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Dropping the " La " from LaScala


boxerjake

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Dale,

The Utopias look nice. Not my style, but I can understand what you are doing. My 'baloney' comment about the MWMs not taking up too much room is only based on others here who have had them in much smaller rooms and been very satisfied.

Bruce

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Erik and Mark seem to get my drift .... The hobby is about exploring options ( within your means )

Your right, I got it but the problem for me was (within your means) and for the first time I feel I can stop looking.

Congratulations on the boxing, looking great in the pics, that's a lot of work and sacrifice to be in shape like that. Just guessing, surely not from my personal experience. :D  

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I had some Focal separates in a boat a few years ago and they were the best sounding 6.5" and tweeter, "car style" speakers I had ever heard.  Before that, MB Quart was all that I ran, which also sound very good.  Each one even came with a very nice encased crossover too.  I bet their floor standers sound tiptop. It will be interesting to see if you enjoy them as much as your horns in the long run. 

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I had some Focal separates in a boat a few years ago and they were the best sounding 6.5" and tweeter, "car style" speakers I had ever heard.  Before that, MB Quart was all that I ran, which also sound very good.  Each one even came with a very nice encased crossover too.  I bet their floor standers sound tiptop. It will be interesting to see if you enjoy them as much as your horns in the long run. 

MB Quart ... now that brings back memories from the early 80's !!       Before my first set of 3 way quarts i ran " Cricket seperates  "  , now thats going back a ways .....

Quarts was one of the first Car audio back then that ran a cross-over ... it was actually a small black box , leading edge stuff in 1981 or so

Todays car audio in 2014  is 10,000 times more advanced then the 80's or late 70's , just as the focal home audio is 10,000 times what their mobile audio ever was ..

Just to put it in perspective

Edited by boxerjake
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Erik and Mark seem to get my drift .... The hobby is about exploring options ( within your means )

Your right, I got it but the problem for me was (within your means) and for the first time I feel I can stop looking.

Congratulations on the boxing, looking great in the pics, that's a lot of work and sacrifice to be in shape like that. Just guessing, surely not from my personal experience. :D  

Imagine if tomorrow you won a state lottery for say 50 million !!

What would you do ?     Well ,  most likly you'd buy a new car , and then probably a new and bigger house ...

So the coralation here is ... what was wrong with the car you had ?  seem to be serving you well at the time , same goes with your home ...

So why the upgrade ?   Well , because your means change

so when you build your new multi million dollar shack , whats in store for your new audio room

Think about it ...

If you had the means you would explore options that today are out of your reach ... i'd bet the farm on it

You think Bill Gates drives a Chevy ? or has a old pair of heresy's kicking around ..... LOL

Imagine your ultimate audio room and setup without any budget restraints ....  what would it look like ?

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Imagine your ultimate audio room and setup without any budget restraints .... what would it look like ?

New electronics to start, then maby the mid bass unit designed for these ? Sounds simple but I love this sound and tired of chasing something better for the last 40 years. They are in the living room/kitchen/dining area all open, total about 1000sf but most important where we spend most of our time which is handy for listening.

It really wouldn't make much difference, I would be traveling and not listen to it as much as I do now. :o

Probably end up living on an island with the speakers pointing toward the beach and the boat (with great speakers) which would be large enough to visit other islands. For starters.

To be honest I have never heard the speakers your considering but being I love the sound of really large horns I was just guessing the sound would be much different, but I would definitely want to hear them. After 40+ years of looking I fully know the feeling of "what if" or "it could always sound better", but we kind of moved over to the just play some music and have a party side of things. :emotion-19:  

 Even built an outside tiki bar just to practice the art of partying/relaxing, covered area, bamboo bar, a pond and of course hammocks hanging and heresy's playing music, I'm trying.

Edited by dtel
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Imagine if tomorrow you won a state lottery for say 50 million !!

What would you do ?     Well ,  most likly you'd buy a new car , and then probably a new and bigger house ...

So the coralation here is ... what was wrong with the car you had ?  seem to be serving you well at the time , same goes with your home ...

So why the upgrade ?   Well , because your means change

so when you build your new multi million dollar shack , whats in store for your new audio room

Think about it ...

If you had the means you would explore options that today are out of your reach ... i'd bet the farm on it

You think Bill Gates drives a Chevy ? or has a old pair of heresy's kicking around ..... LOL

Imagine your ultimate audio room and setup without any budget restraints ....  what would it look like ?

In that case, check all these out before you make a decision.

http://www.higherfi.com/spkrlist/speakerlist.php

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Imagine your ultimate audio room and setup without any budget restraints ....  what would it look like ?

Well it wouldn't look like a pair of tiny Focal speakers ;)

Your car hobby analogy brings up an interesting point. It sounds like you're emphasizing that you moved to faster and faster cars - even getting down into the 9's, which is "decent" (haha). Would you be happy with a larger engine if it meant a slower time? It sounds like the "engineering goal" of a faster time down the track is what you were after?

My question is this - what kind of performance are you looking to gain in the audio world?

I would suggest (probably because I'm an engineer) that there are somewhat obvious decisions based on the type of performance you're looking for. You probably know as well as anybody how much myth runs around the automotive market as to what makes you fast and what doesn't (just look at your fart can ricers). I think the same is even more true in the speaker world. Most of the higher priced good looking speakers do perform quite well - but then the more I listen to the various options, the more I realize how they are more similar than different and it seems mostly about aesthetics (which in a way is similar to your ricers out there).

Looks are absolutely a part of a purchase like this and there's nothing wrong with that if you're being honest with yourself about it. In that regard the Focal speakers are quite elegant.

If I was building my own ultimate audio room, then I would actually start with a custom room. Putting a bigger engine on a car ain't gonna help much if you got dry rotted all seasons tires. I think big dollar speakers in a crappy room is a very similar analogy. I would actually design the room and speakers together and have all of the speakers completely hidden from view - this is mostly because I think round shapes and rectangles (every speaker out there) is just a bad aesthetic. The MBL stuff looks cool and can't be hidden easily without negatively affecting its performance - I've also never heard a bad sounding MBL system.

Anyways, just thinking out loud and seeing if you're looking for anything in particular or just looking for confirmation on the speakers you're looking at - which you're probably not gonna get from a Klipsch forum ;) Horns are where it's at - it's like the big block of the car world.

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Horns are "where it's at" for people who like them. Not everyone does, and I have known people who liked them for a long time...and then found something else they liked more...

I continue to appreciate their virtues, but that's me. I am very averse to the idea of imposing my preferences on someone else, or in any way suggesting that another person's tastes are incorrect, lacking, misguided, ignorant, or anything else by the simple virtue of those things perhaps being in opposition to what is right and good for me.

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Hey .... love the replies , great to get perspectives from all directions

I'm the last one who would ever sh#t on the klipsch parade or even denounce horns ... if anything i'm more like the klipsch poster child considering the shear volume of klipsch speakers if both owned and still have .

I love taking a " me " day every now and again and hanging at the local high end audio stores ,  there is a  difference in speakers , just as there is in tables , cd players , phono stages and amps ..

But , it's a whole lot more fun bringing it home and enjoying it :)

Focals might seem pricey and therefore send some folk running , but i've spent = to or more money on a decoupled audio room then the scala's cost,  so it's all relative .

As for racing ...... there is no replacement for displacement :)  Torque is the name of the game , high reving small blocks are fun but more fuel and more air means more power and more torque hence displaement rules ...  Never find a small block nitro methane dragster doing sub 5 seconds ... the monster displacement rules at the top of the food chain :)

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Displacement is great until you try to keep up in the corners ;)

 

Fast+Car+Fast+Driver1387307526.jpg

 

 

Btw, have you given any of the B&W speakers a listen? Or what about the monster McInstosh arrays? My biggest critique with the Focals has been the lack of cohesion - like something was always off in the voicing. I'm sure a lot of that could be room / source related, but I'm yet to hear one that sounded just right. In similar rooms I've always enjoyed the B&W and McIntosh solutions. Sure, none of them quite have the crazy horn loaded dynamics, but there's something about the midrange at low SPL's that really pulls you in.

 

I always like to say that I can't hear how expensive something is - so in that perspective price is totally arbitrary. I just know from a speaker design perspective that a lot of the price in these higher ranges has a lot to do with the aesthetics - some of these finishes and materials simply take a long time to implement.

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