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FORTE III as a 2 WAY !!!!


Speedy6963

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3 minutes ago, richieb said:

 maybe the two-way 396 with factory home-finished cabinets 

 

Yes, this is what I've been thinking about a lot and may end up building my own. I'd love to see Klipsch offer a Chorus sized, forte III styled ki-396 for home use, I really think there's a market for such a speaker. 

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12 minutes ago, John Chi-town said:

Wasn't the whole point of the forte line to have a 3 way design, allowing the mid to be wide open and effortless?  By not requiring the squawker to reproduce the high end of the audio spectrum?

 

..and more acoustic lobing due to the vertical separation of the midrange driver axis from the tweeter axis by more than a quarter wavelength at the crossover interference band...i.e., all 3-way loudspeakers have this issue (except of course multiple entry horn designs). This lobing is the most audible due to the frequency band that you're talking about, and the misalignment usually the greatest due to the very short wavelengths involved.

 

I think that 3-way loudspeaker designs are simply expedient to economics.  Personally I run 2-way Jubilees with TAD TD-4002 drivers.  I've never heard anything that could touch the "wide open and effortless" of this configuration.  YMMV.

 

Chris

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20 hours ago, Speedy6963 said:

If you need tone controls you have speakers that are not accurate

 

But typical commercial recordings are not flat.  See Chris A's posts.  With the impossibly perfect speaker in the impossibly perfect room, some alteration of frequency response would be needed to make the recording sound like the original performance (if the original performance ever existed in acoustical space).  That being said,  all we can do is get our reproduction to conform to the imagined original.  Not only are current recordings not flat, recordings have never been flat, one way or another, from bass attenuation on vintage vinyl, to some current pop/rock/metal that is made deliberately harsh for reasons that are beyond all understanding (I buy mostly classical, modern orchestral and jazz, so I don't get most of these problems very often).  Strangely, movies on Blu-ray seem to have the best sound quality, but fall in love with a film score, and buy it on a CD, and chances are it will have been f***ed over.   To see that this problem isn't exactly new, see J. Gordon Holt's "Down with Flat" in the Stereophile archives, in which he advocates attenuating the high treble when playing most recordings of his era.

 

The Harman target curve (not the one you see below) usually has about a 10 dB drop from the deepest bass down to the highest treble (with the treble the low SPL end).  This curve was preferred by most listeners in Harman's tests.

 

When people set up a target curve for a treated room or HT, it often ends up looking a lot like the Harman curve.  Here is a significantly smoothed room curve, from the main listening position, that I use for movies of the magnetic era (1953 to about the mid '80s, where applicable), which contain a bit of high frequency distortion (cinema speakers and movie mixing speakers of this heyday tended to drop like a rock above 10K, so the mixers may not have heard the distortion).  For recordings as pure as the driven snow (usually SACD, DVD-A, or Blu-ray), I would probably use the same curve but with flat treble.

 

image.png.8acad5dec2ba4ae79fec5b3ddf36ff28.png

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On 11/29/2017 at 11:03 AM, jjptkd said:

Thinking more of a home style cabinet like the forte III with lower bass response than the 396 with the larger cabinet, I really think there would be a market for such a speaker. 

 

The best part about the 396 is the stupid tight "stop on a dime" bass.  Doesn't extend as low but they're insanely tight.  Would be a shame to waste that.  

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8 hours ago, John Chi-town said:

Wasn't the whole point of the forte line to have a 3 way design, allowing the mid to be wide open and effortless?  By not requiring the squawker to reproduce the high end of the audio spectrum?  A more expensive and rewarding design.

 

I thought it was interesting that Roy custom built some speakers for his boy's recording studio that was based on the Forte III horn except it was a 2-way.  If it's good enough for a professional recording studio then it's probably good enough for our living room.  Personally I think the 3-way design has more to do with keeping the design similar to what it always has been rather than it really needing a tweeter on top.  

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14 hours ago, Chris A said:

 

..and more acoustic lobing due to the vertical separation of the midrange driver axis from the tweeter axis by more than a quarter wavelength at the crossover interference band...i.e., all 3-way loudspeakers have this issue (except of course multiple entry horn designs). This lobing is the most audible due to the frequency band that you're talking about, and the misalignment usually the greatest due to the very short wavelengths involved.

 

I think that 3-way loudspeaker designs are simply expedient to economics.  Personally I run 2-way Jubilees with TAD TD-4002 drivers.  I've never heard anything that could touch the "wide open and effortless" of this configuration.  YMMV.

 

Chris

I also run 2 way Klipschorn's using TAD TD-2002 from 450-24,000hz

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19 hours ago, ODS123 said:

 

Couldn't disagree more.  Not to flame but audiophiles look down their noses at tone controls while music lovers find them essential.  ..I'm the latter.  

 

There are sooo many recordings of great great music that are hard to listen to b/c the recording itself is tipped up, too bright.  ..An accurate hifi system will pass this right along to the listener.  Until you can go back in time and re-record these songs, a  small turn of the treble control makes these songs more enjoyable.   

 

While on the subject, I also think a MONO switch is essential.  ..In the early days of stereo recording engineers would do silly things like have the singer coming out of the right channel while his acoustic guitar would come from the left.  ..Totally screwy.  ..Hitting the MONO switch will bring the singer and his guitar back together.  ..Lots of early Beatles songs were like this.

 

So my advice to budding audiophiles is always to look for an integrated amp (or Pre-amp) with  these basic tools and use them at your discretion.

 

I think it would be sensible for modern preamps to add a control for stereo separation. Digital preamps could do this easily. A lot of masters made for vinyl would have hard panning because (I assume) the pressing wouldn't have total stereo separation, but a lot of those masters are digitized with no compensation for this which leads to that problem. They're finally getting their wits and giving preamps bypassable filters for 2.1 systems, so this doesn't seem unreasonable.

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