The Klipschorn Reason "Why"

[Mallette]

JJack's query about the best Klipsch loudspeaker for orchestra and opera yielded pretty much an overwhelming "Klipschorn!" response. Around here we often just take it for granted, but there is a sound scientific reason for this.

Nobody yet has been able to improve PWK's design for optimum everything, including cost, in a truly accurate speaker. I challenge the world to show me a loudspeaker I can purchase that can produce an accurate sound, at less power, with more bass, and at the same size or smaller.

We're waiting...

While we wait, I'm wonder just how many have read the 8 Card that started all this and remains the "state of the art" well over a half-century later. As this was an engineering paper, Paul didn't really specify the objective that one can clearly see once you've absorbed the message: There is only one compromise in the design, size. I don't mean "big," I mean "small." While the bass output of the Klipschorn covers 98% of all the normally encountered acoustic instruments, there's nearly an octave of audio that pipe organ aficionados need that isn't there. Not Paul's fault, blame physics. If you pop into the neighborhood church, concert hall, or college organ equipped room and take a look at yer basic 32' pipe, you'll immediately know why. You have to have a 32' air column to get there unless you do some things that have impacts on accuracy and other things Paul found objectionable. I agree with him.

Using the Cinema F-20 horn loaded subwoofer Carl and Lonelobo helped me build (OK, I paid for the materials and fed them...) that handles these frequencies in accordance with Paul's theories one can readily see that if he'd designed the Klipschorn to handle them the speaker would have been about the size of your large double door kitchen refrigerator and weighed about as much.

With the Klipschorn already straining the WAF to it's max and beyond, he made the right decision.

If you haven't read it at all or it's been a while, take a look. It's our patron's manifesto and every bit as true today as it was then. There is no loudspeaker avilable that cannot be evaluted by this paper.

There are speakers that equal or exceed the sound qualities of the Klipschorn, but all do so at the expense of one or more of these basic concepts.

Eight Cardinal Rules

Dave

[LarryC]

For me, it's the size of the musical image and total radiating surface. It also seems to me that that musical image size is very well controlled from driver to driver and horn to horn in ways that I don't understand but are probably intrinsic within the 8 points. Only an orchestra itself has a larger radiating surface, with mass of total of wood and metal vibrating surfaces, than the K relative to its frequencies propagation. The LaScala seems as good as the K in that respect, but shows its difference in the smaller mouth size, partly due to only one coupled reflecting surface, the floor, instead of the 3 (floor and 2 walls) of the K-horn.

I've been struck by how the propagation size from some other speakers with mid horns and bass direct drivers seems to shift oddly with the frequency range -- the mid horn's image seems too large relative to that from the bass's direct drivers, which seems to shrink in relative terms. My $0.02, anyway.

Of course, Dave is right about the lowest-frequency limits in the K, which reproduces down only to the 16' range (33 Hz), not 32' (16 Hz). A pipe organ probably has that larger radiating surface, too.

[Axz Hout]

I 

[Boxx]

JJack's query about the best Klipsch loudspeaker for orchestra and opera yielded pretty much an overwhelming "Klipschorn!" response. Around here we often just take it for granted, but there is a sound scientific reason for this.

Nobody yet has been able to improve PWK's design for optimum everything, including cost, in a truly accurate speaker. I challenge the world to show me a loudspeaker I can purchase that can produce an accurate sound, at less power, with more bass, and at the same size or smaller.

We're waiting...

While we wait, I'm wonder just how many have read the 8 Card that started all this and remains the "state of the art" well over a half-century later. As this was an engineering paper, Paul didn't really specify the objective that one can clearly see once you've absorbed the message: There is only one compromise in the design, size. I don't mean "big," I mean "small." While the bass output of the Klipschorn covers 98% of all the normally encountered acoustic instruments, there's nearly an octave of audio that pipe organ aficionados need that isn't there. Not Paul's fault, blame physics. If you pop into the neighborhood church, concert hall, or college organ equipped room and take a look at yer basic 32' pipe, you'll immediately know why. You have to have a 32' air column to get there unless you do some things that have impacts on accuracy and other things Paul found objectionable. I agree with him.

Using the Cinema F-20 horn loaded subwoofer Carl and Lonelobo helped me build (OK, I paid for the materials and fed them...) that handles these frequencies in accordance with Paul's theories one can readily see that if he'd designed the Klipschorn to handle them the speaker would have been about the size of your large double door kitchen refrigerator and weighed about as much.

With the Klipschorn already straining the WAF to it's max and beyond, he made the right decision.

If you haven't read it at all or it's been a while, take a look. It's our patron's manifesto and every bit as true today as it was then. There is no loudspeaker avilable that cannot be evaluted by this paper.

There are speakers that equal or exceed the sound qualities of the Klipschorn, but all do so at the expense of one or more of these basic concepts.

Eight Cardinal Rules

Dave

Dave, Thanks for posting this link....

[Mallette]

Very unheard of anywhere else.

As credited in his paper, he didn't invent this idea. It came from the original Western Electric Stereo experiments in the '30s. It's certainly interesting that he proves the point with listener localization tests. Jus sayn'...

Dave

[dtel]

Nobody yet has been able to improve PWK's design for optimum everything, including cost, in a truly accurate speaker. I challenge the world to show me a loudspeaker I can purchase that can produce an accurate sound, at less power, with more bass, and at the same size or smaller.

Considering this was designed before most here were born and still holds up, it's pretty amazing. And to keep a company growing all those years with something as hard a sell as a speaker in a little town like Hope, that would be very successful on it's own.

A true genius dedicated to whatever he was doing which is easy to see with patents in many different areas. Good thing he was interested in music ! .

[DizRotus]

The Klipschorn was/is also manufactured with the requirement that it can fit (sideways) through a standard residential door.

It's a marvelous design that has withstood the test of time. It's a tribute to PWK, an amazing engineer. No other reasonably priced and sized speaker can touch it.

[Daddy Dee]

Dave,

Thanks for posting. good stuff here.

[Axz Hout]

F

[o0O Bill O0o]

Good Post.

The Klipschorns should have the highest WAF, because mine tuck away in the corner and take up un-used space. My LaScalas took up WAY more space.

Good engineering stands the test of time.

p.s. I feel that anything larger should be a build-in design or at least back out the side of the room and place speakers behind an acoustically transparent (false) wall.

[JJack]

Thanks for posting this. I think a lot of today's audiophiles would benefit by reading it. I know I did.

[ZAKO]

For why did he [PWK] do it, is their any truth to the story that Mr Paul heard a Fisher infinite baffle console with the woofer flapping wildly, and said to himself "That is awfully distorted sounding, I can make it better" and he did just that? chris

not true,,

[Mallette]

Agree with Maron on this. While PWK often pointed out the rattlely construction of speaker of the day, he'd been mulling this over for a decade or more. Can't recall where, but I've seen a number of his earlier conceptual drawings before the Klipschorn.

Dave

[oldtimer]

The irony for you Dave is that you do own close to double door refrigerator speakers from my memory (however daft) called Fraziers.

[babadono]

A true genius dedicated to whatever he was doing which is easy to see with patents in many different areas. Good thing he was interested in music ! .

Yes thank God PWK was so interested in music and the faithful reproduction thereof!

[Mallette]

The irony for you Dave is that you do own close to double door refrigerator speakers from my memory (however daft) called Fraziers.

Precisely, and Frazier Elevens are PERFECT examples of violating one of the minor PWK tenets, that of size and cost. They were twice as expensive as a K'horn in the day, enormous, and good for most of that missing pipe organ octave because of it.

Otherwise, in line with all the 8 Cardinal Rules. Even a silly db more efficient (107db/watt).

Perfect example that proves the point that you cannot do more without compromising something, just like Paul said.

Dave