Rudy81

khorn58: Thanks for the suggestions. What do you mean by "then deform it with a hamer fig eight shape is best"?

Hey, you guys have got to see "Finding Nemo" in your HT's. I know this is a kids movie, but the DVD is Dolby EX THX encoded. What a tremendous sound track. This movie truly tests your systems dynamics, timbre matching, bass, processing and just about every aspect of movie reproduction. I was blown away by the sound track and effects encoding. This is worth watching at THX reference levels!

The first thing is to fix the minor damage caused to the cabinet during shipping. Somehow, the shipper chipped the veneer along the back-top of the cabinet. Then, I'm not sure. It is consecutive to the one I am using as center channel. These turned out to be such a great match to my Belles. The '93 LaS and my '88 Belles have the same drivers.

I e-mailed the poor guy too. Suggested he or she add some pictures, serial numbers etc. Those look pretty nice from a distance.

The average person would think it was one zero's too many. However, he or she obviously didn't check the listing prior to posting.

That would indicate two dummies!

Khorns are fantastic, but 12K for a pair? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3057131937&category=14993

Don't want to hijack the thread, but here is the answer. In critical listeneing, the hiss is a pain in the neck. You tend to focus in on the hiss. I cannot detect any sonic differance, nor should I unless my unbalanced cables were picking up noise, which they are not. So, in my case, the unbalanced connections are better since I don't have the hiss. In my gear, as in most consumer audio gear that has balanced and unbalanced connections, the balanced section is just taken from the unbalanced digital outputs and converted to balanced electronically. Frankly this just adds more electronics to the signal. In my HALO gear, that electronics adds a 6dB gain to the signal, which when paired with efficient Klipsch, gives me a hiss. I spent quite a bit of time with Parasound tech support and they told me the bulk of the information. My understanding is that in order to have truly balanced connections, the internal makeup of the system must be balanced. Having two separate sections inside a consumer unit would make it price prohibitive. These units are 3K as it is. You can see the thread on this issue in the Technical board under "Noise Floor on Heritage systems" .

I had bi-wired my ALK Belles for a while and have recently gone back to standard. Frankly, I cannot tell any differance. I can bi-wire both the Belles and my center La Scala, but can't hear the differance. I recently made some Canare 4S11 speaker cables and chose to opt for two lead runs per terminal for an 11 awg. wire. These cables are easily converted to biwire capability. You can find a tremendous amount of information on the net about bi-wiring, along with the great amount of controversy on the subject. Try them both ways and see which you like better.

ntn1: Some new higher end models are starting to sport balanced connections. That is, connections that use XLR interconnects, large, round 3 pronged connectors. These are generally used by professionals and studios due to superior noise rejection. You would know if you had them. I don't want to get into the details of my hiss problem so as not to hijack your thread. BTW, I too use the Canare RCA interconnect and I am extremely pleased with them. These I made myself to custom length.

In my limited experience, the ground loop humm is very different from a high frequency hiss usually associated with the electronics of the source.

That's what my wife said. For a week I was without a center channel, and you should have heard the whinning and complaining.

Randy: I started this thread before I actually got to listen to the LaS. Now that I have, I can't think of anything it might need other than maybe an ALK balancing network. These things sound absolutely great. They are a very close match to my Belles. I will only be using one for the center channel, but I am extremely glad I got this set.

I'm glad to hear the LaS as center was a good choice. To be honest, I have not heard the Cornwalls so cannot honestly compare those to my Belles, but I love my Belles and would only trade those for Khorns.

This is sad! Part of the problem is the shipping. I just had a pair shipped and paid $350 for shipping and crating. Unfortunately I have all my gear too, or that would be one heck of a deal!!!

ntn1: Man, I feel your pain. I just spent the better part of a month trouble shooting my system because of a hiss also. In my case, I was using balanced connections in my pre/pro and amp. That section of the pre/pro has a 6db gain over the unbalanced section. I now use the unbalanced connections and there is no hiss at all. I assume you have in fact a hiss, and not a hum. I know it is a real pain, but you may want to start from scratch. Unhook all your gear and just have the speakers, amp and pre/pro. Listen to them with just those hooked up. ( I imagine you already did that). Then just hook up one thing at a time until you can further narrow down the problem. You might try some good quality interconnects between your dvd and pre/pro. Let us know how it goes.

Well, it is all finally together. These La Scalas turned out to be a terrific addition as a center channel. The timbre match with the Belles is about as good as it gets. I decided to go with the La Scala as center. I did some two channel comparrison between the Belles and LaS and found them very close, with some minor differences. The LaS has a slightly more tamed mid range and a slightly tighter bass. These differences were very minor, but noticeable. However, the Belles have a larger "air" and much wider soundstage. The differences during the test were the speakers of course, the ALK vs. AL-3 crossovers and the speaker wire. The Belles had my new Canare 4S11 cable and the LaS had plain 12 ga. The drivers in these two models are identical for these year groups. I would love to hear the LaS with the ALK in them. Since the center is going to be big on mid-range and I listen to a lot of 2 Channel music, the perfect setup for me was the LaS in center flanked by the Belles. I never realized just how much wider the Belles are than the LaS. The Belle is a larger and heavier speaker for sure. I will miss the Chorus II's I replaced as center, but they went to a good home.

I just finished building my own Canare interconnects and speaker cables. If you are at all interested in building your own, Canare and Belden are very good quality. The nice thing about building your own is that you can make all your cables to custom length. The money involved will initially be about the same, since you most likely will have to purchase the crimp tools along with the cables etc. However, it makes for a nice project. The quality of my cables is better than any Monster or equivalent product I would have purchased on line or in stores. The Canare connectors are very high quality and very nice. Just depends on your time and desire to work on something like that.

Good thinking guys. No I'm not sure who did the damage. All I know is that it is fresh. It's not a huge deal, but when you pay $350 for professional packing and shipping, that's what you should get. Good idea on the paint match. I'll see if there is a piece that is about to come off, but first I'll have to wait to hear from the Craters and Freighters folks. The eBay pictures don't seem to show this damage, but hey, who really knows.

Yeah, I'm working on suggestion number one and figure I'll get stuck working on suggestion number two. What is the best paint to use on the cabinets to match the original finish? If that is even possible. Certainly others have gone throught this. The chips are not large enough to warrant a total re-veneer, but I would like the cabinet to be a little more presentable. Fortunately, none of the acoustic components were compromised and these sound very good. I have found that although these have the same horn drivers as my Belles, the highs and bass are slightly different. The bass is pretty powerful for a speaker that is quite smaller than the Belle. I am guessing the AL-3 is different enough from my ALK's to account for the high freq differances.

I recently purchased a pair of La Scalas. An outfit called Craters and Freighters (not cheap) was hired to pack and ship the speakers. Somebody damaged the top corners of the cabinets. Mostly, the damage consists of dime sized pieces of veneer that are pulled off. The attached image is one of the damaged areas. Any suggestions on how to best fix this problem? Thanks in advance.

Many thanks for all the suggestions guys. I finally got to listen to them last night. These are a perfect match for my Belles. I found the bass to be deeper in the La Scala than the Belle. The balancing network and horns are all perfect, just a little dust. However, the cabinets have a few deep gouges and some veneer chips that should be repaired. What is the best product to fill in these veneer chips? In order to make the Belle style grilles, is that done with a simple wood frame inserted in the bass cavity and covered with grille fabric, or is there more to it?

If you were asking about the ones I got, here are the pictures. I should receive them in the next few days. First thing will be to hook them up and see if they work properly...acoustically speaking. These have AL3 crossovers and one of them should be a nice match for my Belles as center channel.

I just finished some DIY audio cables. These things turned out great and the cost of the tools and parts is still below what I would have paid for Monster or other name brands. I found most of my information at here and here. I ordered Canare parts but found cheaper tools that worked just as well. The nice thing about DIY cables is that you can cut them to the exact lenght you need. So far, I have made a subwoofer cable, three audio cables and changed the connectors on my component cables to BNC for my HALO gear. I will finish my project when they deliver the rest of the stuff I ordered. I plan on making some Canare 4S11 speaker cables and more audio cables. Once you get the hang of it, it takes about 3 minutes to finish a very nice cable.

I thought I got a very nice deal. $911 for the pair and supposedly in good working order. Just need some cabinet TLC.