll bet it would be an incredible HF driver choice.

I have to say that I'm glad Klipsch is continuing to invest in the pro division products. The credibility of the Klipsch home AV products currently comes from Klipsch's pro cinema presence, not just from Paul's legacy. The only question I'd have as a marketer is how to make sure that the customer in a commercial cinema knows they're listening to Klipsch. The surround speakers are typically the only visible part of a cinema audio system, so focusing on improving their looks and making them look distinctive is a good start. Perhaps also including a decorative wall placard for free to cinema installers using Klipsch products would be helpful in making sure the Klipsch name is visible somewhere in the cinema. I'm sure that residential owners of the more serious Klipsch pro products would also love to be able to buy a Klipsch placard for their own Klipsch-equipped home theaters.

That's an interesting-looking stack. Too bad there isn't enough height under a typical 8-foot ceiling to stack double Klipschorns, tweeter-to-tweeter. I wonder if anyone's looked at building a shorter bass section to accommodate the stacking of dual units in a residential setting. ((Oh, that's charming, I get a little warning symbol if I edit a post.))

I'm not sure who your supplier is, but the KMC-1 is still for sale all over the place online. $299 at Best Buy, Walmart, Crutchfield, and B&H. Even a little bit less on Amazon. I would try another store in your area, if you need to get yours from a store.