Center channel for Khorns

[avidfan]

Hi,

I have Khorn clones in my home theatre,I cant hang a belle or Lascala on the wall for a center chanel.What smaller klipsch speaker is a good match.

[M6 Driver]

I think folks use a Heresy or Heresy II (maybe the Acadamy also) depending on the year of their K horns plus I think they do some type of wacky inverted Heresy for some reason or another. I'm sure the Heritage folks will chime in.

------------------

"FULLY LOADED"

J

[boa12]

i believe steve p for one uses an inverted heresy I above the tv. upside down above puts the horn closer to the action & also puts the woofer farther away from the tv to avoid magnetic interference since heresy are not magnetically shielded.

yea i think it's best to match the heresy I or II to whatever year/type of khorn.

------------------

My Home Systems Page

[j-malotky]

Avid

I was in the same Delema. I plan to use a projector in my new theater and did not have enough room above or below the screen for a LaScalla as I originally planned to use a center between my Khorns.

What I am doing is building a two cabnet system. The top cabnet will have a K-77 and k-400 horn and will be placed over the screen. I plan to build a woofer cabnet to be placed below the screen Still working on the woofer design, but will most likely be a twin K-22 or K-24 ported cabinet.

FYI - The hardest component to find in my project was a K-400 horn. I got mine from "Big D" on this board for a very fair price. I know he has a second one for sale.

I have been conversing with Steve P about this topic, maybe he will join in on this thread. He was a Heresy with a K401 horn in a separate cabinet for his Center. He feels the bass is a little weak, and plans to build a LaScalla type design for a new center.

I feel the best way to get a HT to voice properly is to match your center as close as you can to the Mains.

I tried a Heresy to see how it sounded For me - The Heresy is just a little too small sounding for me in between the mighty Khorns.

JM

[WMcD]

It is difficult to tell how small a center speaker one can get away with.

I built a system and the center has the same mid and tweeter. There are a few pans on CD's I listen to and the effect is good. Klipsch center channel HT systems like the Reference series uses the same horn in the center and this honors the same theory.

One issue, still unresolved, is how much of the system output is from the center channel. My thought is that when PWK was using a phantom L+R mixer for the center, it was pretty much a "helper", with the flanking units handling most of the load. And so a Heresy did well.

Horn Ed points out that with discrete multichannel recordings like from movie DVDs, a lot of info is in the center channel, perhaps more than the flanking units. Even with the center output set to "small" with a 70 Hz roll off, a lot of information is in the center.

So, I conclude that in some circumstances the center channel is, these days, much more important than ever.

In view of the above, I support the theory that K-400 for the center would be a good choice. It will have to be augmented by some sort of bass unit.

Going back to the original issue, can you get away with a Heresy. I'd think it would be better than a more "modern" center channel.

Gil

[soundog]

The goal in a HT system is to have all the channels as tonally matched as possible. Since bass below about 80Hz is non-directional it can be diverted to a sub-woofer using the bass management features of most good A/V receivers. To achieve a tonal match it is best if the mid range and tweeter drivers are identical all around. I built a floor to ceiling cabinet using Heritage components. I put the woofers in a cabinet at the bass and a set of mid range (K77) drivers and tweeters (K55) above and below my 32" monitor. The components came off of ebay and employed the short horns on the mids found in Heresys but used the woofers K33 employed in the Khorns. They came from Frazier speakers that were developed by former Klipsch employees in the 60s. (Of course they were not labeled as "K" speakers but match the E/V, Eminence, Atlas drivers used by Klipsch.

I felt the match was close but more constricted sounding than the mighty Khorns. This may have been partially due to the short horns but probably more due to my using AA crossovers with horns designed for a higher crossover between bass and midrange. I substituted Altec 511Bs (adapted to accommodate K77 drivers) whose wide dispersion works real well on both the dialogue in movie AND with the musical vocals contained in center channel SACDs.

The fact that the 511s are designed for a 500 Hz crossover and I am crossing over at 400 Hz seems not to matter, but, in fact, seems to work real well. However, crossing over the short horn designed for a 700Hz crossover at 400Hz resulted in a very noticeable drop-off and, therefore, a tonal mismatch. I have compared the 511 with the K400 using the K77 drivers in both and the 511s have wider dispersion and , thus, a more open sound which I like, although otherwise the differences are not great. I have remained undecided as to whether to use them on the Khorns.

In my other system employing a 61" projection TV, I use a pair of Klipsch LCR THX speakers towed inward on each side of the TV and this works very well. I use the hanging KT-DS dipoles that come with the THX system along with RS-3s plus 2 additional RS-3s for the rear channel. I think it might have been slightly better if I had employed LCR direct radiators in the rear but I needed something I could hang on the wall.

All these speakers in parallel result in a lower 4 ohm impedence that doesn't seem to bother my Outlaw 1050 receivers in the least. I liked the surround effect from the THX system better until I employed stacked pairs of LaScalas at skewed angles (like giant Bose cubes) as surrounds. Now I like my Heritage system better for both music and movies (unless the movies are something that plays better in progressive scan on a giant screen.

------------------

Soundog's HT Systems

[HornEd]

Another great post Soundog! It is always great to hear the trials and tribulations of someone who can think Klipsch beyond the Box! We all can learn from your experiences... thanks for sharing.

Yes, Gil, centers are more important than ever. PWK (in his home) likes to have his Khorns wide apart for a concert hall effect and uses a Belle in the center, as you indicated, to fill in the center. That's great for classical music... but less than ideal for tying in sound and screen for HT where the center channel is asked to carry more of the sound than all of the other channels put together.

That fact that can be justified by a brief search of sound mixing for DVD's on the web. In fact, I usually say upwards of 75%... the sound engineers usually peg the amount as higher than that. Believe it or not, HornEd is just conservative empiricist facing reality!

So, three considerations surface for any HT center (which BTW also works better with multi-channel music although the mix for music relies much less on the center). These three are from an audio perspective and are not compromised by the important concerns of WAF aesthetics, space available above or below the TV, etc.:

1. Today's center should be robust and have the drivers and cubic inches to match or surpass the mains since they will be asked to carry most of the HT load.

2. The closer the three front Mains (Left, Center, Right) are matched for tone and timbre, the better your average HT experience will be.

3. Dialogue... HT means that most of the human speech will come from the center... and some centers are better at producing clear speech than others. Klipsch uses the "Tapered Array" in their current centers. This tapers out the speech frequencies in one of the two woofers to preclude woofers being slightly out of phase which might lower intelligibility. Yet, my custom KLF-30 center has two 12" woofers and they improved intelligibility for my 94 year-old mother!

Look for a major change in how screens and centers will be integrated in the future. There is so much entertainment value being left on the table by the current crop of under-achieving centers on HT and cable TV that change must come! -HornEd

------------------

Photo update soon! -HornEd