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Klipschorns In A Small'ish Room


ninanina

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6 hours ago, richieb said:

-- will removing and placing the tweeter on top and to the rear of the LaScala cabinet have the same time alignment effect as on the Khorn?

Yes...same midrange driver/horn and same tweeter in the La Scala as the Khorn.  This aligns the tweeter to the midrange.  There is a several wavelength mismatch between these two drivers/horns at their crossover frequency (about 4-6 kHz) which is the most audible in both loudspeaker types.

 

By tri-amping and setting the correct time delays (using a DSP crossover) on both the midrange and tweeter channels, you can also align them both to the bass bin at ~400 Hz.  There is a much smaller relative phase/time delay between the midrange/tweeter horns and the bass bin horns than in the midrange/tweeter crossover due to the 10X difference in the wavelengths.

 

Chris

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I am using Khorns in a smallish room, 13x16x8 and I sit back at 11 feet. I listened this way for years using an SET amp at 2 wpc, I have since gone all active and tri amped my system and it just got so much better!!! Khorns will work in a small room if setup correctly....

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Here's a pic of my 3rd party tweeters, mounted in a baffle set on top of my old pair of LS. You can do the same with the Klipsch tweeter.

 

It really makes a difference in the imaging.

 

Bruce

post-5045-0-48820000-1398354291.jpg

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6 hours ago, Chris A said:

Yes...same midrange driver/horn and same tweeter in the La Scala as the Khorn.  This aligns the tweeter to the midrange.  There is a several wavelength mismatch between these two drivers/horns at their crossover frequency (about 4-6 kHz) which is the most audible in both loudspeaker types.

 

By tri-amping and setting the correct time delays (using a DSP crossover) on both the midrange and tweeter channels, you can also align them both to the bass bin at ~400 Hz.  There is a much smaller relative phase/time delay between the midrange/tweeter horns and the bass bin horns than in the midrange/tweeter crossover due to the 10X difference in the wavelengths.

 

Chris

Can a physical equalizer of decent quality affect a change for the better with the tweeter time alignment in a smallish room ?Thinking maybe not but, thought I would ask you or anyone else as well.( LaScala )

Thanks!

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22 minutes ago, billybob said:

Can a physical equalizer of decent quality affect a change for the better with the tweeter time alignment in a smallish room ?Thinking maybe not but, thought I would ask you or anyone else as well.( LaScala )

Thanks!

 

The only way is to physically align the two (mid and tweeter) or electronically, by delaying the tweeter signal to match the mid driver signal. You would need a digital crossover to do the latter.

 

 

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20 hours ago, billybob said:

Can a physical equalizer of decent quality affect a change for the better with the tweeter time alignment in a smallish room ?Thinking maybe not but, thought I would ask you or anyone else as well.( LaScala )

Thanks!

No, the EQ will only EQ the frequency's as Marvel says you need a DSP to time align electronically but; you can move the tweeters all the way to the rear of the speaker and have the tweeter and mid horn time aligned. This will improve the sound quality some what...

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On 4/22/2018 at 10:41 PM, Chris A said:
On 4/22/2018 at 7:03 PM, Tony Whitlow said:

The La Scala has a bigger footprint than the KHorn.

True...

 

5add441ad4418_KhornLaScalarelativesize.thumb.png.51ce4bcc90dcfbc3330f09929eb455bf.png

Sarcasm, Chris?  I usually get it but on the internet sometimes the nuance is lost.  I'm not sure what your figure is indicating.  If you are trying to show an obvious difference, that image does not represent how a Knorn is set up vis-a-vis how the LS is set up, at least in my house.

+++

 

Here is my attempt to time-align a 12" SEOS waveguide into my Khorns.  The SEOS with the robust Denovo DNA 360 CD had a LOT more acoustic content than did the tiny K-77 tweeter.  The improvement in SQ was immediate and dramatic.

 

 

Khorn SEOS right top view.JPG

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2 minutes ago, wvu80 said:

Sarcasm, Chris?

No, not sarcasm.  The footprint (as was mentioned in the quoted text) of the Khorn is actually much less invasive in-room.  The height of the Khorn is obviously not as small, but in my experience most people are looking for ways to get the tweeter up to the level of the ears while the listeners are seated...even to the point of sacrificing midbass and low bass performance by raising the loudspeakers off the floor, which always produces nasty midbass frequency suck-outs.  The Khorn needs no such risers.

 

Chris

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2 minutes ago, Chris A said:

No, not sarcasm.  The footprint (as was mentioned in the quoted text) of the Khorn is actually much less invasive in-room. 

Thanks for the clarification.  I am in agreement with you.

 

That's what surprised me the most with my Khorns is how UN-obtrusive they were because they were tucked into corners at the outer limits of my peripheral vision.  As large as they are I hardly ever noticed them, especially when watching TV at night with a more subdued light.

 

Unfortunately my wife did not agree and now the Khorns are gone.  :(

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If you don't have a room that can easily accommodate Khorns (and there are a lot of those) then you usually wind up having them too close together or too close to the listening position(s).  In either case, they usually have a visual presence that is a bit too obtrusive for the female gender.  Khorn acoustic performance in very small rooms is also not anything like putting them into better-sized rooms.

 

I've always wondered how large the home listening rooms of PWK were over time.  In the 40s and 50s before stereo recordings hit the marketplace, I'd assume that almost any room with a good available corner was sufficient for a mono Khorn.  Rooms in the first suburban homes for working folks tended to be very small rooms.  But as the 1960s rolled in with stereo recordings as the default format, rooms also tended to get much larger in the USA.  I note that PWK's last listening room didn't have two good corners, so he used false corners, but it looked to be large enough to fully accommodate the Khorns.

 

Nowadays, there is an entire generation of young people that have had to step back from the larger homes of the 60s-90s, and now largely live in apartments and other rented properties, waiting for the day when they might afford to own their own home and perhaps have the job stability to buy into a geographic location without fear of having to move again too soon to justify the buy-in.   I think that limits the sales of corner horns of the performance of Khorns, instead favoring La Scala or Belle-sized loudspeakers in stereo pairs with their one-octave-higher bass cutoff frequencies--but themselves still imposing in very small rooms.

 

I think those facts have always been a source of angst in threads like this one when talking about Khorns vs. La Scalas/Belles. 

 

Chris

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2 hours ago, wvu80 said:

Here is my attempt to time-align a 12" SEOS waveguide into my Khorns.  The SEOS with the robust Denovo DNA 360 CD had a LOT more acoustic content than did the tiny K-77 tweeter.  The improvement in SQ was immediate and dramatic.

 

 

Khorn SEOS right top view.JPG

This is another topic of angst I believe: the K-77 tweeter relative to other tweeters/horns that are available nowadays.  In the heyday of the Klipsch Heritage line (1950s-1970s), the K-77 was probably the best choice for its performance, cost, reliability and overall size/shape.  However, as time marched on,  the K-77 really became probably not the best tweeter. 

 

I found this out when I tri-amped my center Belle and found a certain sensitivity of the high frequency sound to the exact crossover settings used in the DSP crossover.  I found that the high end of the K-55 driver with its horn was allowed to acoustically roll off in the stock passive crossover without an electrical low pass crossover filter to positively roll-off its high end.  During this time I found that the K-55 needs to be rolled off using a crossover filter in order to produce the best sound.  In addition, the K-77 sounds very ragged if crossed below about 4.5-5 kHz, and that--using a fairly steep slope filter of the type which also detrimentally adds to the phase mismatch at the crossover band between the midrange and tweeter.  I played around with the active crossover settings, but I found that the tweeter and midrange really had almost no adjustability in overlap point and bandwidth in their crossover bands.  I found that the crossover needed to be right at 4.9 kHz, no lower and no higher, and that the steepness of the crossover filters was higher than I wanted in order to control the phase growth of the tweeter-to-midrange transition. 

 

So I substituted in a Beyma CP25 "baby cheek" tweeter, and found that I could lower the crossover frequency and the order of the crossover filter to improve the overall sound.  This was a fairly audible improvement. Later on, I swapped out the K-55/K-500 horn for a K-510/K-69-A driver, and moved the crossover frequency up to 8 kHz.  The in-room sound quality improved significantly; the results of the crossover settings were posted to this thread.

 

In summary, I too found that some simple swapping out of the midrange and tweeter horns/drivers had a fairly strong effect on the sound quality and apparent source width (ASW) of the Heritage series loudspeakers.  YMMV.

 

Chris

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On 4/24/2018 at 9:01 AM, Chris A said:

If you don't have a room that can easily accommodate Khorns (and there are a lot of those) then you usually wind up having them too close together or too close to the listening position(s).  In either case, they usually have a visual presence that is a bit too obtrusive for the female gender.  Khorn acoustic performance in very small rooms is also not anything like putting them into better-sized rooms.

 

I've always wondered how large the home listening rooms of PWK were over time.  In the 40s and 50s before stereo recordings hit the marketplace, I'd assume that almost any room with a good available corner was sufficient for a mono Khorn.  Rooms in the first suburban homes for working folks tended to be very small rooms.  But as the 1960s rolled in with stereo recordings as the default format, rooms also tended to get much larger in the USA.  I note that PWK's last listening room didn't have two good corners, so he used false corners, but it looked to be large enough to fully accommodate the Khorns.

 

Nowadays, there is an entire generation of young people that have had to step back from the larger homes of the 60s-90s, and now largely live in apartments and other rented properties, waiting for the day when they might afford to own their own home and perhaps have the job stability to buy into a geographic location without fear of having to move again too soon to justify the buy-in.   I think that limits the sales of corner horns of the performance of Khorns, instead favoring La Scala or Belle-sized loudspeakers in stereo pairs with their one-octave-higher bass cutoff frequencies--but themselves still imposing in very small rooms.

 

I think those facts have always been a source of angst in threads like this one when talking about Khorns vs. La Scalas/Belles. 

 

Chris

 

D I N G !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  • 6 years later...

My 1st pair of Khorns was in my 10x11' bedroom when I was 18 in 1976. I mowed a lot of lawns and cleared a lot of driveways for a couple of years. Now my mother uses them in a 27x19" room with a Mc240 and Mx110 and at 87 years old she uses them all day every day. They sound MUCH better in the larger room. My horns are in a 20 x13 room and my listening position is perfect. I was playing some Frank Sinatra "Come Fly With Me" the other day at live levels and between songs there was a knock on the door. My neighbor had a friend over who played in some of Mr. Sinatra's back up bands and he said it was the closest he ever heard a recording sounding like the real thing . Some people like small triode amps myself I am a fan of dynamic headroom. A pair of Bryston 7b-St at 500 watts a side provide the torque to make Mr. Klipsch's baby's do a wheel stand. 

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Big speakers small room better than small speakers small room 8-) I love using big speakers as headphones. If the room is a compromise why compromise the speaker.

 

 

 

 

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24 minutes ago, opnly bafld said:

Does any company make 3-way headphones?

 

Why compromise the sound even more by using speakers that are too large for a room?

 

Horses for courses or something like that.

Because you want a pair of 'Horns and they're cheaper than a new house. How hard is that to grasp? Perfection is not something everyone seeks.

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1 hour ago, geezin' said:

Because you want a pair of 'Horns and they're cheaper than a new house. How hard is that to grasp? Perfection is not something everyone seeks.

 

My grasp of that is fine, it's the posts I see where others say or at least indicate it is perfection.

 

And even though I didn't quote it my response should indicate I had this in mind:

"Big speakers small room better than small speakers small room 8-) I love using big speakers as headphones. If the room is a compromise why compromise the speaker."

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