Klipsch Noir, The Case of The Twisted Tweeter.

[thebes]

I was sitting in my office on a gray winter chilly day with
low lying clouds about all that was visible through the dirt streaked glass. On
the desk in front of me were a pack of Luckies, a tumbler of neat rye and a
stack of bills.

I was going broke faster than usual. It can be like that
when youre Thebes, a Hi-fi detective working the highways and byways of a city
called Hope. For every well-healed up Towner with deep pockets and passion for
arcane stereo gear theres a dozen low-rent, low-lifes trying to find audio
nirvana on the cheap. Squeezing the
nickels out of the latter was my bread-and-butter, but sometimes the butters
turned and the breads gone stale.

I was relieved when the phone rang, maybe a client.

Hello Thebes, its Val.
Its been awhile

Those were the days, my friend, I said.

We thought theyd never end she replied remembering a
private joke we had shared.

I remembered Valerie all right. Jet-black luminescent hair worn short, angular face with high
cheek-bones, a long lean body with the right amount of curves and given to
wearing black hugger pants, stark white blouses, her neck usually covered with
a never ending parade of wild colored scarves.
Back then we were both just out of college and ran with the intellectual
crowd. Wed hit the art galleries and
rent-parties where wed swig cheap wine, pass a toke or two, recite the Beat
Poets and listen to jazz.

Smart, fun and so alive it hurt the senses. Of course I managed to blow it with her,
some youthful act of gross stupidity.

Her flame flared oh so briefly. Shed taken up with a smooth talking bartender with no class and
even less education. Theyd moved out
to the suburbs, that vast faceless compendium where the young went to breed and
the time-markers camped out spending there days on dreary hours of mind-numbing
traffic commuting to accumulate a pension and spend their declining days in
obscurity.

Something told me I had a case on my hands.

Its TC, she said.
(yeah that was the name of the clown shed fallen for) A few months ago
he bought a pair of beat up Klipschorns and some old vacuum tube equipment to
drive them. At first I thought, well
good its just a harmless hobby.
Trouble is he seemed to grow increasingly obsessed about making them
sound right. Pretty soon he was
spending all his waking hours down in the basement fiddling and tweaking. He hasnt been to work in weeks. Hell lose
his pension if he keeps it up. Youve
traveled the road less traveled, I just know youll help me out (coyly smiling)
for one night we suddenly went mad together again. You could tell she still
remembered her Kerouac

I already knew what she was dealing with. Klipschorns are the finest speakers ever
made. They are, however, as demanding of attention as a Hollywood starlet
working her way through the shops on Rodeo Drive. For those who got them right
theyd found what prophets and preachers had searched for all their lives. For the many who hadnt, insanity usually
ensued.

I knew Id need some help on this one so I made a call and
headed out to Vals house. A few wrinkles around the eyes and her hair had lost
its luster but shed traveled well and still looked fine to me. A few words and I was down in their basement
looking over the Khorns and trying to coax TC out of his fetal ball. I finally got him up and talking but it was
mostly gibberish. Wild-eyed, disheveled hair, he stank of an unwashed body and
too many tumblers of rye. You could
tell he hadnt eaten in awhile and his hands shook like those of an addict in
line at the methadone clinic.

His speakers were in similar shape. The bottom end was missing, the mids were
mediocre and the top end was as shrill as a Brooklyn housewife yelling at her
husband.

I fiddled and I fumed but was getting nowhere fast when The
Conductor arrived.

At least thats what the Society toffs called him. Down in the tenderloin he was known as Larry
the Mono. A silver-maned professorial
type his usual accoutrements were a silver walking stick, tuxedo and a flowing
black silk cape. We called him Mono
because sometime in the past hed lost the hearing in one ear in circumstances
that had never been revealed. Spare
with his words, you could almost watch the gears working his brain when faced
with an intellectual challenge. His
specialty was the hearing spectrum and his one ear was reputed to range higher
than a dog whistle.

He started us out with some god awful funeral dirge from
some massive pipe organ. Whats next, I
thought, bagpipes?

After a few minutes he stopped the music, reached inside his
cape and pulled out a screwdriver. But
not any screwdriver, this was some sort of baroque monstrosity covered with
gold and traced with little curlicues.
He handed it to TC and directed him to remove one of the terminals on
the crossover on one speaker only to another position. (The Conductor never was never known to
actually get his hands dirty or perform mechanical work)

Back went the funeral dirge but this time the bottom end was
of a whole and the midrange had started to display that wonderful luminescence
that is the glory of a Khorn. The top
end, however, still sounded like a factory steam whistle announcing lunchtime.

Hmm, mused The Conductor, the problem appears to be
around 5,500 megahertz. We must
experiment further.

Soon he had us placing covers over the tweeter sections of
the speaker, waving his silver cane like a baton to signal when to remove them.
This went on for some time until finally he motioned us to stop.

TC, was starting to recover and he stood there patiently
with only a small bit of drool running down his chin while The Conductor
considered the implications of his experimentation.

At last he turned to us and exclaimed: There is hope my
friends. There is a definite disconnect
where the mids and highs blend, the tweeter is running hot as the unlettered
might say, and if you follow my instructions to the letter your music will soon
be a coherent whole.

He then burst forth with a staccato of complex instructions
employing technical terms that left me gaping like a beached flounder. TC nodded his understanding and you could
see a glimmer of hope creeping into his eyes.

With a flash of his cape, The Conductor took his leave and I
stepped upstairs to assure Val that all would be well.

As I turned to leave she said :

or the
burden of life

is love,

but we carry the weight

wearily,

and so must rest

in the arms of love

at last,

Ginsberg I
thought. Well that time had passed for
us so I hit her with some Kerouac:

We
turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for
the last time.

Sometimes when you are a HiFi detective working the
alleyways and byways of a city called Hope, memories are you have.

I usually offer these small tales as an introduction to some
piece of gear or problem to be resolved.
In this case its a fellow member whose Khorns sounded quite shrill in
his room. TC had already done considerable
work regarding equipment; room treatments; tweeter and xover testing done by
our own Bob Crites; and numerous others things large and small. I had brought some different gear and a
different set of ears to the problem, and arranged to have him hear my Cornies
and LarryCs Khorns to assist him in his efforts. It wasnt until Larry came over for a listen that real progress
was made and Ill let both of them fill you in on the details. The problem is not completely solved and TC
rightfully feels that these should imagine as originally designed without
resorting to a new xover or changing out the drivers. So stay tuned.

[Mallette]

Alright, Thebes, yer goin down for this one. Yeah, I poked nose into yer office whilst youse with out with that Val hottie and found that stack of bills on yer desk. Robbin the ducks again, you sleazy gumshoe. Poor things dang near starved death trying to survive on strained bugs.

[thebes]

I tells ya Mal, an appropriated moniker if I'da ever hoird one, yea return the scratch dis minute an I mite letcha live.

As the above illustrates, sometimes when you're working a case, you're forced by circumstance to employ the local lingo, but usually with low-life grafters like Mallete I just drop them quick with a roll of nickels. They usually hit the bricks with a thud like a dropped sack of potatoes.

[Mallette]

No dice. Fer one thing, I done retoined those bills to the ducks, and theys mighty pleased to be off AFLAC and back on solid woems. Fer another, I ain't fergot the shelackin you gimme after yer buddy Klaude kopped the kopper kapicitors kept in the kloset klose to the Klipsh by Kim Keen. Fer another, yer trackin ain't worth an eight. Yuh comes down too hard and never seem to quite stay in the groove. Yer Auntie Skate is ashamed of you.

Anyways, duh ducks don't got no hard feelin's, neither do I.

[LarryC]

This was an interesting session. After hearing some bothersome CDs in which we agreed the highs sounded "piercing," I put on an organ CD (Bach's F-major toccata, E. Power Biggs) to hear how a uniform timbre sounded from the top through the bottom. It seemed apparent that some detail in the lower midrange and upper bass was being lost, suggesting that fundamentals were depressed in that range which would remove weight from the upper bass, and overtones from upper bass notes which would reduce their definition. There was, however, plenty of good, emphatic deeper bass.

Since TC had previously used the connections on Bob Crites' very flexible crossover to lower the squawker, we thought the squawker might now be too low, losing the upper bass notes and overtones while leaving the tweeter too strong by comparison. When he raised the squawker back up, the organ piece now sounded much more even throughout the musical range and we heard the more desired clarity from the upper bass. We also heard less exaggerated highs around the upper crossover point, which now sounded only hot instead of "piercing."

We tried to see whether the exaggerated highs came from the tweeter or the midrange by covering the tweeter mouths on both sides to just hear the midranges. However, the peak seemed to come just as much from the midrange. I guess that means it was from around the upper crossover point since it seemed to be shared by both upper drivers.

We also agreed per TC's next observation that the bass horns weren't producing bass like he expected -- when standing nearby, it almost seemed like the bass horns were playing only deep bass, while the speaker overall lacked fullness and richness. We felt there wasn't the expected reinforcement between the bass and mid horns when the ear was positioned between them, although it didn't sound exactly like they were out of phase with each other since the sound didn't seem to "jump" between them. As TC felt there was some uncertainty about the woofer phase markings, he reversed the leads to the bass bin. Bingo! The bass/lower mid-range notes were now full and mutually reinforced, which we felt was much more like the "Klipschorn sound."

That was as much as we could do -- and the highs were still too hot. It sounded like mostly the tweeter, but a repeat of the tweet-blocking test showed that it still came from the top of the midrange, too. Since it looked like the autoformer only controls the squawker, we speculated that a resistor or L-pad was needed to lower the tweeter. TC will ask Bob Crites for further advice.

I generated all this verbiage in case it will help someone. Any other suggestions for TC ?

Larry

[JohnA]

P-Trap?

[meagain]

Ha! It's that darned tail end of the squawker. Would bet big bucks on that for sure. I've been fighting that 6kish pierce for a year now.

Which squawker is this and are the crossovers an AA or similar genetics?

Fair warning.... my head will do a Linda Blair spin if someone suggests throwing different gear at this, or blaming the room.

[RFP]

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I was sitting in my office on a gray winter chilly day with low lying clouds about all that was visible through the dirt streaked glass. On the desk in front of me were a pack of Luckies, a tumbler of neat rye and a stack of bills.

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I was going broke faster than usual. It can be like that when youre Thebes, a Hi-fi detective working the highways and byways of a city called Hope. For every well-healed up Towner with deep pockets and passion for arcane stereo gear theres a dozen low-rent, low-lifes trying to find audio nirvana on the cheap. Squeezing the nickels out of the latter was my bread-and-butter, but sometimes the butters turned and the breads gone stale.

How delightfully "Kiellor-esque"... What a great post (& thread)... you guys are super!

Rob

[thebes]

Thanks RFP. We (that's the imperial WE you know) try to amuse. I just love those old Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler potboilers. Can't really do them justice, but it's still fun to try.

Meagain, Larry has commented to me privately that your recent discoveries seemed to be in line with what we are experiencing with TC's problems. He's started a new job this week so he may or may not have time to post.

I agree with you that the high end problem is not a room problem because it is still very much apparant at low volumes and up close where the room resonances really shouldn't be coming into play. Also we have thrown a variety of different gear both tube and SS at them with similiar results.

I know he has AA xovers but I can't recall the actual driver versions but I'll see if I can get that info for you.

As for that Mallette character. I can't believe he still standing. He's got a jaw harder than an blacksmith's anvil. I think I'll try a roll of quarters this time. Gotta go through my drawer. I think I got a leaded sap here somewhere.

[Mallette]

As for that Mallette character. I can't believe he still standing. He's got a jaw harder than an blacksmith's anvil. I think I'll try a roll of quarters this time. Gotta go through my drawer. I think I got a leaded sap here somewhere.

I coulda been a contenda...

Youse is Da Boss, Thebes. Extraordinary stuff. Personally, I am more of a fan of Regnad Kcin.

Dave

[Dax617]

It is true I did give up drinking and drooling but the bad hygiene remains.......

Big hand for these guys good story ,great job!

Thebes you have truely mastered the mundane and the unletterred

[LarryC]

TC, someone above asked which K-55 drivers (M, V, or what?) you have, and what breed of Crites crossover (AA?) and did you switch it to another varietal when we made the changes? Thanks --

[Dax617]

The mid horn is the standard k55 for 1972 khorns dampened. We listened to the AA configuration. I tried the A config for sometime after and did not prefer it.