Klipsch's Law and Corollaries

[Grizzog]

You make good points. I'd be interested to see how many people are buying Klipsch's smaller offerings vs Heritage or Jubilee - if the larger ones are close in sales, that would be amazing. Personally, I see most commentary on tall(ish) and thin speakers with small drivers.

I wonder why there aren't many dealers. At least near me, I cannot find a single place to hear any of their offerings above the Reference line (not reference premiere).

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[Mallette]

With so many "small loudspeakers" being marketed by Klipsch and others nowadays...and with so many people on this forum beginning to realize that something of value is being left behind, i.e., the designs that PWK created, namely Klipsch Heritage and the Jubilee,

 

From what I know of the current designers they understand the 8 Cardinal Points thoroughly.  Such knowledge arms them to break these points when necessary for a given market.  You do so only as required to meet the market need.  The competition doesn't have the legacy of PWK to guide them so their designs are, to some extent, pure chance as to price/performance. 

 

There remains some PWK in every Klipsch design I've heard.  As long as they get as close as possible to PWK's principles in every product they'll do fine.

 

Dave

[Chris A]

I wonder why there aren't many dealers. At least near me, I cannot find a single place to hear any of their offerings above the Reference line (not reference premiere).

 

Profit margins: local dealers want to sell hardware that's marked up a great deal and with no discounts to anyone else.

 

They don't want Klipsch because in general, the prices that Klipsch charges on-line result in dealer profit margins that are perceived to be too low. Percentage federal taxes on inventory are at all time highs.   Direct, fringe, and indirect costs on labor and liability insurance premiums are the longest poles in the tent, and lease payments on commercial property must be paid.

 

But the fact remains that most people want bottom dollar prices, and will only use the dealers to listen to the equipment, then they go back home and order online at a lower price.  Do you blame them?

 

In general, most people are having to read others' accounts of equipment performance online, look at the pictures of the equipment in-use and on display, then choose whether to buy or not based on those second-hand opinions. 

 

Others that have access to hi-fi shows go and listen, but my experience has been that the acoustics at thse shows are typically so poor (due to the rooms being way too small, too much furniture in the room, and no acoustic treatments, etc.)  that all I hear are really bad demos, even when they shouldn't sound bad.  It seems odd to me, but an extra 2-4 hours of setup time and a few acoustic adjustments in-room would significantly increase the demo sound quality, but I typically don't see that (only a couple of exceptions per hi-fi show typically). 

 

What hi-fi equipment companies need are cooperative agreements with existing businesses to provide full setups for their patrons - like Chipotle and Starbucks, etc.  However, I see a lot of Bose out there--based almost solely on exclusive endorsements and what amounts to kick-backs.  There is no easy solution, apparently.

 

More discussion here: https://community.klipsch.com/index.php?/topic/156766-heritage-pricing/?p=1869919

[wvu80]

I wonder why there aren't many dealers. At least near me, I cannot find a single place to hear any of their offerings above the Reference line (not reference premiere).

 

Boutique brick and mortar stores are an anachronism, a business model for a by-gone era.  Economy of scale dictates mass distribution such as in the 2,000 Best Buy stores around the world, or more recently, internet sales from on-line stores like Amazon or NewEgg, or internet direct.

 

But the fact remains that most people want bottom dollar prices, and will only use the dealers to listen to the equipment, then they go back home and order online at a lower price. Do you blame them?

 

Right on point.

Edited February 26, 2016 by wvu80

[DrWho]

The tenants behind PWK's design philosophies have very little to do with good business strategy. If you want to see a good business approach that offers quality sound, then look at what Bose has been doing all these years.

 

The problem with horns is that a bad horn sounds much worse than a comparable direct radiating solution - and I would posit that a small horn falls into the bad horn category. The market wants small, and that is what necessitates raising the HF corner of the direct radiating solution. We've been seeing Klipsch do for the past couple decades. Heck, even PWK made that concession with the Heresy so it's really not a new concept.

[garyrc]

The market wants small, and that is what necessitates raising the HF corner of the direct radiating solution.

 

This is an example of the market not supporting quality the way Adam Smith thought it would.  Smith's "market check" is nearly dead.  First, advertising impaired it and then the internet nearly killed it.  In audio, at least, it's hard to taste the fruit at the fruit stand any more -- unless it is small, Bose-like fruit 

[Chris A]

The market wants small...

 

If there has been a resurgence in phonograph and tubes, then there definitely is a resurgence in fully horn-loaded loudspeakers in the market by some market segments.  For instance, it's been my typical experience that trained professional musicians always seem to fall in love with the sound of Khorns, etc. 

 

And PWK never said that he was selling to the masses: Bose is doing that.  I think the point is that you pick your market sub-segment and sell to that.  If you want more revenue, then you have to chase a different market segment with a different set of design requirements.  I'll leave the "home theater in a box" market to those companies that presently dominate that market.

 

Chris

[DrWho]

Good product design is so much more than the technical merits of an approach. The original iPhone is testament to that philosophy - from a technical perspective it failed in every way when compared against the Blackberry phones of that era. Where is Blackberry today?

 

The hard reality of the audio industry is that people don't want the result of pure technical capability - and I'm especially talking about the highest end professionals and musicians. There is so much more to good audio design, and there are mountains of data showing how much the non-technical aspects of a design matter to the perception of quality. The purist approach simply is not the best approach from a holistic perspective.

 

Focusing on what people actually want is so much more than a business argument. The technical aspects of a design are merely tools for accomplishing those holistic goals.

 

This is why I'm such a strong advocate for quality knobs....that oldschool analog feel for our modern digital gear.

[Mallette]

And PWK never said that he was selling to the masses: Bose is doing that.

 

On numerous occasions he said precisely the opposite.  That is why I had such fear of the Audiovox takeover.  I remain pleased and amazed they've left PWK's philosophy in place.  Not a single one of the great names in audio, Marantz, Scott, etc. became big companies until they went public or were acquired and did the consumer thing building on their audiophile image.  Audiovox, at least so far, has chosen to leave Klipsch alone and they are doing a stellar job of steering a "via media" between the PWK heritage and a consumer focus.  That isn't easy. 

 

As long as the Heritage line is manufactured, regardless of how many units are sold, Klipsch will be relevant to high quality.  When that ends, it becomes just another brand of consumable.  Personally, I think it would be good for Klipsch to require all dealers to have a pair of Klipschorns at Klipsch expense to demonstrate the Klipsch philosophy.  They might not sell that many more but when people experience them they are made aware that they are dealing with a company that builds the best and that every lower cost option has a bit of Klipschorn in it. Lots of Ford and Chevy owners would rather have a Lincoln or a Corvette...but they get as close as they can.

 

Dave

Edited March 4, 2016 by Mallette

[Chris A]

-

Edited March 5, 2016 by Chris A

[Chris A]

On 3/4/2016 at 5:14 PM, Mallette said:

On numerous occasions he said precisely the opposite.

 

Thanks to Seti for hanging on to this one.

 

 

Quote

January 14, 1980

 

After Bob Browne's visit to Klipsch and Associates, Contributing Editor Gary Stock interviewed PWK on the technical side of Klipsch's thinking. Here too he shows himself to be an American original - controversial, humorous and fiercely independent.

 

 

Audio: What are the major advancements--the significant individual steps--that you feel have moved loudspeaker design forward since the days of Rice and Kellogg, the two engineers who developed the first moving-coil loudspeaker?

 

Klipsch: One big step was in 1914 or so when A.G. Webster formulated the idea that a horn of exponential flare rate comprised the most efficient design for a horn. He proved mathematically that the exponential shape gave the maximum performance for a unit of bulk.

 

Then two Westinghouse engineers, Slepin and Henna, published a paper in 1924.in which they independently developed the idea of the exponential horn. A Dr. Karapetoff of Cornell took them to task for failing to refer to the earlier work, by the way, nothing as an aside that he had been in Webster's laboratory during the early stages of his work and that Webster had apparently showed him two horns, one of plaster and one of brass.  Webster challenged Karapetoff to hear the difference, and the latter later said "I accepted the challenge and he won," bringing up the question of whether the sound was generated by an early loudspeaker, by a vibrating reed, or what.

 

The point, however, is that once the sound was generated, it propagated equally well through horn of two different materials. That establishes one of the basic tenets of horn deign.  Simple, a horn is just a reasonably rigid boundary for an air column. Now all you have to do is figure what shape to make it.

 

Sandeman. of England, invented and patented a corner horn in 1934, and my own contribution in 1940 was to further reduce the total bulk required for a wide-range horn loudspeaker.  As far as I'm concerned, since then the advances in loudspeakers have been largely in detail rather than in basic principle.

 

 

Audio: You've stated your basic philosophy on loudspeaker design in many places. but could you give us a brief review of it here? What should a loudspeaker do in order to be good?

 

Klipsch: The first point is that the higher the efficiency, the lower the distortion.  This is something that can be pretty well proven technically, though I'm not going to prove it here.  Power output with low distortion are the two primary criteria.  You can put one first and the other second, either way, since after all the two are directly related mathematically.  Third in importance is the polar pattern, whether the speaker radiates into the angle you want to cover. And last, probably least important is the effective frequency response.

 

 

Audio: Then you view the response curve as the least important of those criteria?

 

Klipsch:  Yes.  What you really buy in a loudspeaker is horsepower output.  In horn loudspeakers the efficiency--the horsepower output, call it--is typically one to three orders of magnitude higher and the distortion proportionately lower than in a direct radiator.  Admittedly, the direct radiator is the less expensive, "cost effective" approach, and it will never be replaced because horns are vastly more expensive to build. 

 

But if you look at it in terms of horsepower per unit cost, then the horn suddenly becomes much more cost effective--raising the point that the total music system may cost less for a given level of performance if the speakers cost more and yet require a much smaller amplifier.  This brings in my much quoted remark that what this country needs is a good five-watt amplifier.

 

 

Audio: What should a speaker do in order to he popular with the general public. Are most buyers looking for accuracy of reproduction?

 

Klipsch: First off, I don't even consider myself a member of the general public. I know that my own requirements in a loudspeaker are those I've discussed.  Judging from what contact I have with the general public, though, I conclude that 99 percent of the general public doesn't even know what accuracy of reproduction is.  My company is for the one percent composed of perfectionists who buy these expensive speakers.

 

 

Audio: How do you react to the statements by some audio enthusiasts that all horn-type speakers have intrinsic coloration--a particular sonic character, as it were that is inherently unnatural sounding?

 

Klipsch: Many years ago I recall reading an article about the retirement of David Sarnoff as the Chairman of the Board of RCA.  He was reminiscing in the story about one of the earliest electric phonographs, developed by Victor just after it had been acquired by RCA, It sounded miles better than the phonographs of the day, but Sarnoff remembers someone in marketing listening to it and saying "I don't think it will sell; it doesn't sound like a phonograph." There's a good point there: Many people would prefer that a music reproduction system sound like a machine, rather than like music.

 

If you take any kind of speaker horn or direct radiator, lop off the lows below 300 Hz, attenuate the upper treble, and inject some scratchiness, people will say "it sounds like a horn."  That's because it has a restricted frequency range; it would be like using one of our Klipschorns with only the' midrange driver connected.  It would sound like a Twenties phonograph. The point I'm making is that so-called horn coloration is a function of the frequency response.

 

A wide-range horn, like any of the speakers we make, will have no substantial coloration. You can make any horn sound like any direct radiator, if they both have wide, flat frequency response.

But the horn will always sound cleaner because it will always have higher output for lower distortion. That's why I'm in the business of making horn speakers.

[Chris A]

PWK later found that it is the tractrix profile which is the most efficient and most correct in terms of its assumptions (i.e., spherical wave fronts of constant radius inside the horn, instead of exponential...which assumes flat wave fronts).

 

When he did, the design of Klipsch loudspeakers changed to tractrix profiles, with Roy involved in many of those design efforts.

 

Chris

Edited March 5, 2016 by Chris A

[Chris A]

It's interesting to note that the throat area of a tractrix horn actually is an exponential expansion.  The differences in profiles start to show up toward the mouth of the horns:

 

[garyrc]

 

...  For instance, it's been my typical experience that trained professional musicians always seem to fall in love with the sound of Khorns, etc. ...

 

 

 

As they always have. 

 

Sometime in the '80s, J Gordon Holt reported in Stereophile, "... musicians who listen to records are increasingly (according to our mail) choosing Klipschorns over the products of the "high end" speaker manufacturers.  It is because their priorities in sound reproduction aren't as fouled-up as ours ... They are not into any single aspect of sound reproduction; they want something to trigger their musical gestalt ..."

[Mallette]

My experience corroborates the above.  Having recorded a sub ensemble of the Dallas symphony I invited them over to my home to hear the recording.  They'd hear many recordings of themselves in the past.  They uniformly said they'd never heard anything like it. 

 

The folks who complain that horns are "too harsh" are talking about the source materials.  I prefer to speak of them as "mercilessly transparent."  In short, they ensure that shite sounds like shite and Shinola shines.

 

Dave

Edited March 5, 2016 by Mallette

[Chris A]

The hard reality of the audio industry is that people don't want the result of pure technical capability - and I'm especially talking about the highest end professionals and musicians. There is so much more to good audio design, and there are mountains of data showing how much the non-technical aspects of a design matter to the perception of quality. The purist approach simply is not the best approach from a holistic perspective.

 

Focusing on what people actually want is so much more than a business argument. The technical aspects of a design are merely tools for accomplishing those holistic goals.

 

This is why I'm such a strong advocate for quality knobs....that old-school analog feel for our modern digital gear.

 

Mike, what you are describing is called Kansei engineering,and Kansei studies which is what Apple effectively applied with the iPhone and the iPod by using extended user trials and product development on their multifunctional engineered devices.  For devices with extensive software- and firmware-based functionality, the practice has been very successful.  To my knowledge, it was first practiced on the U.S. market on the original development of Lexus automobiles in the 1980s by Toyota, interviewing U.S. and European owners of Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, and other luxury brands.

 

While I agree with the value of Kansei, when the focusing is down to the loudspeakers and their sound, I think that there is a limit to the contributions of "fit and finish", the "look", and "the signature sound" of hi-fi loudspeakers.  Perhaps other modalities can be brought to bear, like olfactory (smell) and tactile (touch). 

 

This practice has been used to good effect, but it has significant costs associated with an extended product development cycle, including extensive focus group and individual customer interviews, mock-ups, extensive prototyping to examine all degrees of the Kansei space, and extensive followup with customers after product launch in order to do coarse and fine product design and implementation corrections and iterative product development cycles, such as Agile software development. 

 

When you add up the costs and development time, I think that you will see that the process, while effective, is also extremely costly, time consuming, and requiring of excessive "staying power" by the senior management of the companies involved, as well as limited in terms of the cost of the product itself in order to support the rapid prototyping and short development cycles.  In other words, you're not going to do Kansei on large aircraft development (across the board) and even automobiles (across the board).  You have to pick the user interface portions of the product development and constrain the Kansei to those efforts.  Usually, for things like aircraft cockpits, fully 50% of the development costs and product costs can be wrapped up in Kansei. 

 

While I understand your comment on loudspeaker design and implementation using Kansei techniques, I also will point out that many of the Kansei studies of "fit and finish", "sound", and "look and feel" are practiced organically by the lead engineering staff of those items using built-up experience of what works and what doesn't work, usually through trial-and-error (something that is good to avoid in the engineering process) and "organizational memory" (which typically becomes dysfunctional over time, and must be reset through layoffs and organizational culture resets).  I'm not sure that most engineers would want to stick around after a Kansei development, for that reason, unless the senior management funds extensive and expensive on-going "Kansei data gathering" and post-launch prototyping.

 

Good luck with that.  My experience has been to focus on the way the the users actually use the products via an extensive set of system-level use cases that are broken down by segment and by Kansei modality (look and feel, functionality and user interface sequences, graceful degradation, etc.) as well as planned obsolescence cycles (pre-planned product improvement: P3I).

 

Chris

Edited March 5, 2016 by Chris A

[garyrc]

IMO, what speaker manufacturers need are automated showrooms in large cities.  AR used to have one for their speakers in Grand Central Station.  The Disney theme parks have had several automated displays; the Conduct the Orchestra one comes to mind.   After careful set-up, the only personnel needed would be a music loving security guard, and a traveling repair tech.  A Klipsch automated showroom could have a cross section of their speaker line, up to Kipschorns and Paladiums, a variety of types of music rotating through them, so people could compare the sound.  

 

Klipsch could include a sign detailing where the speakers could be purchased from real stores, as well as their online purchasing channel, using the "50 mile rule" they use now (are they still doing that?).

 

In the '70s and '80s, there were many (up to 8) Klipsch dealers in the S.F. Bay Area.  I went from store to store and Klipschorns demolished the competition (at equal SPL) in prolonged A/B tests, including some very pricey top-of-the-line models, from manufacturers like B&W.  People rarely, if ever, have a chance to do that today.  

[Chris A]

That's essentially what Fry's had setup a few years ago - everyone just walked in and started pushing buttons and turning knobs by themselves.  I noticed that they closed those showrooms a few years ago, unfortunately. (I don't remember seeing Klipsch products in there.)  There are display consoles available that can limit the SPL and knob turning to save the equipment from the preteens and, well, people acting destructively.

 

Toole described a loudspeaker "shuffler" used for double-blind tests.  I wonder if they productized that pneumatically-driven system so that it could be had at lower costs than a one-off engineering development lab?  That sort of mechanism could be used to move around many different models for listening--behind a protective barrier for safety.

[DrWho]

when the focusing is down to the loudspeakers and their sound, I think that there is a limit to the contributions of "fit and finish", the "look", and "the signature sound" of hi-fi loudspeakers.  Perhaps other modalities can be brought to bear, like olfactory (smell) and tactile (touch). 

 

I certainly don't subscribe to Kansei, but all you need to do is go to a big audiophile show to see how much the visual and tactile aspects dominate people's perceptions.

[DrWho]

As far as double-blind tests.....double-blind is not required by someone without bias.

 

Instantaneous volume matched comparisons are what's more important - but you aren't gonna get there with big massive machines moving stuff around. The best way to compare speakers would be to actually record their output in an idea acoustic space - and then playback through a good in-ear system where you can compare against the original source material too. The double benefit here is we can make those recordings available for analysis in our own homes. I'm surprised Klipsch hasn't attempted something like this for their speaker lineup - they even have a great anechoic chamber with a true 1/8 space corner to do this in. Shure has been doing this with our microphones for a while now:

http://www.shure.com/americas/support/tools/mic-listening-lab