Walk me through the wiring of a vintage Klipschorn

[RiotSqrl]

Howdy all

 

Have inherited some corner speakers that I need to verify/clean-up for sale.

 

K-B-MR 3G058

 

This is how currently wired. Btw is canned air okay to deal with the dust? Contact cleaner thumbs up or down?

 

 

 

Wires 3 and 4 terminate on lower section

 

 

Input wires 1 and 2 free

 

 

 

Will this power it?

 

 

If so, what needs to be plugged in where?

 

 

Have a multimeter and an entry level understanding of how to use it. Voltage, resistance, continuity. 

 

Be gentle and patient, my experience with this world of electrics is plugging headphones into cassette players, and later CD walkmen, and eventually smartphones. I understand everything about my car's design except the audio system.

[wuzzzer]

Hate to be the first to say it but that RCA unit is very inadequate for your Khorns.  Not in terms of power as a 3 watt amp will drive you out of the room with the sensitivity of your speakers.

 

If you really want to do them justice, do a little browsing on the forum for recommended amplifiers.

 

I wouldn’t worry about the dust, but I’d recommended unscrewing and tightening all the input/output screws that you can see.  This will help give a much better signal path between all the components.

 

If you want to use the RCA to just test it out, connect speaker wire to the RCA’s L and R outputs on the right side of the picture you posted them to the input connections of your speakers.

[RiotSqrl]

Yeah I'm just testing the speakers are functional.

 

The input wire is two strands in a side-by-side cable. The kind where it's basically like two wires sorta glued together that peel apart with some effort? One length goes to Input point 1, the other to Input 2. So is one power and ground? Both? Neither? 

 

Not sure how to do L-R power and ground on that RCA setup, making the assumption that's what red and black are representing.

 

<Edit>Sorry, I'm an idiot. I keep thinking in terms of the single speaker. It can be left or right, I can run it as a single if I like. 

 

But if I want to make a single speaker A-Right I suppose I'd learn pretty quickly if I wired the input backwards. But it's not going to burst into flames or anything right?

Edited July 22, 2024 by RiotSqrl

[mboxler]

Don't connect the speakers to the RCA jacks.  Those are for your music sources.

 

Connect the two wires in your hand to SPEAKERS (8Ω MIN).  The posts on the receiver are push type.  Simply push on the black or red tab, insert the bare part of the wire into the hole, then release the tab.  

 

Put the 1 wire into A R - (black tab), and the 2 wire into A R + (red tab).  Both wires power the speaker.

 

Turn the receiver all the way down.  Verify the SPEAKER A is displayed on the front panel.  Play some music and slowly turn the volume up.

 

Make sense?

 

Mike

 

 

[RiotSqrl]

So far.

 

How does the speaker know what's directed to the subwoofer or the tweeter or whatever? If I look at my car radio I have a pin connector for power/ground/accessories and my various speakers. If I have an aftermarket radio I have cables on the back for individual tweeters and subwoofers and etc if available. The Great Speaker has one input lane?

 

 

[mboxler]

That's what the Type A crossover is for.  It's a passive filter.  Your car stereo probably has active filters, but the result is the same.  Send the voltage to the correct drivers based on frequency.

[RiotSqrl]

That's weirdly clever. I like the 'old tech'. Carbs and ignition points are so intelligent when you look at them.

 

What does the warm up or easing in do? Are we trying to avoid unknown resistance in the system until we establish everything is good? I wasn't getting signal in the radio but had static so gradually turned it up until I could hear it and let it sit for a few minutes while I figured out a solution.

 

I used an old metal car antenna with a jumper cable to the antenna ground on the stereo and we got music. First station I found was classic rock and the final 30 seconds of Metallica's Enter Sandman. This is quite a speaker. Given the quality of the recording, the broadcast, the stereo, etc, etc it still sounds....different. I don't know if that's the quality of the Klipschorn or the size of it or that it has the full range of speakers or the way it's designed to project sound or what but it really is something. As you turn the volume up the quality seems to get better and better. Maybe it's like the first time you have a garden tomato vs a store bought one. You didn't know what you didn't know. Or maybe it's just having an amplifier vs a lifetime listening to headphones and factory car audio.

 

What's a good resource for understanding audio/speaker science? So let's say we have an audio recording that has a tweeter, woofer, and subwoofer sound. It goes down this simple wire to the K-Horn and arrives at the crossover. Are there 3 frequencies coming down the line at the same time? If so, our weak link is the quality, and data channels, of the original recording plus whatever the amp can process and distribute?

 

Does the original FM signal over the air have the 'data' to be parsed by amp or the crossover? 

 

Assuming it or any other source does, when it hits my Radioshack unit and it processes the sound is that the next point of degradation? 

 

Lets go the opposite end of quality, just to scare you guys. 

 

I get one of these cigarette-lighter bluetooth receivers that does a low power FM signal so you can sync your phone to your FM car radio. I plug the cig end into my car battery jumperpack for power. I connect my phone to it. I broadcast at Whatever FM. I tune Whatever FM on the receiver and pump the output to the K-Horn. I go on YouTube and find some amazing sound with all sorts of instruments and highs and lows and a full spectrum of sounds and quality. 

 

Recording>YouTube upload>Youtube output>Phone output>Bluetooth receiver>Bluetooth FM output>Radioshack FM Receiver>Radioshack speaker output>K-Horn.

 

What is the K-Horn digesting at that point? I'm assuming a fairly garbage one note input? And I assume it flows downhill. So whichever part of the transmission journey has the lowest quality, that becomes the new baseline for everything else to work from? I could be doing an in-person recording of Steely Dan in their prime but if I'm running it through my Radioshack AMP it's still going to be a little cruddy when it gets to the Klipsch?

 

Again I'm not an audio guy and I'm just testing function and performance because these need to find a buyer. What's the simplest way to get a good run of these speakers? If the old lady down the road has a record player from the same decade this K-Horn was built is that the 'cleanest' source? Record to Turntable to K-Horn?

 

Tape deck? CD player? Could I put a microphone on the roof and run ambient birdsong through it? I'd actually be super into that idea.

 

Short answer: They work, they're great. But I have a hunch what I heard last night was like only hearing the opening note of <your favorite song> rather than the real experience. To use another car metaphor, I want to take this thing out for a drive and open it up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[geezin']

"..........I want to take this thing out for a drive and open it up....."

 

Careful they could become hard to sell after that.