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KHorn midrange horn vs other heritage midrange horn.


m00n

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Hi Moon

The Khorn and the LaScalla use the same horn lens that goes down to 400 hz.

The Belle is the next largest and is designed to go down to 500 hz. The CornW goes to 600 hz and the Heresy goes down to 700 hz.

All 4 lenses use the same driver.

The sound is almost the same. Very close IMO. I find the K400 to be a slightly bit more detailed than the smaller horns.

JM

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Hey Moon,

The longer horn with a larger mouth has a lower cutoff frequency. The K-400/401 has a cut-off of 263 Hz. The shorter horns cannot go that deep. The K-horn's bass horn struggles to get as high as 400 Hz, so it needs the bigger K-400. The La Scala does not and the Belle likely does not need its K-500 either. The K-600 or even the K-700 goes plenty low enough to mate with the La Scala bass horn.

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To the big bad world outside this forum, we are all a bunch of tweaking audiophiles who worry about nuances of sound too minute to distinguish. I confess this is true, but I cant help pushing and nudging my home movie and music reproduction system towards ever more realistic reproduction of the 3D sonic holographs, even the home attempt is quite a long way from the hard-pounding concrete-vibrating energy of the live rock band in full-volume crescendo.

So to the outside world I have to admit the sound from the mid-range horn of the Cornwall is much the same as the other, larger big ole horns. It is the Klipsch sound.

To the rarified air of this wonderful forum however, I have to say bigger is better. The wider lens of the classic LaScala and Klipsch corner Khorns makes a significant, if small, difference to me in the enjoyment of female vocals with small groups (my preferred music, probably because big ole horns and Bottlehead 2A3 Paramour monoblocks do it so well).

It was after hearing LaScalas that I had to have better loudspeakers than my walnut-oiled Cornwall 1s, with their B2 crossovers. In my opinion, the LaScala and Khorns larger mid-range horn is smoother, larger, clearer, open, efficient, compelling, more accurate and true.

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It ain't because the horn is larger in and of itself, it's because the crossover from woofer to mid driver is lower, almost an octave. The horn must be larger to go lower. Evidently you like the sound of the lower midrange better when reproduced by a compression driver than by a 15" cone. So do I.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi folks,

Here's an interesting (at least to me) aside about Khorn bass bins and freq response: I have 6" throat openings in my Khorns and use the motor board to reduce it to the normal 3" wide opening. But when using a motor board with a 6" wide opening, more upper bass definately comes through the bass horn, I got the K33E to mate with a 500Hz mid-horn/driver using an ALK crossover EXTREMELY SEEMLESSLY with no modifications (I was shocked) with the setting of X-3 on the autoformer, which is substancially more output than what the "normal" upper band pass is typically capable of using the 3" wide cavity and the same midrange driver in a 400Hz fc horn. I was so enthralled that I am considering the 500Hz horn and a 6" cavity opening as the preferred setup from now on. Just goes to show that there is quite a bit of lee-way available in tweaking the Khorns as far as efficiency and frequency response(s). I am very impressed with the capabilities of the Khorn. What other speaker is capable of being tweaked to this degree and suffer no permanent ill effects?!

Just a note. Thanks for "listening"...

DM2.gif

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One thought is that the K400 is not so different from the other midranges in sound. It certainly goes lower, though.

The real difference is that it is typically mated with a bass horn.

Dr. Bruce Edgar opined that mixing horns with a bass radiator creates an aural problem in that the direct bass radiater is producting modulation distortion. In a system using direct radiators all around the pattern is consistent and our brain tunes it out. But in a mixed system, it is not consistent and we can't.

I tried listening to a bass horn alone and it is muddy, as it should be given the limited response. It is difficult to detect much of anything magic.

Perhaps the smaller and large midrange horns don't sound to different from each other and also don't sound magic. Sound tinny, as they should given the passband.

But use a bass horn to supplement a mid horn and tweeter, and everything sounds better.

Gil

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  • 3 weeks later...

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