Is there any timedelay compensation in the Khorn between the bass re the mid re the tweeter

[TBrennan]

Shawn---My Sony 975 upscaling DVD machine has an adjustment for video-audio synch. I'm not using the option though.

[D-MAN]

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On 12/27/2004 3:57:20 PM sfogg wrote:

"Distances of over 3 ft. result in a discernable difference."

If the earlier posted info is correct about a 8.4ms delay then the K'Horn is well over this distance. 1 foot is roughly 1 ms of delay.

Shawn

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This absolutely cannot be correct; the overall length of the Khorn is about 65 inches measured center-of-channel from the throat cavity opening to the "mouth".

That is a little over 5 feet overall. It's still over 36 inches even subracting the length of the midrange horn, so it could definitely be noticable between the woofer and midrange diaphragms but only at the shared 6db slope crossover point.

We might regard it as "smearing", but with bass notes, who can tell?

I have to come down on PWK's side on this one, there is little sense in trying to correct this "deficiency", as delay issues only really count in the high frequencies, not the low ones.

DM

[3dzapper]

It's a terrible thing DM if one listens to Tibetian Buddist monks ringing their gongs!

Rick

[D-MAN]

If there's one thing that I can't stand, it's SMEARED GONG sound! How could I have been so foolish as to get horns in the first place?! What was I thinking?!

Rick, thanks for your intervention.

DM

[sfogg]

"We might regard it as "smearing", but with bass notes, who can tell?"

400hz isn't really just bass notes, vocals fall into that range easily too. Swapping out my first order crossovers in the LaScalas (at 400hz) for Al's extreme slopes (at 600hz) cleared up vocals in a big way. Smearing is a good term for it... I typically describe it as coherence but I think we mean the same thing.

The high frequency rolloff of the woofer is probably very different between a K'Horn and a Las or Belle. In the Las or the Belle the bass horn lets the woofer get a lot higher up in frequency then 400hz. But as I understand it (haven't measured it) in the K'Horn the more complex bass horn acts like a low pass filter around 450hz or so.

Shawn

[DrWho]

The issues regarding the crossover aren't the real problem with the time delay. It's very straightforward that the crossover either needs to line up the phases between drivers or in Al's approach, he minimizes the range where phase is an issue (while also trying to line things up).

Not talking about the crossover, there is the issue of the trombone in the rear of the orchestra. I was thinking about this analogy and I finally figured out why it didn't make sense. When the trombone plays in the back of the orchestra, ALL of it's timbre comes from the same location...the low notes and the high notes. The end result is that the trombone sounds like it's in the back. However, the time delay issues with the khorn are not playing all of the timbre at the same time. Using the trombone example, the khorn is making it seem like the trombone is smeared from the front to the back of the orchestra because the harmonics and upper frequencies are arriving before the lower ones.

Ironically, I think this might be part of the reason the k-horn has such a large soundstage and "live" sound. Basically, the music sounds almost as if it were on a deeper stage. As long as the delay is less than the shortest sound on the recording, then the time delay should be for the most part unnoticeable. If the delay is longer, then you are going to hear the different parts of the instrument at different times (despite what the crossover is doing).

[Parrot]

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On 12/31/2004 5:52:57 AM DrWho wrote:

If the delay is longer, then you are going to hear the different parts of the instrument at different times (despite what the crossover is doing).

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Dr., you're getting so far into the theoretical that it's absurd. I can't believe anyone hearing a trombone through a Klipschorn is going to be able to distinguish the higher notes from a trombone as reaching him before the lower notes of a trombone.

[DrWho]

You are taking the trombone analogy too literally. I'm talking about the analogy that claimed the sound from instruments in the rear of the orchestra (which arrives later than the instruments in front) didn't sound like they arrived "late".

I remember listening to a drum recording of some oriental dude during my visit to artto's place. One thing I remember very distinctly is the way the drums sounded on his system. I managed to get myself a copy of the same song and listened on my system and it was a totally different sound. I would need more time with a pair of khorns to justify myself, but I think a lot of it had to do with the delay issues. Listening on 3 different pairs of higher quality headphones further leads me to the same conclusion. Ironically though, I felt the khorn sounded better because I like space in music and there was space between the attack and the gut of the drums. I really don't think I'm being too theoretical; I'm just trying to show that it's not a crossover issue. I have experienced other time delay issues in other settings as well and it results in the same kind of sound (mostly in PA environments where this actually throws off the musicians).

Anyways, it would be a trivial matter to introduce a digital time delay matrix and at least bi-amp the khorn to determine the audible effects of the delay issue, or at least determine if it's audible.

Just because PWK said it's not an issue doesn't mean it's true. There is a whole wealth of documentation from multiple other speaker manufactures that document the impact of time alignment. I believe there must be some merit to the cause other than pure marketing hype.

[WMcD]

Oh goodness gracious. I do now await technical information on time delay in wire wound resistors . . . or anything else.

The subject of time delay has come to the fore again in horn design. Nelson Pass has built his back loaded Klein bottle horns using Lother drivers with about 18 feet (?) of delay. He is not very distressed by it.

Gil

[Ray Garrison]

Gil,

"...Nelson Pass has built his back loaded Klein bottle horns..."

O My Gosh! I know Pass was a remarkable engineer, but I didn't know he could do *THAT*.

I bet it sure reduced the cabinet resonances. Having only one surface and being boundry free, it should not resonate at all. I guess it serves as an infinate baffle, too, at the same time it's a horn.

Of course, in keeping with the topic of this thread, you now have delays in four dimentions instead of only three...

[Deang]

Bump.

[Klewless]

It seems to me that I read someplace that Paul Klipsch used to take speakers with the highs and lows in separate enclosures so that he could move them back and forth for the audience. As best I can remember, he had to get them VERY far apart (front to back) before anyone could actually hear the difference.

It also seems to me that when that happens what one actually hears is two separate sources. The tap dancer thing was on a two way system right smack in the middle of the most sensitive part of our hearing range.

Between the bass horn and the tweeter is an exercise in tom foolery since there is nothing common between them. Between the bass and mid is an area of concern but that is hardly an issue since the two are parting ways so fast it makes your head hurt. And between the mid and tweeter that frequency is so high that the room is doing more "damage" than the speakers themselves.

Lobing effects between two sources however are not crossover related nor are they related to the difference in origin of source. It is because two drivers, no matter how perfect they may be, are making the same frequencies at the same time from two different places. Same as sound bouncing back and forth in your room setting up the hot/dead spots within the room. This is why I dissagree with the side-by-side center channel that is being sold today for home theater.

In Paul's paper on the development of the midrange he clearly discusses the lobing issue.

Sorry I cannot properly quote my recollections about Paul's experiments with the non-believers.

I personally believe the main reason the Khorn is so good is because they cover the critical midrange with one driver. And in my little mind the other problems will get my worry time after I manage to hear them.

I also have a strong opinion about the noise tests regarding drivers time/non-time aligned speakers. I believe that what is going on is that the drivers are moving in and out of phase but not in time-alignment. You could hear the phasing differences but not the time-alignment differences when the sources are close together (which the bass and tweeter are not).

Otherwise you guys may have to take all this with a grain (or more) of salt. It is my own opinion.

Thanks for listening.

[3dzapper]

Gil, A little more info:

As you know the NCTS color TV signal contains the "y" signal which carries the picture information, the audio sub-carrier at 4.5MHz and the Chroma sub-carrier at 3.58Mhz. The Chroma sub-carrier takes the most time in a circuit to demodulate and seperate into red,green and blue,and since the eye would be sensitive to the smearing if the Color and Hue components of the Chroma carrier lagged the Y's black and white contrast signal, the Y signal was delayed. The audio signal is taken from the Y video portion's intermediate frequency probably in the second stage after the delay is applied and is thus likewise delayed.

The delay line I can vividly remember my lab instructor pointing out looked like a wire wound resistor. A calibrated lengh of tinned thin gauge wire wrapped around a ceramic form. (Circa 1974, TV from '60s?)

Today this is all handled by the LSIs in the set as well as the delays for various noise filters and digital picture enhancements such as 540p or 1180i displays.

Rick

[D-MAN]

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On 12/29/2004 7:09:34 PM D-MAN wrote:

We might regard it as "smearing", but with bass notes, who can tell?

DM

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This post started (I think) before I got my new bass horns, and now, I have to say that there is INDEED time-delay between the bass horn and the midrange horn but its only apparent at the crossover point overlap where both drivers are producing the same frequencies.

Normally, this is made moot by the crossover point and slope being appropriate to the job. But a new bass horn that passes more mid-and-upper bass and a 400Hz crossover point and not enough slope means BIG TROUBLE right here in River City. No amount of xformer adjustment can compensate, although it can be lessened to a degree.

I am forced to go to another crossover (goodbye ALK-A's, hello ES600/ES5800), that's not an optional upgrade, that's a requirement, and that hurts the old wallet.

The "smearing" of certain notes was too much for me, in particular PIANO lower registers. It is a weakness or a fuzziness to the tone almost like distortion, but it is the combination of the midrange and the woofer tones that produces it. Hence, the "smearing" and it is very apparent, so I take back my previous "who knows" remark!

I suppose that I could have looked around for a less-capable woofer in the higher bass frequencies, but what the heck! I decided that I shouldn't take the chance with another unknown commodity...

DM

[Klewless]

Help!!! I am a bit confused.

I thought the ES600 was at 600 Hz. Isn't that wrong for the Khorn????

Popular belief was that the Khorn bass unit could not get high enough and even it it did it sounds gutty (sorry about the spelling). That is part of the reason Klipsch developed the current 400 Hz mid horn which was originally good to about 500 Hz. The infamous hole in the middle kind of thing.

I remember when the rage was to short out the bass coil. That lasted about a week before Klipsch said "Don't do it". I remember trying it at the time (many, many years ago) and left it that way about 2 hours.

[D-MAN]

Sorry that I didn't make it clear.

Yes, you are correct, but the new bass horn isn't a Khorn.

It's a new design that is also a 40Hz horn with the same throat area and BC area as the Khorn, so the K33E is a nice "fit".

DM

[D-MAN]

"I remember when the rage was to short out the bass coil. That lasted about a week before Klipsch said "Don't do it". I remember trying it at the time (many, many years ago) and left it that way about 2 hours."

PWK did actually publish that in the DOPE FROM HOPE papers,

that the woofer coil was "optional" in the crossover.

I didn't find anything to indicate that he retracted that.

I think that natural rolloff of the upper frequencies in the Khorn sort of made it inconsequential (or not!).

DM

[hsosdrum]

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On 2/14/2005 7:18:28 PM D-MAN wrote:

there is INDEED time-delay between the bass horn and the midrange horn but its only apparent at the crossover point overlap where both drivers are producing the same frequencies.

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Actually, it's apparent whenever you're listening in stereo, because it prevents the K-Horns from creating a life-like 3-dimensional stereo soundstage. They image like a b*tch from side-so-side -- with pinpoint precision -- but that huge soundstage is as flat and thin as a gossamer curtain. And having the bass voice coil more than 5 feet behind the squawker voice coil, which is 2 feet behind the tweeter voice coil is a chief cause.

The "shuffleboard" experiments described in the Dope From Hopes (where the mid/high section was separated from the woofer and moved forwards and backwards until blindfolded listeners could hear a difference) were performed with a single speaker. Monaural listening is quite forgiving of time-arrival errors. If one speaker is reproducing the attack of a piano hammer smeared over several milliseconds, no big deal -- the piano's timbre may change slightly. But when locating the piano in 3-dimensional space depends upon sounds from more than one speaker reaching both ears at a precise moment in time, that several millisecond smear destroys the brain's ability to reconstruct the acoustic environment in 3-dimensions. (Remember -- directional hearing is a temporal phenomenon.)

There are dozens of speakers on the market designed with minimal or no phase error at the crossover points (it is possible to do this in a passive network, providing that the amount of compensation isn't extreme -- the huge differences in the depths of the 3 horns in a K-Horn generate phase errors too large to be addressed in a passive network), and they blow K-Horns out of the water when it comes to creating a believeable 3-dimensional soundstage. (Of course, the K-Horns blow those speakers out of the water in terms of dynamic accuracy at all volume levels, freedom from IM distortion, and depending on the room they're in, flat frequency response and bass extension, but I'm only talking about the stereo soundstage here.)

Sonance (the company I work for) is about to release a set of cabinet speakers that produce a frighteningly realistic 3-dimensional soundstage -- one of the very best I've ever heard in my nearly 30 years in the industry. It rivals the soundstage produced by any speaker made by Wilson Audio (some of the most expensive on Earth). Even our higher-end in-walls do a very credible job of creating a 3-D soundstage, and those speakers can't be angled towards the listener (which improves soundstage depth). It's not impossible to do this when the depths of your driver voice coils are only a couple of inches apart and you know how to design a good dividing network. But if we moved those voice coils several feet apart the soundstage would completely evaporate and no amount of network tomfoolery would bring it back.

I've never heard tri-amped K-Horns with time delay compensation, but with all of the K-Horn's other great sonic attributes, I think such a system could create one of the most realistic 3-dimensional soundstages ever heard in the history of music reproduction.

-hsosdrum

[mikebse2a3]

hsosdrum said:

Actually, it's apparent whenever you're listening in stereo, because it prevents the K-Horns from creating a life-like 3-dimensional stereo soundstage. They image like a b*tch from side-so-side -- with pinpoint precision -- but that huge soundstage is as flat and thin as a gossamer curtain.

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I would assume that If we could keep all the good points about the Khorn design and bring it into time alignment there would be improvements in the sound.

But I have to say (My) experience with Khorns in several different rooms is that when the room and the Khorn are a good match the Khorns have a very detailed reproduction of depth and the sense of scale from side to side as well as depth is among the best I have ever heard.

As most of us know imaging is so easily destroyed by the room and the way a speaker interacts with the room and the first time I ever heard the Khorns it was the lifelike qualities of dynamics and soundstaging that hooked me for life.

So I for one have to disagree "The Khorns can reproduce a very believable image(Width and Depth) when like most all good speakers the setup is right".

mike

[D-MAN]

I think that the Khorn is limited in its ability to "image" by the 45 deg. angle that the top frequency cabinet is fixed at. This means that in the perfect room, where the sweet spot is exactly at the nexus, it should image like crazy. But most rooms are not proportionally correct enough to provide this.

Some people give Khorns a bad rap for this reason, IMO. They were designed in the '40's for mono reproduction, so there you go...

But if you turn the upper horns to accomodate the room and listening position, you should then be able to adjust it to the point where you get a uniform waveform coming at you capable of imaging as much as the horns themselves are capable of.

DM