Paducah Home Theater

I've tried to preach this but people still want to mix and match. Like you said, that's on them. But some of the people who want to mix and match are the same ones who don't want to measure anything. Also I've seen situations where people actually do set up two identical amps but the gain wasn't set so it was all wonky and I had to explain all that. I keep half expecting some people to set things up and not realize that the gain isn't set up right. It already happens today. Just wondering how they're going to try to avoid this is all.

Hope so. I've just seen some dealers do things like literally not know what a Heresy is. Not a clue. They got short with the customer and made them provide a part number. These same guys will be selling Jubilees and will be assisting with remote setups. I suspect there will be some interesting situations is all. Been curious as to how said situations will be avoided. Training? Dummy proof the hardware? Automatic setup in the DSP? Not entirely sure.

Not totally. A preliminary sales sheet was leaked inadvertently through me because everybody knows I'm excited about them. I shared it because I was told it was ok to. Apparently it was not. Officially speaking it's still unofficial at this point.

That would be nice. I haven't heard any such thing but it would make sense. To be honest if they DON'T do that, I'm afraid they might have a support nightmare on their hands without some significant training. I've had trouble trying to help people get them set up remotely and that's after going to electrical engineering school, being a software engineer for 20 years, and being around audio for 30. Some of these dealers aren't exactly the most technical people in the world and many potential customers are not at all. Based on my experience with selling quite a few, even after having a mostly plug and play DSP solution., I don't see how they're going to open it up for anybody to sell to anybody without doing something like this. As you said, people feel the need to want to mix and match amps for some reason, and just setting the gain alone is somewhat of a big deal to some. Most people do not want to have to buy a microphone and laptop and download REW and all that jazz but without doing that it's not going to be correct.

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I have one pair of cherry and one pair of walnut but I'm not giving them away, fully plan to either get paid dearly for them or leverage them for advertising purposes.

I don't think people realize how many people are out there who don't have access to a local dealer who can demo nicer stuff. The only time the listening comparisons really works well for this in my opinion is if you have similar speakers in the same place on the same equipment and you're pointing out slight details. Dean mentioned the RF-7's earlier... that halfway worked because they were almost identical and were mostly just listening for this pretty specific and annoying 1.7-1.8 khz or so section, whether it's there or got better or whatever. Dean did this resistor mod crossover thing that cut this frequency range on the original RF-7's somewhat and they were wondering if the new ones helped in this regard. It can work great for such things but that's about it in my opinion. I've done really well with Cornwalls in particular on YouTube. However, most people really want to hear the stories, technical explanations, different angles and lighting than the stock pictures, etc. The recorded audio demos in themselves isn't what's driving sales, that's just where the vocal minority comes out of the woodwork to whine about it.

Yeah no. Best case scenario you're stripping it down to basic frequency response, while adding some room coloration and other shenanigans from the gear you're listening with. Just buy some headphones and be done with it.

Absolutely. I've sold a ton of speakers based on the youtube videos in general and yes plenty of people including myself use YouTube to go car shopping. Actually YouTube is golden for more expensive vehicles with unique and complicated features such as my Raptor. The idea that I'd buy a $70,000 truck based on a few cheap sales pitch lines from the local sales idiot (who may have never even seen one before) rather than scour YouTube for more in-depth demos and reviews is far-fetched.

Don't quote me on this but I think the problem is that there was some kind of vendor issue and I think they hoped to switch vendors and spin them back up but it never happened. There was a similar issue with the heritage headphone amp. suddenly one day we realized that we couldn't get them anymore after we had waited quite awhile for the next shipment and realized it would never come, yet there was never any official "discontinued" designation.

These have been on backorder for months and months and months. All kinds of problems with supply. Nobody stocked very many of them as the price kept them from being wildly popular so everybody ran out at some point.

I find it ironic that people are drawn to tubes and turntables for the hobby / tinkering factor, yet the first thing that many wants to do is get things like self-biasing amps so they don't have to actually tinker with anything. Just get a CD player and a solid state amp.

dudes on youtube: we want speaker comparisons. us: ok, we'll do a review and tell you all about it dudes: no not like that. we want to know what you're playing. us: ok, we'll give you a big list of everything we're playing so you can try for yourself. dudes: no not like that. we want to know when you're playing which speaker. us: ok, we'll give you a list of what's playing when. dudes: no not like that. We want to actually hear them. us: wellllll.... you're largely hearing what the room sounds like, on a cheap cell phone speaker, and we're not big fans of enabling that because it's somewhat intellectually dishonest and may inadvertently sway your decision to something that isn't fully truthful. But ok we'll play some of the music so it's not awkward. dudes: no not like that. we want to hear the differences and know exactly what speaker is playing when you switch them. us: ok but there are licensing issues with big bands, so we're going to get some super cool local Indianapolis bands to give us a licensing agreement, then we will fully play this music and document exactly what speaker is playing and you can see what band is playing and maybe you might find something new and the bands will get some much need exposure and we don't get sued or have our channel dropped and everybody is happy, cool? dudes: no not like that.

Thanks. Yeah that's a significant issue. Some channels just try to record normal well known audiophile type tracks but it's a blatant disregard for licensing and it puts their channel at risk of getting shut down. I have no interest in that, everything that plays in our videos has a proper licensing agreement. We even used original music from well known Klipsch guy Matt Sommers plus other material that former Klipsch tech support guy Matt Whatley produced, which is who Roy's son worked with for awhile in his studio. Thought a few people might appreciate such things at least.

Considering plywood is like $65 + a sheet right now I bet it's more than you'd think. As with any product, manufacturing cost alone isn't really what you're paying for, otherwise you'd be buying new Nike AirMax shoes for $5 or something.

What I think happened with the bass is that for whatever reason there is a suckout in the middle of the room with the K-horns due to strange room geometry, yet the Jubilees were more towards the middle of the room and were more directional, and the microphone seems to have exaggerated the differences for some reason. When playing them in person there wasn't really the shocking difference in bass that it sounds like in the video. I've got the K-horns sounding pretty good nowadays, and I thought the Jubilees sounded a little thin that day as they were not corner loaded or boosted. To be honest I have no idea why the end result was the total opposite with the Jubilees sounding tubby and the K-horns sounding anemic, both to the extreme sometimes.

What I need to do is quit trying to appease people who are trying to audition nearly 4' wide 250 pound speakers on a YouTube video on their computer or phone. I find it silly myself. It keeps snowballing. Even with a perfect setup the only thing you will be able to manage to pull off is showing the basic frequency response and not much else, and even that is largely being affected by the room and speaker placement. At this point I'm pulling the plug on such things for nicer speakers. We just got some Perlisten S7t's in, just not even going there. If you want to know the frequency response without the room being a factor then look at a chart. Jason has ordered a nicer microphone setup but at this point I've lost interest and won't be doing it on more expensive speakers. Thanks to everybody for overanalyzing it. Just non-stop trying to defend what was recorded every time one of these gets published. Gets kinda old. If you guys can do better, well, do it.

Walnut is typically on average a medium true brown, often with lighter swirls. It has the most character on average but it varies greatly. Cherry is a little lighter nowadays, with a slight red tint. UV rays definitely turn the cherry veneer darker. A-stock cherry is usually more uniform. B-stock or special order cherry can have more aggressive character like quilted or almost flamy but typically not the multi-colored swirls like walnut.

My personal opinion is that direct radiating subs could work but those are a little colored for the K horns. I'd try to get something that is known to be super tight / accurate / neutral. A lot of folks would describe such subs as "fast" although that term makes me cringe so you didn't hear it from me. Although, for LFE purposes, the SPL-150 could work just fine, ideally two of them. I'd never use that combination for music with a crossover in place myself. You'd be surprised at how much 20-40 hz LFE goodness can come out of two of those subs considering their price.

Even if your mains are flat to 10 hz it would still typically help. The problem is that unless you have a high end pre/pro that can reroute the LFE channel to your mains, you're just throwing all that content away, which is very significant.

And yeah Marantz is really slow right now. Some things take months. Strangely enough Denon is significantly easier to get generally speaking, which is strange since they share a lot of parts. So I don't know. We basically have to just order a bunch of stuff and hope it comes in some day. We have no idea when or what order or if the entire order will ship or just a partial, or maybe two entire orders at the same time.... maybe we'll even get a huge order then our card will be preauthorized for two other big orders and max out our card with 6 digits worth of receivers... nobody knows. It all happens. Luckily we have a direct account and aren't scared of large orders. All the small dealers who have been going through distribution and has been counting on their distributor having a few of every model in stock is probably having a real hard time right now, I'm not sure how they're making it. I do have an MM8077 in stock, haven't seen the 5 channels in awhile.

Apples to oranges. All their stuff is refurbished.

If budget isn't a big issue, for anybody looking to do this in the future, I would look at the IC-650-T. I've actually sold more of the 8" 800's but the dispersion angles are a little narrow on those, these 650's are all you need for the home. It has a transformer for 70V applications but you can bypass it for use with normal amps. Only problem is that they cost significantly more than typical street price of the 5800's, cost is the big draw on those. Anyway, these are ported and Roy designed that horn, there is a patent on it. It's going to be the best match. https://www.klipsch.com/pro/distributed-audio#ic-650-t

An article worth checking out is below. Note that some parameters can wildly change over the course of 80 hours on some woofers, others not so much. Also worth noting is that this is a 40 hz sine wave which will be more aggressive than simply playing material at normal volumes. Also, these are just normal 5-6" woofers. If you get a large 18" or something with dual spiders and a very stiff suspension, that's going to be much worse. You can't break in a stiff 18" sub with normal music at normal listening levels in 15 minutes, doesn't work that way, those spiders needs to be spanked for quite awhile. https://www.gr-research.com/burn-in-myths.html