Want to mod Heresy 3 - need information

[salavat]

Your points are well taken - you are absolutely right - there is no ground to compare the result, that is very good reason to play H3 before modding.

I see 2 things - either I like the sound with no desire to change it or I will have an impression to compare with.

Your experience with silver wire is valuable too... Now I am biased again )))))

[colterphoto1]

[] [Y]

[Steve.]

My daughter cranked the volume on my system and cooked a midrange and tweeter on my Heresy III.      I replaced both mid diaphrams with Klipsch replacements and replaced both tweeter diaphrams with Crites Ti diaphrams.   They sound great.

[Budman]

6 hours ago, Steve. said:

My daughter cranked the volume on my system and cooked a midrange and tweeter on my Heresy III.      I replaced both mid diaphrams with Klipsch replacements and replaced both tweeter diaphrams with Crites Ti diaphrams.   They sound great.

does your audio system ( avr ) have the ability to set the max volume to say 90-100 db on the spl meter ?

i have all mine set to start up at 50db and max out at 100db

 

[moray james]

Salavat your H3 may have problems of greater concern than the hook up wire. as a momentary aside why would you assume that Klipsch did not listen to the wire and caps that they use? just because the parts are inexpensive does not men that they are crap and that they did not bother to listen to them.

   The H3 had (in my experience of working on two pairs) a build problem with poor to very bad glue lines on the cabinet joints. The poor joints results in resonances and in air leaks the cabinet has zero reinforcement. with the cabinet flat on the floor (risers off) you could lean down on the front top edge of the cabinet and watch the top bow down til it made contact with the top edge of the baffle, this on all four that I had at the time. Take a look at my thread on the brace work that I did on two sets of H3 cabinets at the link below. They may not all be like this but it is a good thing to check for. I did a lot of other work on the speakers over a two year period but this is where I started.

http://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/heresy-3-brace-work.438234/#post-6652105

[Dave A]

I'm with the don't do anything crowd until the warranty is over. You want to tinker buy vintage and play away. If the sound was good enough to make you buy new when did it deteriorate to the point you now want to "fix" it?

[Panelhead]

  I have thought about modding my Klipsch speakers. The new versions are very well voiced. Not sure they will be “improved” with caps and wire. 

  For caps forget Electrolytics or similar type such as Black Gate or Cerafine. A nice film and foil are the ticket. I like tin foil, some prefer copper. For less money there is aluminum. For cost is no object there are silver foil caps. The caps in your speakers most likely are metalized film.

  For wire, that would be easy. Magico uses Canare Star Quad to internally wire their loudspeakers. It is what I use for speaker wire, as a bi-wire set not as Star Quad. I think the 4S6 would be perfect for tweeter and mids. May be enough for woofer too.

  But mine are staying stock for now. Never opened up to look inside. 

  Moray’s comments on HIII cabinets is interesting. They look very solid from the outside.

[Tony Whitlow]

My Heresys are 40 years old and still sound pristine. Wire is wire. It passes current not sound. Any “ improvement” in sound quality from expensive designer wire is purely psychoacoustical.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[moray james]

37 minutes ago, Tony Whitlow said:

My Heresys are 40 years old and still sound pristine. Wire is wire. It passes current not sound. Any “ improvement” in sound quality from expensive designer wire is purely psychoacoustical.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

if we followed non logic like this then we would be in a mess. We might follow this terrible logic to all resistors sound the same, all capacitors sound the same and on forever into the dark.

   If I built you two identical tweeter voice coils one 34 gage copper wound one 34 gage aluminum wound I don't imagine you would need to listen to them to know that there was going to be a difference or even to guess what that would be. Just because you cannot see a difference or imagine one it does not mean a differences does not exist.

 

[wuzzzer]

@moray james, et al, this thread is over 10 years old and the OP hasn't visited the site since then.

[cincymat]

5 minutes ago, wuzzzer said:

@moray james, et al, this thread is over 10 years old and the OP hasn't visited the site since then.

Yep, wonder how the experiment he embarked upon panned out? 

 

Love my HIII's straight from the box. 

 

Bye from the way back machine.....err thread 

[moray james]

17 hours ago, wuzzzer said:

@moray james, et al, this thread is over 10 years old and the OP hasn't visited the site since then.

you read it! I read it too. Just because it's old does not mean that the content is any less relevant today. Messed up thinking persists unless you try to correct it. Not challenging things is how we get stuck going around in circles.

[Panelhead]

  With the evolution seen in crossovers even in the iii series of speakers, has the cabinet issue been addressed by the Factory?

  If the plinth was coming loose, Klipsch would look at construction and make changes to eliminate. They are committed to building quality products. 

  Need to look inside my pair. They seem to be rock solid. They are also recent builds, not early production Heresy iii.

[moray james]

I don't believe there is any real problem with cabinet construction I think rather this was/is simply a case where the application of adhesive was not being watched properly and some got built with little to in some cases close to no adhesive in all the joints. I can see this happening unfortunate but worth your time to check. The brace work I did eliminates this as a problem both from a structural and air tight point of view. It never hurts to check which is why I mention this.

[helomech]

This seemed like possibly the best thread to post this. 

 

I recently damped the midhorns of my H-IIIs at the recommendation of a Klipsch modder who swears by this tweak. It basically involves wrapping the midhorn in constrained layer bitumen sheets (think Dynamat). I used Stinger Roadkill brand, as back in my mobile audio days, I found its performance superior.

I do notice a slight improvement but it's not nearly as dramatic as was alleged by that member. 

 

Before I catch flak for modding these speakers, please understand that I did so only because over the last 1.5 years, I've begun to detect some consistent weaknesses. Most notable of these is a coloration/chestiness to the midrange and vocals. These are $2K speakers after all, and in stock form, can't match the midrange clarity or refinement of the ~$3K^ speakers I've owned/auditioned. For example, my $3300 retail JMR Bliss Silvers trounce my H-IIIs in midrange refinement. So I figured the midhorn damping might improve this some - it has, but it's not a massive difference - definitely a slight improvement in lyric delineation and decay.

 

If anyone else here has tried this mod or similar mods, I'm interested in your feedback. I think these speakers can be taken a bit further but I'm not prepared to start swapping out drivers and such. 

Edited December 25, 2018 by helomech

[wuzzzer]

Do you have them on the floor or on stands?  Amplification?  Source?