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16OHM speaker in place of a 4Ohm ??!


vacs2000

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Hi

Is it OK to replace the 4Ohm impendance woofer on a Cornwall with a 16 Ohm ??

Shoudl one should fiddle with the transformer etc ?!?

thank you

george

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Fisher 400-CX pre-amp

Fisher 100 (EL37) monoblocks (3)

Fisher 101R tuner

Fisher 100-MPX

Sony SCD-333ES

Ampex 1260 reel to rell

Garrard 401/SME3012R/Grado

Speakers...

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I'd say no. Or at least that performance is going to suffer.

That one driver is rated at 4 ohms and the other is rated at 16 ohms doesn't tell the whole story. It does signal these are very different designs, though.

Generally, the size of the box and the tuning of the reflex port is designed to match the Theil-Small parameters of the driver. The T-S parameters are Fs, Qts, and Cms. You see these parameters in catalogs selling drivers.

PWK designed the Cornwall before those parameters came into the engineering world. However, his analysis was based on related parameters.

Later, Don Keele analyzed the Cornwall and found it to be close to optimum based on the later engineering design theory. So PWK was right on the money.

The bottom line is that the Cornwall bass response (and indeed that of any speaker system) is going to be optimum only if the proper driver speaker is used.

It is highly unlikely that a replacement driver which varies from the K-33 is going to work as well as the original.

The transformer, or autotransformer, controls the response of the midrange and the tweeter, not the bass.

Gil

This message has been edited by William F. Gil McDermott on 10-31-2001 at 08:31 PM

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Hello,

thank you for your answer. I have the following comment though. Reading an old issue of VTV I noticed that the Cornwall speaker used the same woofer like the Klipschorn ( K-33P/J/E). It happened to have then a EV 15WK which is a 16 Ohm impendance and it was also used in the Klipschorn before the K-33 series begun.

So I though using it for the Cornwall since....

Looking to this list of speakers for the Klipschorn it looked to me that there was not such a deep research for the Cornwall since in reality the Cornwall use the same exactly speaker component as the Klipschorn and following any chance made over the years ( except for the Corwall II late 1989) which indeed sound different than the Cornwall I type. So fo me this look more like they put whatever speakers had for the other type of the heritage line and made a Cornwall.

Am I missing something ?!?

george

------------------

---------------------

Fisher 400-CX pre-amp

Fisher 100 (EL37) monoblocks (3)

Fisher 101R tuner

Fisher 100-MPX

Sony SCD-333ES

Ampex 1260 reel to rell

Garrard 401/SME3012R/Grado

Speakers...

-------------------------

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Klipschorn has had many different woofers, a few different squawkers, a few different tweeters, a few different crossovers over the years. The same is true for the most of the rest of the Heritage line. Blindly swapping parts from a speaker of one vintage into a speaker of another vintage is not guaranteed to yield acceptable results, particularly if there was a parametric change in the part. When there is a parametric change in one part, there is usually a corresponding change in at least one other part. If the combination of woofer, squawker, and tweeter you arrive at is one Klipsch shipped, it may be as simple as modifying your crossover network, assuming you can get the schematic for the appropriate crossover network. More than a tap change on the autotransformer may be involved. If it is not a combination Klipsch has shipped, you are in the position of engineering your own crossover. And, even if everything works out properly, you may still wind up with a speaker that no long matches its mate as well as it did before the change.

If you are considering this because of the issues you raised in your other post about your Cornwalls, I would suggest you just find another K-33, preferably of the same vintage if possible. K-33s show up on eBay fairly frequently, alhough I don't recall seeing one of the CTS manufactured ones recently.

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