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Klipschorn Original Specs


jcmusic

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This is awkward. That isn't what the frequency response of a 1977 Klipschorn looks like. Manufacturers smooth their plots to make them more palatable to the consumer. I can't post what I have without being banned.

However, we can piece it together with things that have previously been posted on the forum, including a plot from a Dope from Hope which appears to be unsanitized. The in-network/anechoic response doesn't look much different than what I'm about to post -- the older networks don't provide much in the way of correction.

khornlf1.pdf

post-1106-0-20180000-1384632116_thumb.gi

post-1106-0-44900000-1384632137_thumb.jp

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Nice, I can finally make sure I have them all.

Jim's cool, it's great trying to squish answers out of him. At one of the pilgrimages we did a night at a Jazz club for dinner and music. A group of us decided to see how far we could go with the questions. After I thought about it a bit, I told everyone that I didn't really want to do that to him, but just wanted to observe. He was really forthright, but there were areas he clearly didn't want to elaborate on. It was fun watching his body language. He was giving stuff up without opening his mouth, and he was doing it deliberately -- it was hilarious.

I am still looking for an engineering document I saw once, that describes the reasoning for the move from the K-400 to the K-401. It specifically mentioned reduced distortion levels. I thought it was in a Dope from Hope, but it isn't. I believe now it may have been an internal document. If you have any kind of rapport with him at all, let him know the question comes up often on the forum, and if he remembers anything about this thing. He will probably smirk and walk away. Thanks.

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K401 from K400,

I have not seen any documentation, but from what I have pieced together from a 1978 conversation with Paul and other snippets, I think the issue was manufacturing cost. The resin based K-401 is just cheaper to produce than the metal K-400. Paul mentioned that the tooling for the K-400 was expensive, and I surmise that the resin based K-401 would be cheaper to make and if need be, change. Given the real estate available in the Klipschorn tophat, I don't think that major changes are in store. Also, I think all the K-400s are back-mounted and I know the K-401 is front mounted. That might have made a difference in the tooling for the horn as well.

Then of course there's the question of metal horns 'ringing". In his 1963 K-400 paper, Paul claimed that any ringing in the K-400 was damped out when attached to the flange (baffle).

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Dean,

The plots are interesting. Too bad that I don't have time to run the French through a computer translator.

I've read comments on the forum to the effect that various plots have been doctored by the factory and people who were friends of PWK. Maybe not to curry favor but acting on the notion that any testing which does not show excellent performance suffers from less than optimal room conditions, and are not accurate.

It seems to me that the authors of the French reviews are so far away from Hope that they probably are making objective reports without doctoring.

WMcD

Okay, who is boom3 that he was on a first name basis with The Man?

Love the plots in that article Gil -- very close to what I have. Nice "dirty curves".

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Quiet, do you have a name, something like Jim or Steve? :)

Sure, there is what the loudspeaker is doing, and then there is what the ear/brain perceives what the loudspeaker is doing. Though they aren't the same, I don't feel comfortable saying that the anechoic curves derived with the microphone "aren't important". I once used this argument with Roy, and he looked at me with pity - for good reason. You have to understand what's going on with the loudspeaker before you can figure out what's going on with the ears.

http://community.klipsch.com/dope/Dope_601107_v1n2.pdf

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Well, we have folks here doing strange and interesting things with their loudspeakers. It's nice to know where you need to lift or drop if you're applying PEQ or playing with an LCR in a passive - tough to do if the only thing you have is a curve from the marketing department. But then I guess the right way should be with in-room measurements anyway.

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It's Tom. :emotion-22:

All I meant was that the merit of a graph shouldn't hinge simply on the absence (or inclusion) of smoothing.

I've heard that around 1/3 octave smoothing provides about the response the ear hears. True? I found my notes regarding a more stringent 1/6th octave smoothed curve run in my decidedly non-anechoic room. With no EQ my AK4 upgraded Klipschorns (run one at a time) came in at about +/- 9 dB. from about 45 to 16 K Hz. With EQ (Audyssey Flat; no movie roll-off) we got a fairly smooth looking curve (no sharp, jagged peaks or dips) from about 43 Hz to 16K Hz, +/- 5 dB with the same 1/6th octave smoothing. Above about 700 Hz, it's +/- 2.5 dB. There is some response at about 25 Hz, and it sounds fairly clean down there (I don't have a way to measure distortion). I think I agree with PWK that smoothness of frequency response is less important than other factors, like (subjectively) dynamics, the inner voices of the orchestra, and the illusion that solo instruments are really "there." I think PWK cast this in terms of low distortion.

Edited by Garyrc
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