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KMHA Class by Chief Bone Head Oct. 18 & 19 (


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I was hunting around for some examples of how Roy teaches and explains things.

 

I remembered this:

 

 

He talks about specifics of the product, but he also talks about general concepts related to drivers, crossovers; he talks about what Paul wanted to do; he talks about Paul's notebooks, "M Derived" filters. and a whole lot about the importance of crossover design for specific drivers. I don't know that Roy will talk about any of these things in his class in October, it is just a general example of how he can explain things so even I understand it.  

 

He starts talking about technical concepts @1:30 into the video. I thought it was a good reminder of how Roy packs a lot of information in short statements.

 

If you have never seen it, or it has been awhile, it is worth a look.

 

"It has Paul's fingerprints all over it, I'm just his right hand man.  I wish he could have heard it.  I think he would be pleased."  Roy Delgado, aka Chief Bonehead.

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On 9/13/2019 at 7:27 PM, dwilawyer said:

"It has Paul's fingerprints all over it, I'm just his right hand man.  I wish he could have heard it.  I think he would be pleased."  Roy Delgado, aka Chief Bonehead.

Extraordinary. It also has Roy's fingerprints all over it!

Dave

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Well, if you didn't come, you missed some really cool stuff and comparisons.  The H IV is super impressive with some real bass kick.  I hope it makes KGI millions, it should.  The new CW IV was an "oh, wow!" And The Chief showed us what goes into crossover R&D.  I now understand his comments calling modified products "not Klipsch".  A lot of heart goes into a Klipsch design and bettering it will take a lot of effort. 

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On 10/23/2019 at 10:20 AM, JohnA said:

Well, if you didn't come, you missed some really cool stuff and comparisons.  The H IV is super impressive with some real bass kick.  I hope it makes KGI millions, it should.  The new CW IV was an "oh, wow!" And The Chief showed us what goes into crossover R&D.  I now understand his comments calling modified products "not Klipsch".  A lot of heart goes into a Klipsch design and bettering it will take a lot of effort. 

 

The crossover lecture and demo was the pinnacle of all my visits to Hope and there have been alot. True mods not upgrades.

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18 minutes ago, seti said:

The crossover lecture and demo was the pinnacle of all my visits to Hope and there have been alot. True mods not upgrades.

 

Would it be comforting, or troubling, to know that what Roy discussed was just the tip of the iceberg?

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So may I ask the obvious question of the participants in the class...

 

What percentage of creating a new or revised loudspeaker model do you now think is involved solely with its (passive) crossover development and tweaking?

 

Spoiler

I'd say ~30-40%, after the loudspeaker model concept/requirements are arrived at, drivers selected/iterated, and the box/placement of the woofers designed, tested and woofer location and box internals iterated.  The passive crossover design I believe represents a non-trivial amount of work to satisfy requirements and pass all the subjective listening trials/iterations.

 

Chris

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3 minutes ago, Chris A said:

The passive crossover design I believe represents a non-trivial amount of work to satisfy requirements and pass all the subjective listening trials/iterations.

 

In addition, the design has to accommodate production tolerances and variations in individual components (including drivers). The absolute best results are obtained when the basic design is augmented with case-by-case fine-tuning of the crossover components. 

 

Yes, it's tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. That's another reason why really fine loudspeakers cost so much.

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Exactly. 

 

If you read the story of John Dunlavy's interview with John Atkinson at Stereophile, it turns out that he was dialing in each loudspeaker pair in their anechoic chamber, two at a time, and using a lot of chamber time to get everything dialed-in in pairs.  From a producibility standpoint, that's not what you want to do. This story was cited by a potential buyer of the company as one reason why he became disinterested in buying it after he saw the number of hours each loudspeaker pair spent in the chamber to get the pair dialed in.  This of course says nothing about the issues presented if a customer blew a driver after sale or simply due to driver/crossover capacitor aging:  what happens then?

 

Instead, as you imply, you want to hit the statistical centers for values of passive crossover characteristics with the statistical centers of the drivers being used.  Then you only need to do a quick check in the chamber (like Klipsch does) to verify each loudspeaker's characteristic performance is within some sort of specification tolerance, or you send the unit back for rework and/or supplier quality assurance focus to find the source of the problem(s).

 

The good thing about DSP crossovers is that they can effectively take half the variability of acoustic performance out of the producibility equation.  The DSP crossover will be effectively "right on" relative to a box full of passive crossover parts soldered together.  The only unit-to-unit variability left is in the box (internal dimensions and stiffness) and the acoustic driver characteristics (where there is probably most of the variability).

 

Chris

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These discussions are always interesting, but I don't see how any of the information is applicable when all you are doing is pulling and replacing three end-of-life capacitors and a couple of coils. "Upgrade", "modification" - who cares. How about, "better than it was". I've also posted ESR measurements of the old parts ad nauseum. Getting criticized for doing this kind of work just seems silly.    

 

When Roy gave us the schematic for the Jubilee passive, he placed no restrictions on parts choice except the DCR numbers for the coils. His position on capacitors at that point in time was that they supplied "the salt and pepper". So, what has changed?  

 

Independent measurements of current product consistently shows exaggerated HF response. While most really enjoy the dynamics of horns, not everyone likes having their ears pinned back, especially at the SPL levels many around here seem to enjoy. A change to a filter is obviously a modification. Whether or not it's an "upgrade" is up to the end user to decide.

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6 hours ago, Deang said:

Independent measurements of current product consistently shows exaggerated HF response. While most really enjoy the dynamics of horns, not everyone likes having their ears pinned back, especially at the SPL levels many around here seem to enjoy. A change to a filter is obviously a modification. Whether or not it's an "upgrade" is up to the end user to decide.

 

Thats why you don’t just look at one measurement because the sound as experienced is a much more complex result and a single on axis frequency response measurement doesn’t reveal that complexity and that is why Roy measures all performance aspects of the loudspeaker and most importantly verifies that the final design meets the Klipsch standard of sound reproduction.

 

After all the classes when everyone was asked what they learned at the Chief bonehead class the largest majority expressed a new awareness of how important and complex is the designing of the balancing networks are for the Klipsch Sound that Roy designs the Heritage for.

 

I think anyone who would go through the class Roy presented would very likely  understand why Roy’s position is if it’s not a Klipsch designed network it’s not an upgrade but a modification. If someone performs a modification and likes it then great for them but don’t be disappointed if Roy or others don’t see it as an upgrade to a Klipsch Design.

 

miketn

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