Steve
It is an old problem, covering everything with sound absorption just makes a space too dead for good sound. Because the absorption drops off as the sound wavelengths get longer you get a boomy mushy sound.
A good sounding space will have well dispersed absorption in moderation.
Perhaps most importantly a real audiophile would never go for the fake stuff and if the real stuff got wet, that would become smell-o-vision. And there are few things real audiophiles look down upon more than audio for video systems.
E.S.
P.S. I am getting too bored it is inventory counting week.
"The Klipschorn is the only speaker in the world that has been in continuous production, relatively unchanged, for over 60 years." wiki
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Hi John,
Go ahead and teach. Just leave personal comments out of it.
The fact that you interacted with him in 1965 doesn't mean you really do know what the man was thinking. The fact that you identified the speakers as cheap and stiff coned shows you are not aware of what the product is like. If you want to throw stones, just look at all the other speakers sold in 1965. I'm sure that they have all changed, strongly for the better. What were your designs like in 1965? I'll bet pretty bad compared to your current work. Point made?
I have a wall of various boxed Klipsch drivers that I'll use here and there. Most of them have modern cone materials and compliant suspensions. The later products are largely bass reflex, but the older products that are still similar to the original plans are the variety you described. But then these are very old designs. The boxes suit the drivers, and isn't that what matters?
So, do you want to knock one line and it's designer, or are you going to talk about the subject of horn loaded designs? There is a difference between the two.
Attack the idea, not the person. Chris
Go ahead and teach. Just leave personal comments out of it.
The fact that you interacted with him in 1965 doesn't mean you really do know what the man was thinking. The fact that you identified the speakers as cheap and stiff coned shows you are not aware of what the product is like. If you want to throw stones, just look at all the other speakers sold in 1965. I'm sure that they have all changed, strongly for the better. What were your designs like in 1965? I'll bet pretty bad compared to your current work. Point made?
I have a wall of various boxed Klipsch drivers that I'll use here and there. Most of them have modern cone materials and compliant suspensions. The later products are largely bass reflex, but the older products that are still similar to the original plans are the variety you described. But then these are very old designs. The boxes suit the drivers, and isn't that what matters?
So, do you want to knock one line and it's designer, or are you going to talk about the subject of horn loaded designs? There is a difference between the two.
Attack the idea, not the person. Chris
Measure their THROW! Compare it with a JBL pro loudspeaker. Then we can talk together. Personally, I defended Paul Klipsch for more than a decade after John Meyer completely dissed him. In fact, I had a photo of Paul Klipsch in my office in Switzerland in 1974-5, with 'MY HERO!' written underneath. This was to offset John Meyer, who was on the other side of the argument. I kept my Klipsch's until 1980, when I sold them to good friend at cost. Even today, the very same K-horns are owned by my business partner, and available to me on occasion, to try, and I do.
For the record, I found, after almost 1 year of A-B preference tests, that I preferred a small direct radiator loudspeaker with a sub-woofer, in preference to K-horns, in a smallish room, typical of an apartment. This is when I switched to Rogers LS3-5A's and sub-woofers. Later, after other small 2 way speakers + sub, I settled with WATT's with a sub, and that is what I use today.
I'm the one who first said here that Klipsch used cheap drivers. JC merely agreed. But I didn't make it up, here's where I got it from;
HARTSFIELD
"While there had been some criticism of the Klipschorn in its use of mass market drive units and an insufficiently rigid cabinet, there would be no such compromises with the Hartsfield."
"The Hartsfield would incorporate the highest quality drivers in JBL's inventory - the 085 kit consisting of the 150-4C bass driver and the 375 high frequency compression driver. Both units had been originally designed for professional use in theatre speakers."
Personally I'm no fan of horn speakers. Take it for what it's worth, if you are interested in the history of this industry, the Lansing Heritage site is a good read IMO.
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Hi Soundminded,
You aren't relying on that site as a source of factual information where a competing brand is concerned, are you? There's folly for you!
Look at facts in the speaker business. Most smaller brands do not make their own drivers. the best you can expect to see is a modified version of one sold to consumers. These will be of higher quality than contract drivers can be. Larger manufacturers may "design" their driver by picking out the components such as surrounds, cones, spiders and voice coils. Some older (experienced) people in the business can look at customer specifications and pick these components out and be in the ballpark most of the time. In the darker days (Like RSC, Radio Speakers of Canada and others), the specs were not the result of knowledgeable design efforts. Very often, cost was an overriding concern with appearance running a close tie. Nothing else mattered. So this is what that web site is accusing Klipsch of, and John decided to endorse this idea also. Now there's a person who knows better!
Still larger manufacturers actually hire engineers, create labs and assembly lines with QC stations. They build their own drivers and often will not release the specs for these. These are actually engineered to deliver the performance required at an expected power level and failure rate - and no more. This would be someone like JBL, Altec, EV and the like.
These days, much work is designed and handed off to contract manufacturing in China. The two highest quality speaker plants in the world exist there - to the best of my knowledge. They can produce anything from pure scrap (they leave that to other plants) to world renowned speakers. They create the drivers, crossovers (and probably plate amps) to enclosures.
Back in the "bad ole days", quality was highly variable without good QC. Better manufacturers handled their own QC and production, but all you needed to design and build drivers was about 2,400 sq feet or so. I've been into some of these places and you wouldn't believe how little is needed. The better builders have clean plants and assembly areas.
I can't say where Klipsch actually (for real) got their drivers, or if they made them in house. I can say that they were well beyond the average driver found in a speaker brand. The comments made on the site you pointed to are cleverly "hear-say", although this would be known as all industries are pretty small worlds. I have personally seen and held some garbage JBL drivers as well. They are one company that shouldn't make too much in the way of accusations over quality!
What you repeated is questionable. John has knowledge beyond what you have read and should know better.
My concern is simply, doing a hatchet job on one company (undeserved) or person isn't ethical. Especially in the guise of a discussion about one type of speaker design. The design can be examined with references that does not involve anyone or any one company.
BTW, I do not care for horn loaded speakers and I don't own any complete Klipsch product either. I am not defending anything for personal interest either as I did warranty for several different speaker brands as well. If there is something that can be proved that comes up in the course of this discussion, then fine. Otherwise it's best to keep accusations to yourself. Pay attention to your source of information also!
I do have the opinion that the current and recently past non-horn cabinets Klipsch produces would make great home theater systems. For those who just have to know, I personally use PSB Stratus Gold for both the music room and home theater (such as it is), and I'm pretty happy with them. That's two sets of Stratus Gold speakers in different rooms. Paul Barton did a decent job on these.
-Chris
You aren't relying on that site as a source of factual information where a competing brand is concerned, are you? There's folly for you!
Look at facts in the speaker business. Most smaller brands do not make their own drivers. the best you can expect to see is a modified version of one sold to consumers. These will be of higher quality than contract drivers can be. Larger manufacturers may "design" their driver by picking out the components such as surrounds, cones, spiders and voice coils. Some older (experienced) people in the business can look at customer specifications and pick these components out and be in the ballpark most of the time. In the darker days (Like RSC, Radio Speakers of Canada and others), the specs were not the result of knowledgeable design efforts. Very often, cost was an overriding concern with appearance running a close tie. Nothing else mattered. So this is what that web site is accusing Klipsch of, and John decided to endorse this idea also. Now there's a person who knows better!
Still larger manufacturers actually hire engineers, create labs and assembly lines with QC stations. They build their own drivers and often will not release the specs for these. These are actually engineered to deliver the performance required at an expected power level and failure rate - and no more. This would be someone like JBL, Altec, EV and the like.
These days, much work is designed and handed off to contract manufacturing in China. The two highest quality speaker plants in the world exist there - to the best of my knowledge. They can produce anything from pure scrap (they leave that to other plants) to world renowned speakers. They create the drivers, crossovers (and probably plate amps) to enclosures.
Back in the "bad ole days", quality was highly variable without good QC. Better manufacturers handled their own QC and production, but all you needed to design and build drivers was about 2,400 sq feet or so. I've been into some of these places and you wouldn't believe how little is needed. The better builders have clean plants and assembly areas.
I can't say where Klipsch actually (for real) got their drivers, or if they made them in house. I can say that they were well beyond the average driver found in a speaker brand. The comments made on the site you pointed to are cleverly "hear-say", although this would be known as all industries are pretty small worlds. I have personally seen and held some garbage JBL drivers as well. They are one company that shouldn't make too much in the way of accusations over quality!
What you repeated is questionable. John has knowledge beyond what you have read and should know better.
My concern is simply, doing a hatchet job on one company (undeserved) or person isn't ethical. Especially in the guise of a discussion about one type of speaker design. The design can be examined with references that does not involve anyone or any one company.
BTW, I do not care for horn loaded speakers and I don't own any complete Klipsch product either. I am not defending anything for personal interest either as I did warranty for several different speaker brands as well. If there is something that can be proved that comes up in the course of this discussion, then fine. Otherwise it's best to keep accusations to yourself. Pay attention to your source of information also!
I do have the opinion that the current and recently past non-horn cabinets Klipsch produces would make great home theater systems. For those who just have to know, I personally use PSB Stratus Gold for both the music room and home theater (such as it is), and I'm pretty happy with them. That's two sets of Stratus Gold speakers in different rooms. Paul Barton did a decent job on these.
-Chris
It's an old shaggy dog story how a bunch of guys at MIT got hold of a trailer full of CTS "Bose" QC reject drivers and tried to sell clones. They were cheap, very cheap. I prefered my David B. Weems wild woofer.
"the driver excursion operates with 1/f rather than 1/f(squared) and the speaker does not have to move as much at low frequencies."
To move the same amount of air, a driver, any driver of a given diameter will have to move the same distance as another of the same effective piston diameter. Cubic inches is cubic inches. If the sound of one speaker is focused in a narrower beam, the same displacement will generate higher SPLs than one that has more effective dispersion. The horn loading focuses the beam. It doesn't matter what the electrical to mechanical efficiency is. The only way around it is to design a speaker that makes use of both the back and front pressure wave such as by inverting the phase of the back pressue wave as in a bass reflex design. In theory, you could gain up to 3 db in efficiency if none of the back pressure energy is absorbed by the cabinet. The same holds true for tweeters where dispersion is a major issue.
You told me you were snookered by AR for a long time. Then by Paul Klipsch for a long time. But you don't like it or accept that people like me don't believe your implausible explanations to rationalize your opinions Mr. Curl. Fermi velocity of electrons? Pleeeze, at least come up with a better story, don't insult my intellegence...or are you just having a little fun at our expense?
Honestly, build Salas' Simplistic RIAA if you can HONESTLY tell it over a Blowtorch then get out your snowblower.
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