DTLongo

Welcome to the Khorn priesthood (or cult). Audiophile dream of a lifetime, I bought ny 2003's new then. It's been a LOVE - not so love relationship. The darn things are very amplifier-sensitive and tend to sound bass-shy on newer solid-state home theater amps, though they sounded great in straight-stereo on one older obsolete vintage 1990 Pioneer Pro-Logic HT VSX-5700SX receiver I still have. You should seal them to the wall, which you can do very inexpensively via foam pipe insulating-tubing you can buy at Home Depot or such. Your older Khorns may benefit too from upgrading the crossovers. Mine benefited from top-of-the-line ALK extreme-slope Xovers but they're pricey and other folks on the forum will have other views. When you do finally have them dialed in to your satisfaction you're in for a treat. Their clarity and transparency is hypnotic, they energize the very air in the room, the performance is just THERE. And when you want to play them stadium-loud they'll do so without flinching. Same basic design for over sixty years and they still hold their own against the supposedly very very best out there. Quite a "Heritage" for PWK.

According to Best Buy's weekend flyer today the price of admission for 3D (50" screen + 3D DVD player plus multiple glasses package) is north of $3,000.00. That's pretty stiff for what I feel in my bones is a niche product. Maybe it'll be worth a look in a couple of years or so when (if?) prices come WAY down. But not now, I think.

"Just to start off, I feel like such a lucky person to be blessed with the gifts below..." Thank you for that sweet post. You are a younger person and I don't know if you are familiar with the writings of Ayn Rand ("Atlas Shrugged" and much more). Rand is a controversial authoress with her uncompromising advocacy of libertarianism and the free market and scorn for governmental intervention in such. She is flawed in that her uncompromising libertarian ideal does postulate a completely HONEST free market, and we imperfect humans fall short of that in the real world. Still, Rand got some things right. One is her distinction between "altruism" and "benevolence." Altruism entails a duty to sacrifice for others. Benevolence, by contrast, entails a donor's WANTING to help someone because so doing gives pleasure to the donor. The donor sees qualities on the recipient (or the recipient's family, in your case, your mom) that the donor wants to encourage and reward. It follows that for a recipient to resist or refuse such benevolence would be grievously to wound the well-intended donor. Rather, you should want to respect and treasure that person and live up to the standards that he or she is seeking to reward. In so doing you would be a completely moral person in accepting and earning that benevolence. Thank you again for your post, a breath of fresh air in these times. Good luck. - Tom Longo

JJK, pardon me, but where is this "AVS Forum"?

Apologies if I'm repeating something discussed recently. But do any of you have hands-on experience with home-3-D? I know that 3-D is being ballyhooed by manufacturers and Sound & Vision magazine, etc. as The Next Big Thing. I have been skeptical. But the reason I ask is that last night I began watching 2-D Blu-Ray Avatar on my vintage 2004 Pioneer HDTV 50-inch plasma that isn't even 1080p (it's 1080i). The video clarity and quality were stunning, the best Blu-Ray yet that I've seen, and since the original film was released in 3-D I couldn't help wondering what it would look like at home in that. So, assuming I'm still around (I'm 68) and might be in the mood to upgrade in say one or two years or whenever my Pioneer gives up the ghost, what do you folks with experience think of the current and prospective state of the art in home 3-D? Tks.

So, how did you make out?

Really check carefully the bass management settings on your receiver. You may have to dig into the manual some. First check your speaker configuration settings to be sure the receiver is set to subwoofer-on. Then you should find somewhere a choice between 'LFE" or "L/R + LFE" or some such. If you choose "LFE," the receiver will send to the sub ONLY the Low Frequency Effects signal it senses from, say, a movie soundtrack that has such encoding. Dependng on the movie material, there may be little or no LFE. If you set it to "L/R + LFE" the receiver will send all low bass material on all input material to the sub. The difference should be quite noticeable.

Yes, the Zoom HN4 recorder pictured by Al K. is the one I have. (from Al K.) " I'm curious about a point Tom makes here. It would seem to me that a person's hearing would be a "constant" over everything he hears and would be the same no matter if he is listening to live music or reproduced music. Why is it that Tom would want to hear more highs over his stereo than he hears when listening to live music?" Al, I think I know you well enough to observe that you're a dedicated engineer and, as such, what your instruments' technical measurements tell you is absolute truth for you. If they say a curve is flat then by gum and by gawd it's FLAT. But actual human hearing is a subjective as well as objective exercise. Take the famous Fletcher-Mundsen (sp)? Loudness hearing curves. Signals at both 20 db and 85 db levels may be each measurably dead-flat, but the human ear interprets the lower-level signal as tinny and the higher-level one as full. Hence, Loudness compensation. Also, individual people's hearing varies. I know from test signals that my old ears don't hear much if anything above 11 or 12 khz. Yet I can still detect the very subtle differneces between, say, your 1" Trachorns that are in my Khorns and the 2" Trachorns you lent me for a week and sought my listening impressions about. Both the "engineering" and "ear" approaches are legitimate, neither is more "right" than the other. It's what gives the listener pleasure that counts. As good as my Khorns with your Trachorns and ES networks are, I can sure hear the difference between them and and a live Mid-Atlantic Symphony performance. Running the tweeters wide open brings the Khorns closer to approximating the live performance, to my ears. (from Al K.) "It suggests that even a person whose ears have been "calibrated" by listening to the real thing can still prefer something other than "true" reproduction. If this is true, what is a speaker manufacturer to do? Show they make a speaker have perfectly flat frequency response or make it suit what most people "want" to hear. Which philosophy will sell the most speakers?" It follows from my comments above that a wise manufacturer's policy would be to incorporate crossover level controls in their speakers so that users can set the speakers to their preference. Original Large Advents and other speakers, back then, had that feature. But to do that well costs money, which is another consideration. Al's sophisticated crossovers, which do allow for level-sets without degrading the signal, are not exactly cheap.

As some of you may recall from posts, about six weeks ago Al K. lent me a pair of his new 2" Trachorns for a week and then reported on my listening impressions of them. While he was here I took advantage of all his measuring gear Al brought over (extensive, good thing he lives nearby) to re-check his 1" Trachorns and ES crossovers that he installed in my '03 Klipschorns for me last year. The midrange and tweeter drivers are stock Klipsch. Al backed off the midrange squawkers as I requested, and with his gear set the tweeters dead flat relative to that. Trouble was, to my ear the result sounded somewhat dull. At the age of going-on-68 and based on listening tests, ain't nothing much left up in the old ears beyond ca,.12 Khz if that much. So, I reset the tweeters with Al's jumpers to wide open. The difference (for me) was, really, amazing. The speakers opened up, it was literally like lifting a rather heavy veil. Footnote: I recently acquired a gadget for digital-audio recording of the local symphony orchestra I am associated with (www.midatlanticsymphony.org). It is a Zoom H4N digitial audio recorder, a small device that could fit in an overcoat pocket. You really have to get used to it since its screens are not terribly intuitive and the accompanying manual transliterated from Japanese or Chinese is a challenge. Plus, it tends to record at low (but high quality) levels, so you have to be level-aggressive with whatever audio import program you're using (for me, Audacity). But once you work the kinks out, it's a truly impressive gadget. True CD-audio and better quality for only around $300.00. (Klipschsite police note: I have no connection at all with Zoom, some musicians in the M.S.O. recommended it to me.)

"Al, I get it, keep doing what you do best and ignore it. Some people just don't get it and never will. Its called common sense. Without people like yourself, we wouldn't be talking about BMS or any other driver." I write this respectful of Klipsch's Amy Unger's admonition at the top of this string. I acknowledge and respect Klipsch's willingness to continue to permit such improving-on-Klipsch posts to appear on this site which, after all, is proprietarially Klipsch's. That said, when one speaks of improvements to relatively new Klipschorns one is talking about pushing already relatively high end into the esoteric. And I did so with ALK upgrades to my relatively new 2003 Khorns and indeed there were differences that were palpable. Do a site search under my handle DTLongo and you can read about that. And yet and yet...ALK's improvements were definitely noticeable and welcome in some respects, yet I miss some, not much, but some high-frequency "tingle" of the original Klipsch crossovers on some material. And yet further, with the ALK upgrades everything in general sounds more separated, discernible and real. But yet further further, unrelated to what Al's Xovers do, I am still frustrated by still-anemic (to my ears) Klipschorn bass on symphonic material. On general rock-country-disco-heavy metal material, nothing beats the Khorns to my ears especially when you really want to crank them to concert volumes which they handle so well. On symphonic, though, ...? So here we are chasing after our respective audio Holy Grails never to be fully fulfilled. But that's part of the fun of it (I guess).

Pioneer 50" from 2004. Hard to believe it's 5+ years old already. Works perfectly. Cost $4000+ back then. No noticeable dimunition in brightness, no burn-in. This is an obsolescent set,1080i (not p) and with a rather awkward outboard control center that adds a bit of hookup complexity. But it does a superb job on standard DVD's and a very good one on Blu-Ray. Flesh tones,especially of the feminine persuasion, are especially sweet. I wonder whether 1080p would really be a significant improvement. IMHO plasma beats LCD hands down. LCD still is grappling with refresh times, off-angle dimming and various compensating measures such as vario-LED backlighting. While plasma just cruises along...

It's a darn shame that Klipschorns lack "equalization" in the sense that the factory crossover is fixed with no way to adjust relative mid- and tweeter range levels for room and/or the listener's preference. I always thought ny '03 Khorns were too hot, the midrange overwhelmed the bass. But there was no way to adjust for that. Which is a shame since Klipschorn bass, really heard, is something to behold (sic). I've since upgraded the midrange + tweeter Xovers (ALK) and that helped significantly. But adjustable crossovers appear to have been a blind spot of the Klipsch Co. since PWK's days.

When my '03 Klipschorns were apart in October '09 to install ALK ES-crossovers and Trachorns, we needed to open the bass bins to disconnect the stock crossovers mounted therein. The pyramidal bass space immediately behind the 15" driver is sealed. Ergo, PWK seems to have incorporated an acoustic-suspension air-spring in his woofer design as well. Pretty prescient since the AR-1 and later acoustic suspension speakers didn't come on the market til about 1959 or so. All the Khorn bass you hear comes from the front of the woofer driver through an approximately 4" x 12" slot into the the complicated horn configuration. It works. The combination of the air-spring and the horn means that the woofer driver barely exerts itself while producing prodigious sound. On the other hand, if there is not true low bass in the program material, the Khorns won't artificially add it. Al Klappenberger (ALK), who has been messing around with Klipschorns for years, avers that the Khorn bass bin & horn are perfection and can't be improved.

Some will find this sacrilegious but IMHO surround sound is way overrated. I've gone the 5.1 and now 7.1 routes for several years now (see profile), and conclude that surround is not worth the added expense and complexity. It's a frill that adds something at the margins, but negligibly. On the other hand, a center channel speaker does definitely improve things by anchoring center dialogue so it doesn't pull so much toward the right or left channel speaker if you are off the sweet-spot centerline. That is a valuable improvement. But the center channel speaker (again IMHO) can be of a much more modest quality than the outboards. You can run it 2 to 4 db down and it will still fill in the center nicely. Since three-channel home theater receivers don't exist, if I had to do it all over again I'd be happy with a decent 5.1 channel receiver run with no back channels. If I were willing to run the wires, a pair of el cheapo speakers would fill the bill for the surrounds. (Disclosure: Back in the 1950's I thought stereo was a downgrade from, say, a mono Klipschorn well fed and set up. An atavistic part of me still feels that way. Stereo is nice. Three-channel is nice. But surround - as was four-channel in the 1970's - is a gimmick.)

Interesting string, sorry I came in late, was away for the holidays. I too had a '53 Chevy that I remember well and fondly. Blue-Flame six-cylinder 115 hp. with Powerglide auto transmission. I don't remember the radio particularly, though. Before that I had a '53 Oldsmobile 98 Rocket 4-door sedan, eight cylinders, a real tank, smooth as silk, used oil to the nines but a sweet ride. My father picked it up as a junker for $5.00 or so from a friend and had it fixed up for a few hundred $ more and that barge took me through college in the early 1960's. It had a SWEET radio. Big sonorous speaker in the center of the dashboard. AM-only and tubes or course, took a minute or so to "warm up," how quaint. The Olds finally died and I acquired the more economical Chevy afterward. Fast forward through decades to the present (see profile below). Despite a near-top of the line system I can still live with mid-fi which in fact is what I have in the HT room next door. Yet...for serious full-bore, live-volume, you-are-there symphonic listening of fortissimo material, those Klipschorns really shine! It's like that big old Oldsmobile. Nice to have those "cubic inches." The softer inner voices (flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons) really shine too even at lower volumes. Seriously, there's nothing wrong with decent mid-fi, say, $1,000.00 all up including $500.00 for speakers, for 90% to 95% of listening. But for that last few percent, ain't nothing better than striving for the best one can afford. At age 67 I think I've gotten to where I'm going to get with my ALK-upgraded Klipschorns.

Far be it from me to contest the more engineer-philes among you. All I have is my 67 y.o. ears. But to those ears my 2003 Klipschorns always sounded voiced too strong in the midrange. Yet the stock crossover is fixed, no user adjustments. IMHO THE big improvement Klipsch should make, and that ought to be commercially relatively economically doable to boot, is to have the midrange (especially) and tweeter Xovers user-adjustable. My '03's are now upgraded with ALK Trachorns and exteme-slope crossovers and they are a definite improvement, not least because AL K's default setting holds back the midrange several db's. His Xovers allow for further adjustment but it's awkward, you have to pull the heavy speakers out from the wall and get in there and move jumpers in ways that are not crystal-clear from the written information Al provides. Much better to have the crossvers dial- or multiposition switch-adjustable. When properly set up and with the midrange (and treble) held back to one's taste, the Klipschorn bass is AWEEESOME. So pure and enveloping. But with the hot stock midrange it's hard to get there.

I'm not sure I fully understand your question, but since you said you're a "noob" I'm assuming that you're innocent about speaker phasing. Basically, from your amp you have to connect positive to postivie and negative to negative on ALL your speakers. This in order to avoid out-of-phase problems where one speaker cone will be moving inward while the other is moving outward, which will ruin your imaging and torpedo your bass. Generally the red terminals are positive and the black terminals are negative. But experiment, first in two-channel mode, and choose the settings where the bass is stronger and the center image is solid. Don't worry, if it's wrong you'll definitely hear the difference. And then accord the center channel correspondingly. Let us know how you make out.

"Tom, I know you didn't want to pack these, but I am shure Marshal will pay for shipping. Marshal is a good dude, he put Cholter up when he went to Florida and ran him around, he has offered to have me come stay before. I am shure that if you needed something he would help you out in the future, no questions asked if he could." Is "Marshall" = Groomlake51? If so, I feel conscience-bound to offer them to him since he weighed in on 2-Channel earlier before GaryMD decided he couldn't come out to fetch them. "Marshall," please advise who you are. Otherwise, the fallback at present is loveroklipsch in Denver, Daniel Miller. I intend to have the grille + horn assemblies professionally packed and will send the cost beforehand for the recipient to send me a check before shipping. I might not be able to do so for a few days though because we are in some wretched weather here in the Mid-Atlantic, a classic Nor'easter with day after day of wind and rain, and I dont want to get them wet. Info note: I lost one of the two throat-washers. But it's a standard faucet-like washer that you can obtain at any plumbing supply outfit. - Tom

Second picture.

GaryMD wrote that he didn't know when he might be able to come out to pick these up and graciously suggested I offer them anew. So, here is my slightly-edited offer from several days ago: FREE to good home: a pair of Klipschorn top-hat grille and midrange horn assemblies (less drivers). These came from my 2003 Klipschorns recently upgraded with ALK Trachorns and crossovers as described elsewhere on this forum. These assemblies are in absolutely new, pristine unblemished condition. They include mounting brackets as shown. They would be ideal for someone seeking cosmetically to upgrade a pair of old Khorns, or building a Belle, for instance. WILL DELIVER GRATIS within a 75-mile range of Salisbury MD. Otherwise, recipient pays shipping, which could be pricey (? - guessing $100.00 or so) because of challenge of packing and shipping these rather bulky items. See photos. COMMENT: I would very much prefer for someone to come pick them up. Second choice is for me to deliver them within a 75-mile radius as mentioned. Distant third choice is to ship them, but I really weant to avoid the packing + shipping chore.

It's been suggested to me that perhaps people haven't seen this since it was first posted at the end of an earlier longish string of pictures of the upgrade. So, here it is again. As promised at the beginning of [that] string, here are listening impressions of my Klipschorns with the new ALK Trachorns and ES crossovers. These are based on a cumulative ca. 12 hours of listening over three days to a variety of material. Overall impression: The Khorns sound distinctly "sweeter" and fuller. There is greater, more precise separation of group-singing voices and of the inner voices of a symphony orchestra, particularly woodwinds. Plus, I encountered a major, pleasant surprise in the bass. The speakers sound fuller in the woofer range. I did not expect that, rather, I expected improvement basically in the midrange only. Al K. did say I would hear some improvement in the upper bass. It's counterintuitive and I don't what is the exact cause, but perhaps it is because of Al's default setting holding the midrange back 6 db (the level is adjustable). Anyway, the Klipschorn woofers seem now seem literally to have "bloomed" and to be much more in the action than they were before. In fact, need for a subwoofer is now eclipsed. I am running the Khorns now as much without as with my Velodyne S1500R sub. The sub still comes in handy to "excavate" some deep-low to augment program material that is otherwise bass-shy. Some specific listening examples: The Beach Boys - Endless Summer: One hears each of the voices such as really to sense the presence and the different voices of the individual performers. Other vocal music (Dean Martin, Dolly Parton): fuller sound and greater realism, they're truly in the room with you. Piano music: greater fullness, realism and tactile presence. Symphonic music. This is my forte, my primary listening. I am especially closely familiar with the sound of a local professional symphony on whose Board of Directors I sit, the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra (www.midatlanticsymphony.org). Since 2006 I have been making DVD's of selected MSO performances for archival and promotional purposes, using a Sony DCR-SR100 camcorder. .These are non-professional recordings using the camera's own microphone, which captures a commendably clear and articulate sound. Compared with the pre-ALK Klipschorns, the same recordings of the MSO sound sweeter with more precise instrument definition and separation, and fuller in the bass. Before, I had to crank the subwoofer to pull out bass to round out the sound. Now, the sub is essentially superfluous. Other symphonic: Boston Pops - Leroy Anderson's "A Christmas Festival." There is a passage where oboe and clarinet are playing in unison. The ALK upgrade separates the instruments so you can hear each. I had never before perceived that particular stretch as involving the two different instruments. Now I hear that clearly. Later in the piece where some really deep symphonic percussive bass comes in, the Khorns now pump that out way down low. They didn't before. Acid tests: the famous Telarc Tchaikovsky "1812" with the Cincinnati Symphony and the cannon shots, and the Telarc Saint-Saens Organ Symphony #3 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. With either, no subwoofer necessary! 1812 - The strings shine, they are luminescent. One has a sense of hearing actual multiple violins rather than a generic string sound. The non-cannon-shots orchestral deep bass thumps and crescendi are tactile. The cannon shots themselves come through the Khorns as excitedly as you can imagine. In fact, I have never heard this recording as thrillingly reproduced as it is now on the new setup, since sometime in the 1980's when I heard it through 1500 watts into a set of then-$40,000 Stonehenge-like Infinity Reference Standard speakers at a now-defunct retailer called Excalibur in Alexandria, VA. The Organ Symphony - Same general impression about the strings and about overall smoothness and precision as above. Plus, the opening and closing fortissimo portions of the Third Movement, played at volume, literally took my breath away. This was real, wall-shaking, pants-flapping sound, no kidding, like I had never heard before through those Klipschorns. Yet all undistorted and pure. My "Mighty Klipschorns" are now just that. They now whisper and roar palpably more clearly, precisely and satisfyingly than before.

GaryMD, if you want 'em and you're willing to make the trek out here to pick them up, they're yours. Let me know so we can work out a mutually agreeable date. You can give my new babies a listen while you're here. Groomlakearea51, thank you for your quick dibs and email, but I'd really prefer not to go through the hassle of packing and shipping them if someone close by claims them. If GaryMD falls through and nobody else locally comes up, you're next. Thank you everyone for your interest.

...a pair of Klipschorn top-hat grille and midrange horn assemblies (less drivers). These came from my 2003 Klipschorns recently upgraded with ALK Trachorns and crossovers as described on the Upgrades and Modifications forum. These assemblies are in absolutely new, pristine unblemished condition. They include mounting brackets and midrange throat-washers as shown. They would be ideal for someone seeking cosmetically to upgrade a pair of old Khorns, or building a Belle, for instance. WILL DELIVER GRATIS within a 75-mile range of Salisbury MD. Otherwise, recipient pays shipping, which could be pricey (? - guessing $100.00 or so) because of challenge of packing and shipping these rather bulky items. See photos.

Second photo. The tweeter cutout is also visible.

...a pair of Klipschorn top-hat grille and midrange horn assemblies (less drivers). These came from my 2003 Klipschorns recently upgraded with ALK Trachorns and crossovers as described elsewhere on this forum. These assemblies are in absolutely new, pristine unblemished condition. They include mounting brackets and midrange throat-washers as shown. They would be ideal for someone seeking cosmetically to upgrade a pair of old Khorns, or building a Belle, for instance. WILL DELIVER GRATIS within a 75-mile range of Salisbury MD. Otherwise, recipient pays shipping, which could be pricey (? - guessing $100.00 or so) because of challenge of packing and shipping these rather bulky items. See photos.