k400 mid-horn

[cegman1@gmail.com]

hello has anyone thought about 3D printing the k400 mid-horn   or the tweeter. any thoughts. thanks paul

[Tarheel TJ]

Don't know much about 3d printing, but I have a pair of K400s I'd be willing to part with if you need a pair. 

 

 

[Dave A]

3D printing is a relatively slow and expensive process. If you would like to pay a lot of money for a plastic knockoff K-400 this would be the way to go. Then of course to be faithful to the original design you have to have a way to accurately recreate the part in a CAD program which in cases like this just might be another charge for the 3D scan and then the charge to get the point cloud data into the CAD program and then the charge to generate the 3D CAD file.

 

  This would have to be done on a commercial scale business printer also which is more $$$. Buy a set from a forum member and forget the 3D printing.

[Marvel]

My aluminum (K-400) horns weren't the best castings. I've spent a bunch of time filing down the imperfections. Don't really know if I can hear any difference, but measurements would probably reveal the change.

[Alexander]

Maybe the OP has an in to such resources? How about a k-50x?

 

 

[CECAA850]

21 hours ago, Marvel said:

My aluminum (K-400) horns weren't the best castings. I've spent a bunch of time filing down the imperfections. Don't really know if I can hear any difference, but measurements would probably reveal the change.

I had, and repaired, the same issue with mine.

[Seadog]

Unless you need that form factor, there are better mid horns, and tweeters.

[Chris A]

3 hours ago, Seadog said:

Unless you need that form factor, there are better mid horns, and tweeters.

 

I will be respectful to PWK in discussing the K-400...whose basic design was by Jensen in the late 1950s, and was documented by Bruce Edgar in an article called "A Visit to the Klipsch Kingdom" in the April 1989 issue of Speaker Builder magazine:

 

Quote

PWK: One day I was in [Phil Williams at Jensen's office] and I fished something out of his wastebasket. He told me to take it home and play with it since a client had rejected it because it was too expensive. [This became] the beginnings of our K·700 horn. I took it home and tested it. The horn had a better polar pattern than the ones I had designed [i.e., the K-5, etc.].  I enlarged it but kept the basic pattern for our K·400, K·500, and K-600 horns...My efforts have been with controlled directivity instead of constant directivity horns...The constant directivity horn has the same [horizontal and vertical] pattern at all frequencies in its operating range.

 

My idea is that you should allow the horn to compress the angle in one direction [and allow it to expand past 180 degrees at lower frequencies], say the vertical, but have constant directivity in the horizontal. This controlled directivity would partially compensate for the driver's falling off at the high frequencies.

What PWK didn't say was that instead of putting an EQ compensating network in his crossovers to correct the rising then falling SPL response from constant directivity horns, he chose instead to put that compensation into the midrange horn itself.  The Heritage midrange horns are designed to spill excess acoustic energy below 2 kHz in order to keep the horizontal polars relatively constant vs. frequency.  This avoids having to use more complex crossover filter networks to flatten their SPL response.  The trade-off is that this puts a lot of excess acoustic energy on your floor and ceiling below 2 kHz, which is the cause of a lot of people not liking Klipsch Heritage loudspeaker models. 

 

Nowadays, you will see all midrange/tweeter Klipsch horns designed to control both the horizontal and vertical polars (e.g., K-510, K-402, Reference, Cornwall IV, Forte II and III, etc.).  This increases the fidelity of the midrange sound quality in-room by a large measure. 

 

Chris