Delivery from Hope, Arkansas!

[Ponch0069]

I just received my La Scala’s! I will update pictures after they are setup 😊 

[KT88]

Congratulations! I have 47 year old LaScalas which I like and two weeks ago I heard AL5 for the first time. I thought the sound was very good. You will have a lot of fun with it. To my ears, the sound is wonderfully round and not boomy as can be the case with the old LS. (I can do something about that if I have time). The AL5s also look great. Pics and impressions please later on.

 

 

 

[Bananas and Blow]

New speaker day is the best day. Congrats. When I have the room and the money I hope to have a pair someday.

[Schu]

Congrats... and enjoy.

I remember that day well...

 

[Ponch0069]

Klipsch La Scala Serendipity…

 

Two years ago I updated my front end kit with a McIntosh C8 tube preamp and a pair of McIntosh MC830 solid state mono blocks. Then the audition process started to replace my GoldenEar Triton 2+ speakers. Great speakers but I was ready for something different. My son is the lucky recipient of those speakers. I auditioned B&W D4, Sonus Faber Olympica Nova II & III, Focal Kanta 2 & 3, Magical A3, McIntosh ML1 speakers and even travelled to Boulder, CO and auditioned PS Audio’s FR20 Aspen speakers in their great listening room. I decided on the PS Audio FR20’s but wanted to give all the other speakers another listen before I purchased them. I went back to a local shop to do some listening and while walking between listening rooms the La Scala’s caught my eye. Klipsch speakers were not even on my radar at this point. I went in there and listened to my audition playlist and was blown away! None and I mean none of the above mentioned speakers IMO demonstrated the dynamics, the feel and sound of a real drum kit being in the room, the feel and sound of Clarence Clemon’s saxophone solo during Jungleland as if he was physical in front of me playing between the speakers. “I’m not bull shitting over here!” I thought to myself why spend more money on any of the above speakers that didn’t even sound as dynamic and truly alive as the the La Scala’s do? That’s the point of listening to music, isn’t it? My sister in law listened to them this morning and the 1st thing she said was,”Damn! That sounds like the band was in the room,” Case closed! 

[hanksjim1]

What a beautiful setup!  Those sound panels look interesting as well.

[Ponch0069]

@hanksjim1 a few years ago I sent GIK acoustics pictures of my listening area and one of their sound engineers made the recommendations for my room. All six panels for $800. A great in investment. 

[Ponch0069]

Also as left and right front theater speakers. WOW! The GoldenEar speakers were great but the La Scala’s take it to another level 

[Ceptorman]

Very nice , congrats.

[babadono]

Nice! Welcome to hornville.

[Flevoman]

On 7/18/2024 at 10:06 PM, KT88 said:

... and two weeks ago I heard AL5 for the first time. I thought the sound was very good.

You sure?... You didn't seem very impressed. 😉

[Flevoman]

 

@derrickdj1 **Brief explanation**

It was a jab to provoke a reaction. But unfortunately, @KT88 didn't take the bait. 

A few weeks ago, he was at my place. Unfortunately, we didn't have much time as we were busy with other matters, but he briefly listened to my AL5. He didn't say much about it, but I had the impression (and this is entirely my interpretation) that he preferred his own Lascalas at home.

[Coytee]

2 hours ago, Flevoman said:

my interpretation) that he preferred his own Lascalas at home

well, they are his and these are yours! 

 

[KT88]

Yes, I was very impressed... by what I heard and how it sounds compared to my old 1977 Lascala, which has original components but very little sanded side walls (I could still kill the carpenter for what he did 18 years ago without asking. In the fall, I will have the LaScala's cabinet reworked, and the side wall will be reinforced with additional veneer).

 

But now I come to the AL5 that I heard in the home of @Flevoman. I would like to say in advance that it is my very personal impression of the sound, which should not be generalized under any circumstances. That makes it easier for me to speak freely.

This is the very first impression, after different songs and for the first time ever in an unfamiliar room.

 

The AL5s sound incredibly homogeneous and natural. I was absolutely positively impressed by the seamlessness of the sound and the fusion of bass, midrange and treble. In addition, a very pleasant and extremely sympathetic basic tonality was lresented. A little on the warm side of things (which makes the sound very inviting), but without any annoying coloration in the mid band. The big challenge was achieved, tone colors but no coloration, that was a very positive first impression of my short listening experience.

 

I somehow immediately took the AL5 to my heart. This harmonized with the beautiful appearance of these speakers. Flevoman has a fairly large living room as a listening room, the speakers are placed in front of the long wall (which I found very pleasant, except for one point that I will come back to later). Visually, they are perfectly integrated into his room. My old speakers look much bigger in our living room. Actually, the living room areas are quite similar, but because we have an even if a wide passageway at home, so our living room is effectively divided in two and I can only use half the space. That's why it looks optically very integrated at Flevoman's (similar to the original advertising images for the AL5 on the Klipsch website) At our place it looks as if I had put two washing machines in the living room and painted them light brown. The visual difference depending on the size of the room is that dramatic. I am not taking into account that the AL5 are actually even noticeably larger than the vintage LS.

 

Now it is my impression that a very wide rear wall, as with Melvin, also means that the sound is very free of reflections on the sides. I am particularly thinking of the mids and treble. However, I feel very comfortable with a few of such reflections on the closer side walls, as they are at home with us. It reinforces my subjective impression of spatial listening because direct sound is enriched with relatively timely smaller amount of indirect sound. But I have a meter of distance to the side walls at home, because if the reflections are too close, it primarily means unpleasant colorations, so I mean indirect sound, which the brain can learn to distinguish if the delay time remains long enough. I hope it makes sense as it translates into English. So I am very curious to see how the AL5 would sound at our home.

 

I was extremely curious before the listening session to see how Roy's still relatively young new tweeter horn would fit into the LaScala sound. Because the T35 (in my case alnico, fortunately) is in my view the great contentious, relevant and ambivalent aspect of vintage LS and Khorns (I'll write something about vintage Khorn in a few weeks because I'm still in the adaptation and a little restore phase with my 1973 Khorns, which are new to me. Just so you know, I'm delighted with these Khorns, the first in my life).

 

The T35 (or K77) is very noticeable in its importance for the Klipsch sound... when it is gone you will miss it. I tried a CT125 17 years ago. It was one of the reasons why my LS disappeared into my (very good climatically) storage room for almost 5 years. When I rebuilt the LS, I remembered the original tweeter and the original AA crossover (I had bought ALK universal in 2006 and it was a musical step backwards for my ears, towards lifelessness).

It's hard to describe what the K77 does for the overall sound of a vintage Klipsch LS or Khorn, the punch, the liveliness, the sense of authority, the great attack when plucking the strings of a Martin D28... it was back due to the reinstallation of my K77, and with it my enthusiasm and joy of listening was also back again.

I suspect that some third-party tweeter manufacturers made the mistake of making their tweeters too gentle and tame. It's also called hi-fi or audiophile. At least with the CT125, everything was polished to a shine and the speech intelligibility was no longer good. I know that the CT125 is a bit quieter than a K77, but that really wasn't the only reason for my impression. There are certainly better third party solutions than the CT125 and I don't want to offend anyone.

 

Well... how did Roy solve the weak points of the K77? Because on the negative side, many here know that the K77 can hiss, it can sometimes be annoying when it shouldn't be, and the K77 is, I mean this very seriously, very picky and moody when it comes to a piece of music. It's like a love-hate relationship. There are songs where I enjoy every note and life is beautiful. Then comes another song and somehow the K77 “manages” to make a Strat with intermediate pick-up positioning hit exactly the fried bacon resonance of the K77...OMG.

 

To put it briefly and with the highest praise: Roy's new tweeter horn in the AL5 is like a K77 without the fried bacon sound but with the energy and liveliness of an original K77 plus more high end freq.

That was my biggest surprise with the AL5. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The new tweeter harmonizes with the exponential K401 and forms a joint team... even though it is a tractrix horn and perhaps radiates a touch wider than a K77. A perfectly solved task to mediate between the old world and the new world. That's why the AL5 sounds so wonderfully coherent to me after the first 30 minutes.

 

There were aspects of the AL5 listening test that I didn't find quite so wonderful. But to say it in advance, and Flevoman may forgive me, it had more to do with his frontend than with the AL5.

The bass was not as authoritative as I know it from my LaSala. Of course, there are physical limits to the low frequencies due to the short horn, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the performance of the audible range. Personally, I definitely lacked punch and rhythmic timing. My foot remained motionless while listening. My expectations of 3D spatiality were not met at all. The sound remained on a two-dimensional line between the two speakers. It sounded, as they say, rather “shot in”.

 

The front end was a Cambridge streamer, which I believe is a very good device for what it is. From there it went directly into a power amp (with type 45 output tubes of low wattage. Such an amp may promote a high-resolution sound in the treble but is not to my taste because I prefer powerful amps with punch in the bass and little interaction with the xover, such as my MC275).

 

I read the brochure of the streamer. It is recommended for various configurations but expressly not for direct control and drive of a power amp. For this purpose, Cambridge has another more expensive model because it includes an additional real preamp stage - with buffer and impedance converter at the output.

 

Melvin‘s streamer is technically more or less similar to my Bluesound node (I thin so). His Cambridge may be of higher quality but both have a volume function, but that doesn't make them preamps. I use the volume function when I'm lazy, but my Streamer goes into my C22CE, EAR 864 or Quad 34.

I tried connecting my Node Streamer directly to one of my power amps and leaving out the preamp. It was the same anemic sound as with Melvin's system. There are two issues when you leave out the preamp. 1) As I said, there is no ability to drive a power amp properly due to too high output impedance. 2) You have to attenuate the line output of the streamer with its volume function. This results in an incredible loss of resolution, detail and spatial depth. This is because the digital attenuation of the signal in almost all such devices that do not have a built-in preamp stage is associated with a severe reduction in digital bandwidth.

 

I tried it. If I turn the Bluesound Node down and turn up the preamp to compensate the SPL, the signal and the information content are much narrower and more boring than if I turn up the volume of the streamer (or even better, avoid the volume function and select the fixed voltage value at the output) and turn down the preamp accordingly.

This effect has a very strong impact on the sound impression, even if the preamp already ensures the correct output impedance. This whole source/preamp topic comes in addition to the in my view somehow weak type 45 amp. Later I learned that Melvin also has a fully integrated very nice Melody tube amp with genuine preamp included and also with a volume control of course. But it was too late for a second listening to the AL5.

 

To summarize, I can very well imagine the sound of the AL5 under optimal front-end conditions because I know my own LaScala inside out. Then the AL5 will have also the punch and the powerful, lively performance that my vintage LS can deliver. Except for the tweeter, the xover and the type of cabinet material, it is basically the same speaker in terms ofthe bass horn construction, the K33E, K55 (V or X). What should be less powerful and spatial in the AL5 compared to the vintage LS? I think the AL5 is in many ways even better than my vintage LS (although I don't question my LS and will never let them go).

I am very impressed, emotionally when listening and rationally due to the technical engineering performance in integrating the new high-frequency horn.

I wholeheartedly recommend the AL5 without reservation. Despite the adversities of the front end during the session, it was a rare and spontaneous positive impression that you don't often experience.

 

I have since exchanged views with Flevoman about his frontend and I have written some very few lines from my point of view to him. In the end, it's all a matter of personal taste, but as far as the combination of streamer and poweramp is concerned, Flevoman is trying out other solutions, which I very much welcome and appreciate as it shows his flexibility and a genuine interest. In the end, he can decide for himself which frontend he likes best but then he knows about the alternatives.

 

PS

I have a small addendum for those who are aware of this point. I was very curious about how the AL5 is voiced. In my opinion, it is very similar to my 1977 LS in terms of voicing, with (!) the magnetic screw in the center of the small coil of the high-frequency section of the AA crossover. And that's what I like best.

 

 

[vulcan]

Really nice speakers and room set up. What model is the turntable?

[Marvel]

On 7/24/2024 at 8:06 AM, KT88 said:

At our place it looks as if I had put two washing machines in the living room and painted them light brown.

Priceless image stuck in my head, Heinz.

 

A very thorough  and easy to understand review, as well. I appreciate the detail you give. Thank you! I had some CT125s on my '89 LS, and understand your comment about them. I later switched to the same driver but different horn, placed in a baffle on top of the LS, where I could move it to time align the mid and tweeter.  But that's another story.

[Ponch0069]

@vulcan it’s a ProJect X8 turntable 

[Dave1291]

Looks like a great set up and has to sound even better!  Enjoy it!