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Cornwall 3 vs Cornwall 4 impression


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2 hours ago, ODS123 said:

 

Worthless?  ..Well, almost.

 

Look, if I was invited to the Klipsch mothership by it's chief engineer for the unveiling of their newest CW, I would have excitedly accepted the offer - like anyone here would.   I would have enjoyed the presentation, the music, and the camaraderie.  But that hardly passes as an environment where people are able to make an unbiased assessment of what they are hearing.   To say "I don't hear a difference" or "I hear a difference, but I don't think it's necessarily better" in that context/environment would be like showing up to the hospital and refusing to say your friends new baby is beautiful. 

 

 

Well that's not what happened. It was a Klipsch Museum Education event. It wasn't an unveiling of the newest CW, or anything else. They didn't sit around and listen in that class. They were looking at graphs with X and Y axes with squiggly lines  running across them, and circular graphs with loops coming out from the center, comparing those graphs, then they were put in a room with a single speaker to listen at different vantage points to get an understanding of what the changes in X equated to in the real world, and if you change Y on a balancing network (don't call it a crossover) the other parameters that change as a result. They looked at changes in 4, maybe 5, speakers from previous generations to the other. When they looked, they did it with their eyes, on curves from an anechoic chamber with lab grade equipment, properly calibrated.  They were not there to assess preferences. They were there to learn why PWK did what he did. (Which was based on measurements and science). 

 

The new baby analogy doesn't fit, but none of your other analogies such as drug testing trials do either. In fact, on the last day of the class they listened to a redheaded step child that was over 20 years old. But it didn't stop there, there were discussions about why it was they all preferred the ugly step child based on PWK's four core design principles that he has been discussing since the mid-50s. Those were all discovered by PWK in his mission to find out why a speaker behaves a certain way in a corner. That mission was sparked when a fellow graduate student at Stanford made a statement that a speaker always sounds better if placed in a corner. Like most scientific and engineering geniuses, they are not satisfied with the proposition even it if is easy to hear for one's self. He set out to know precisely why that is so, down to the root level - which led him to his four fundamental design principles. All of the principles (except one which can't be measured properly yet) were later proven by others such as Toole, Olive, Meyer, etc. to be the most significant factors (in blind scientific comparison testing) in the preference of a loudspeaker. They also learned how PWK factored in listening, and the way he factored it in. They learned exactly what PWK would say about that. 

 

I think they only thing that has been established here  is that you know absolutely nothing about what you are talking about.  

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17 minutes ago, Flevoman said:

5 pages of comment and almost no responses to the audible differences between the CW3 and CW4.. I hope they will still come 😉

Come to Hope, Arkansas and you can see/hear for yourself. Maybe we can get Tim to come out again for that with the Dutch crew.

 

 

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6 minutes ago, Flevoman said:

5 pages of comment and almost no responses to the audible differences between the CW3 and CW4.. I hope they will still come 😉

OK:

 

To my ears, the CW3 midbass sounded boxy. The midrange was good but not special enough to move me to want one.

 

To my ears, the CW4 eliminated all of the bass boxiness, but it was the midrange that truly impressed me. I thought that the CW4 vocals were even more lifelike than what I heard from the (underground) Jubilee the same day. I jokingly commented at the time that the only speaker I wanted to sneak into the back of my car while nobody was looking was the CW4, despite having auditioned the entire version 3 and version 4 lineup, plus the Jubilee (which wouldn't fit in my car or my living room anyway) that day.

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20 hours ago, Chief bonehead said:

Ok. I give up. Those that heard the Cornwall IV vs the III…….I tricked you. 

It was clearly done by using the Eagles in the lineup that day. 

 

I guess for the next one, instead of masks we will get blindfolds or maybe a giant black screen like they use down in  Northridge. 

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2 hours ago, Travis In Austin said:

Well that's not what happened.

I don't know how I came to understand it was some sort of an unofficial unveiling for a small audience - I'd have to go back through old threads to figure it out.  Maybe we're not talking about the same event.

 

But it doesn't really matter.  To me, the fact remains that audible differences b/w generations of speakers - in my personal experience - have always ended up being much smaller than proclaimed by the mfg.  In in the present case, they were designed by the same person.

 

And I'd still like to know what leaps in audio engineering have taken place since 2005.   

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44 minutes ago, ODS123 said:

I don't know how I came to understand it was some sort of an unofficial unveiling for a small audience - I'd have to go back through old threads to figure it out.  Maybe we're not talking about the same event.

 

But it doesn't really matter.  To me, the fact remains that audible differences b/w generations of speakers - in my personal experience - have always ended up being much smaller than proclaimed by the mfg.  In in the present case, they were designed by the same person.

 

And I'd still like to know what leaps in audio engineering have taken place since 2005.   

I will be brief.  I have heard both the CW3 and CW4 in a dealer's space in Chicago, side by side, same sources, same amps, same music.  The CW4 was head and shoulders above the CW3 in width and depth of soundstage, much smoother and balanced in all aspects of HF, Mid and LF.  Not sure what else to say, but then based on your previous posts in this thread, you probably won't believe me, nor care.  And honestly, I moved away from Cornwalls years ago and have had La Scalas/Khorns/KPT-904s /Heresy 4s since then.  And you can't think of any advances in audio engineering in the last 17 years, really?

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1 hour ago, ODS123 said:

I don't know how I came to understand it was some sort of an unofficial unveiling for a small audience - I'd have to go back through old threads to figure it out.  Maybe we're not talking about the same event.

 

But it doesn't really matter.  To me, the fact remains that audible differences b/w generations of speakers - in my personal experience - have always ended up being much smaller than proclaimed by the mfg.  In in the present case, they were designed by the same person.

All I can say is solipsism is about as far from any scientific viewpoint or rational seeking of information as one can get. You did not know because you did not care to look into what people who know nothing, that would be anyone but you just so we are clear here about my comment, were doing or saying or have done or said. It is an amazing cancellation of external information on thought processes.

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16 minutes ago, Dave A said:

All I can say is solipsism is about as far from any scientific viewpoint or rational seeking of information as one can get.

If you're implying I'm a solipsist I think you need to re-read your freshman year Philosophy text book.

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3 hours ago, ODS123 said:

I don't know how I came to understand it was some sort of an unofficial unveiling for a small audience - I'd have to go back through old threads to figure it out.  Maybe we're not talking about the same event.

 

But it doesn't really matter.  To me, the fact remains that audible differences b/w generations of speakers - in my personal experience - have always ended up being much smaller than proclaimed by the mfg.  In in the present case, they were designed by the same person.

 

And I'd still like to know what leaps in audio engineering have taken place since 2005.   

Sure you know how you came to state it was an "unofficial unveiling." [Even that's a bit of a walk-back from your post]. You are clearly in the habit of making blind assumptions to try and prove an unrelated point - I guess figuring that no one will call you out on it. So what does anyone do that routinely makes false assumptions? You pivot. 

 

You now have gone from the Education class being a marketing ploy involving subjective listening tests in an attempt to invalidate what very knowledgeable people (all with established credibility) learned, saw and heard back to what your experience is with speakers. 

 

It is clearly evident that "it" doesn't matter to you, which in this case "it" being things like truth and reality. What really doesn't matter at this point is what your "experience" has been.  

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1 hour ago, RandyH said:

 

Thanks for this link, Randy, and for choosing this exact video. Because unlike Steve, Andrew Robinson, for example, even though he does a lot for Klipsch, is almost embarrassing to me in the way he himself together with his wife in the off represents a somewhat stuffy middle class and addresses this target group somewhat corny ("when I heard the Lascala, my wife and I came to tears"). Even though Steve is more of the older generation (like me only a very few years behind him) this video is an example of what I meant in my post before to address „new“ people. He is excited in a way that he is sharing with fans of his channel who have never seen anything like a Cornwall of any series.
His every word is believable (except for the little nonsense with the power cord in between). 
Back to our thread, I haven't heard a Cornwall4 yet (although I am determined to buy it for an old friend for whom I am to select and install a new stereo for his new house) but I have a 1977 Lascala since 1998 and an Underground Jubilee with TAD 4002 since 2008. I'll bet that the difference between a CW3 and the CW4 with the new horn needs no explanation, as I know the difference between an exponential horn and a modern Roy-Horn. Yes an exponential horn has by physic laws the lowest distortion but the new Klipsch horn has another coupling to the room and it is easier to be enjoyed by more then only one listener at the same time. Plus without going deeper into this topic I think that the mid horn is too small in the CW3 if it was borrowed from the older Heresy with a higher xover freq. and that I bet I would like a CW1 better than a CW3 (to both unexperienced). This is exactly why it is unfair to compare an exponential horn to a Tractrix horn when the expo horn is actually too small. But the final result speaks anyway for the CW4 vs the CW3. 

To be honest, I think that with the release of the CW3, their innovation was a bit uncharitable and that in marketing to their release year, perhaps they thought it would be a small inexpensive model upgrade before there was no more Heritage series in a near future. Kind of like Porsche thought the 911 was dead in 1977 and the SC was actually the swan song...but three times more people bought the 911SC than the 928. The 911 still exists today.

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I've read some comments about the CW3's "too small" midhorn.  And although I try to stay away from the conclusion which speaker sounds "better" because I know that this depends on many variables (personal taste, acoustics, etc) I would like to give my opinion about the CW3 vs CW4.  When I switched from the Chorus 1 to the CW3 I indeed had the idea (not A/B tested unfortunately) that the midrange of the CW3 sounded a bit smaller than that of the Chorus 1. Perhaps this is indeed due to the somewhat smaller midhorn of  the CW3.  But the CW3 sounded very musical to me and when the CW4 replaced the CW3 I heard a quite clearly audible difference between these two speakers, which turned out to be in favor of the CW4 on almost all points.  But I definitely missed a bit of emotion in the music with the CW4 that I did hear in the CW3.  When I listened to the CW4 I felt like I was listening to music but wasn't emotionally sucked into it.  And when I listened to the CW3 I disappeared into the music.  My foot was tapping to the beat of the music, or I was almost headbanging on the couch listening to "The Wall". The CW4 is just a bit too analytical. The music sounds better than the CW3.  Less boomy.. More detail.. Brighter.. But the CW3 has more emotion in my experience.  

 

So maybe the CW3 has a "too small" midhorn,nevertheless this speaker did something really good for me with this horn. Something I can't find in the CW4 yet..

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