Mike Lindsey Posted February 17, 2002 Share Posted February 17, 2002 Well Q-Man is right, I showed up a week early as I got my dates mixed up. For some reason I thought it was the 23rd. Suffice it to say, it was a surprise to the whole family. First of all, I would like to thank Q for having me over and letting me partake of his system... for almost 6 hours. The first impression you have when you walk into the room is how big those speakers are. The false corners and custom wall-unit is first rate. The pictures he had posted earlier do not give this room justice. It is a much larger room than it looks. The false corners that he built allow the Khorns to be toed exactly to the sweet spot on his couch, approximately 20 feet from the speakers. The custom shelf that his La Scala's sit on for effect speakers, allow them to sit a little further back in the corner and angled more to the sides. The custom wall-unit, which houses the TV, some recording equipment and the inverted center La Scala, is a work of art. His Yamaha receiver, McIntosh amp, 100 CD changer and Outlaw ICBM also sit on the large custom made shelf. Suffice it to say, you won't see too many people with 2 Khorns and 3 La Scala's for their front soundstage. In the rear, Q made two very large Imperial speakers of 1950's vintage using the schematic that John Warren sent him. These speakers have the same drivers and horns that the Khorns employ. Sitting on top of these behemoths is another pair of La Scala's turned upside down. The Imperials are sitting about 2 feet behind the couch and angled slightly behind the listening position. The La Scala's are angled more to the sides so that people sitting in the loveseat or the lounge chair can still hear the rears. They are both receiving the same channel of music. For good measure, Q has built a 1950's vintage University (for rear center), again using some plans that John Warren sent him. This has all original University components (you gotta love eBay) inside and is also where Q educated me on the principles of the folded bass horn. I had no idea that it was the cabinet design that did this. I thought there was a big long folded metal horn inside there. Now raise your hand if you thought the same thing. I believe this employs a big Altec (or Atlas, I can't remember) horn and smaller tweeter, that sit on top of the cabinet. If you can believe it, he has another room that houses another pair of Klipschorns that will be the beginning of a 2-channel system. I beleive they will temporarily be driven by some mid-70's Phase Linear separates until he figures out what he wants to do with them (tubes maybe?). As we sat down to listen to some music, Q's wife was nice enough to make a nice vegetable plate with Hawaiian bread for an unexpected visitor, and opened up the Beringer's Merlot I brought over. Little did I know she only drank white wine (over the next 4 hours or so, I proceeded to drink the whole damn bottle). Now to the good stuff. I brought over a couple of miscellaneous 5.1 DVD's since Q is still living in the 1990's and hasn't gotten around to upgrading his DVD player yet. It's hard to believe with all that muscle, he doesn't have a DTS player yet (he is currently in the market for a better DVD player with DVD-A as a bonus). We started out with Santana's "Supernatural" (Gypsy Queen/Oye Como Va) in 5.1 DD, because of the great percussion on those two tracks. According to the RS SPL meter, we kept the SPL right around 95 - 100db with some 110db peaks. The first thing I noticed was how much quieter his system was at that volume than it is in my much smaller room. There seemed to be a lot more air around the instruments than what I was accustomed to with my 2 pairs of Chorus's. Better separation and not as much harshness at the loud volumes. As for bass, Q was using an Outlaw ICBM (I have one as well) to manage his bass and sent anything under 40hz (from his Khorns) to his 12" Sunfire (we'll get to that later :-). Next we threw on Fleetwood Mac's "The Dance" (also in 5.1DD) and fired up track 5 (I'm so Afraid), which is one of my favorite tunes. There is a real nice 3 or 4 minute guitar solo at the end of this track by Lindsey Buckingham that does not disappoint. There is also some real heavy bass by John McVie which had the room shaking as well. Next up was James Taylor's "Live at the Beacon Theater", a much more mellow offering but I was interested in track 2 (You can close Your Eyes) because of the 5 part vocals being backed by an acoustic guitar. Again, plenty of separation between the vocals and absolutely no distortion no matter where we had the volume. About this time, we decided to play a couple of CD's I brought over because I wanted to hear the Khorns all by themselves. I started with Joe Jackson's "Night and Day" CD from Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. This is one of my better recorded CD's and the music is fantastic. We played track 7 (Cancer) which has a great piano solo towards the last half of the track and it sounded awesome on the Khorns. Next was Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue". Q may not agree with me here, but this CD sounded better to me than everything else we played. Miles on the trumpet and Coltrane on the Saxophone felt so alive in this living room. I played Freddy Freeloader and Flemenco Sketches, but I could have played this CD for 3 straight hours on this system and I would have been in heaven. It is an album I never get tired of listening to. After listening to my stuff for a couple of hours, Q was in the mood to hear some of his own music and proceeded to turn me on to some of his favorites, which consist mostly of the Blues genre. By now, I had polished off the bottle of Merlot and Q asked me if I would like some more. I should have said no but after telling me they had some red wine that they would not be drinking I decided to take a look. He proceeded to pull out a bottle of Cabernet that was made in 1988! I don't think I had ever had a bottle of wine that was older than 5 years old but this was probably the best wine I had ever tasted in my life (Thanks Q). For the life of me, I can't remember what it was (I wonder why) but I did leave them half the bottle. Getting back to the story, I think we started with B.B. King and then moved on to some Buddy Guy. I think there was some Muddy Waters somewhere in there too and we ended up listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn for the last hour or so (I was very impressed by the SRV material). Somewhere in the middle of all this, I was spinning one of my tales when Q heard something weird coming from the Sub. Sure enough, that thing was crackling and spitting like you wouldn't believe. It seems somewhere along the way we fried the damn thing. We ended up setting the ICBM to bypass on all the channels so that the bass would go to each of the original speakers. The Khorns can more than handle their own in this regard. All in all, it was a fun, albeit expensive evening with one heck of a nice guy. I told him that I would like to do the same thing again, this time at my house. Maybe we can break my SVS sub while we're at it. Thanks for everything Q, Mike ------------------ My Music Systems This message has been edited by Mike Lindsey on 02-18-2002 at 08:24 AM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Q-Man Posted February 17, 2002 Share Posted February 17, 2002 Mike, I'm glad that you enjoyed the demo, and that the Klipschorns lived up to your expectations. It was fun having you here, and I even liked some of your music. My wife and kids got a kick out of you, when you went into the room and ran from speaker to speaker checking them out. They said that you were like a kid in a candy store. Especially when I had to take the University apart to explain the bass horn. They now know that there are other nuts in this world, and that I'm not the only one. We'll see you again, and thanks for the kind words. Q. ------------------ Q-Man This message has been edited by Q-Man on 02-17-2002 at 09:37 PM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Lindsey Posted February 18, 2002 Author Share Posted February 18, 2002 One thing I forgot to mention is Q's two boys were into the system as much as he was. They seemed to have a better grasp of the remote than him. I hope you had as much fun as I did and look forward to our next visit... Mike Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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