Lee Catanoid Cornerhorn

[CaptnBob]

I have a pair of these jewels, in attractive blonde formica. OK, a really dated looking blonde formica. The good news is, the finish appears to be about indestructable.

I've had them for a number of years, and, I'm ashamed and embarrassed to admit, I've never fully unpacked the second one. The one I have opened had Jensen drivers. The guy I got it from had sold it once, but the buyer only wanted the tweeter (201? Whatever the Jensen tweeter is which brings insanely high prices) so it came HF free. (Lucky for me I was able to find an Atlas tweeter which appears to be a drop in replacement.) Under the circumstances I was able to get it pretty reasonably. Of course, there were still several hundred dollars involved to pack and ship it. After all, it is big, heavy and funny shaped.

When I opened it, the capacitors - the brick like looking things in the pictures above - had leaked a nasty green fluid onto the woofer. After I donned a hazmat suit, I was able to clean it off pretty readily. I'd like to replace them, but I have no idea what the values would be - they are unmarked.

My impressions of the LEE are - workmanship ok, although the border around the grill looks a little cheesy. Sound quality, not bad, probably somewhere in the EV Aristocrat, small JBL, early Heresy line. Big mistake, at least on mine, is ignoring one of Mr. Klipsch's dicta: music lives in the midrange. That Jensen speaker cost around $5.00 in the mid fifties, which was probably a false economy in a unit of this class. I'm sure the JBL specified above would sound better.

Contrary to what you might think, this doesn't appear to be a Klipsch design. The LEE people made a big deal out of the catenoid flare rate, although in practice, it doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. All in all, an interesting period piece.

I suppose I should mention where I got the second one. A couple of weeks after the first one was delivered, I got an email from the man I'd bought it from. Seems he was going to work one day and saw a LEE Catenoid just like the one he'd shipped out sitting on the curb by the trash. He said I could have it if I wanted to pay the packing and shipping. Some questions are easier to answer than others. It came so well packed I just haven't had the motivation to open it all the way up - I've gotten about half way and it still looks like a four foot diameter ball of bubble wrap.