klipsch speakers,be honest

Hey Fishboat - The closest experience I have with the Chorus speakers is with their smaler cousins, the Fortes. These speakers use the Tractrix horns and forward firing bass drivers, so are quite different from my LaScalas. I did enjoy the Fortes as great speakers for rockin' out. In a smaller room I wonder if the Chorus aren't giving you problems with bass-loading the room? They do put out a significant low end if they are anything like the Fortes. You may try fiddling with speaker position and room treatments to address that. Doesn't have to be proprietary treatments, you can use things like curtains, rugs and plants to help. The 'fatigue' I mentioned only happened with the ALK crossovers in a smaller room and had more to do with the mids and highs than the bass. Your Chorus speakers produced significantly lower bass than my Scalas do. As far as 'surgery' on the speakers themselves, without any direct experience I'd be at a loss to give you specific advice. From experience with many other Klipsch products of that era and earlier I'd guess swapping out the wiring harness with better wires and reinforcing the cabinets would be at the top of my list of where to start. But honestly I'd try addressing the room first if listening fatigue is the problem. As you know, I certainly do prefer tubes to SS with the vintage Klipsch products so I'm not at all surprised that step was, as you say, a significant improvement.

Marco

I think Klipsch got a bad rap from what is mentioned above. (Improper System Matching)In the audiophile community you will see brows wrinkle when Klipsch Speakers are brought up. Most of these opinions were formed hearing Klipsch speakers hooked up up to an Adcom Stack in a hi fi store or hearing a pair of Heresey Pros in a club being played ear bleedingly LOUD. I always hear people say, yea, those Klipsch sure are BRIGHT!

When paired with a tube amp and the right setup, they can sound great!

Jax,
The fatigue for me is the mid to top end of things. The horns seem to be in my face too much. The bass in the Fortes are lower than the Chorus, even though the Chorus runs a 15 inch woofer. The Chorus-I rolls off around 45 Hz(the Fortes go down to 32Hz). Actually the bass on the Chorus isn't that "big" unless their backs are against the wall & even then not large by any means.

Chorus I specs

I have played around with speaker placement & again this helped, but didn't eliminate the in your face aspect ("shouting" at me?) The room is fairly dead I think as it's carpeted and has too much (soon to go) over-stuffed furniture in it. I haven't done any room treatments yet as I'm just researching such things now. 3/4's of one wall is open above a half-wall to the kitchen. For comparison's sake...the Chorus were terrific on a very narrow slice of music styles (strings/harp/acoustics & female vocals) ..your El Cant De La Sibil La sounds wonderful...huge dynamics..however as soon as I switch to jazz..well..the speakers get shut down. Compare this to the Snells and, while the sound has a different 'feel' to it, all types of music sound very good & non-fatiguing. Soundstage & imaging has definitely improved..a lot...the speakers completely disappear. Bass is much better. Cymballs are smooth & shimmer...not 'loud' (as they were with the Chorus, even at lower volumes). All this with the Snells in the same room, basically the same position as the Chorus were (~5 feet off the back wall & ~3 feet off the side walls), and my listening position in the same place....though I've moved things around to sort of come back to where I started.

I picked up the Snell E-IV's as I got a good price on them & they were local. A friend has the CV Snells & they're very easy to listen to while sounding very good. With the new equipment I 'needed' something to listen to so I took a flyer on the E IV's. The Snells are not the end of the road by any means, but at least I have a nice-sounding and listenable system until I figure out what's next.

I may be looking for a different house before long. I figured I keep the Chorus as one never knows what type of room I'll get into & how they will sound. Naturally, if I can work through any well-found tweaks on them in the mean time, so much the better.

Fishboat - sounds like the Snell's are a better match overall for your system/room as it stands now. I don't have any experience with Snells, so can't comment beyond that as far as comparisons go. I would've thought the Chorus put out more bass than the Forte's from their larger size. Don't they also have the passive woofer firing to the rear (as do the Fortes)? The Fortes would not be my choice for the music I love most (acoustic, vocals, strings, small-scale classical arrangements). The larger Klipsch speakers that Paul designed have a more 'refined' sound to my ear, which comes out mostly in the midrange. The newer designs using the Tractrix horn and large, forward-firing woofers are more of a rockin' out speaker IMO, and I've moved on from that kind of music to where it is only a very small portion of what I enjoy. I believe their current designs use similar architecture, the few of those I've heard have not impressed me at all. Again, no direct experience with the Chorus to share. Perhaps Sean can be of some help here (?).

Marco

My experiences with anything but the "vintage" Klipsch models is less than enthusiastic and even the "vintage" models need a LOT of help in my opinion.

The main things that the "vintage" models have going for them is that they are very simple designs that utilize sealed cabinets, which are almost "fool proof" in terms of working with. The newer models utilize lower grade parts in the crossovers and you have to deal with the various bass alignments used in a vented design.

As a side note, the older models weren't so much "bright" as they were "ringy" due to the metal horns resonating like mad. The newer models ARE "bright" and the plastic horn bodies tend to have a very specific albeit "forward" upper midrange sound to them. On top of that, the passive radiators are tuned to produce a large peak in the bass, which reduces transient response and definition. In effect, you end up with a speaker that is bloated on the bottom, thick in the warmth region, forward in the mids and piercing in the treble. In effect, you ended up with a Klipsch speaker that sounded more like a Cerwin-Vega. Both are LOUDspeakers that can rock & roll, but lack any type of finesse and refinement. When driven hard, these newer speakers just sound flat out "abrasive" to me. How do you fix this? It's called a LOT of work.

Probably the easiest things to do that are completely reversible would be to buy a bag or two of polyester fiberfil at your local Wal-Mart ( $2 per bag ) and play with the amount of stuffing in each cabinet. By varying the density of stuffing within the cabinet, you can fine tune the bass response to your liking. Just make sure that any stuffing that you add to the box does NOT interfere with the movement of any of the drivers.

The next thing to do would be to cover the baffle area surrounding the horns with felt. You can pick up enough felt and some "temporary double sided hem tape" at your local fabric shop for about $10. Not only will this help to tame the peaky response of the upper mids and treble region, imaging should improve. You might end up losing a bit of the "snap" or "jump factor" on horns and / or cymbals, so experiment with how much felt you use.

Personally, i would probably felt the entire baffle on these myself, but others may find this to sound TOO subdued. I know that at least one guy posted over on AA that Heresy's as modified as i suggested ended up sounding "dark" to him. Then again, he was used to years and years worth of "ringing" in his system and going to a more natural, less resonant presentation may have sounded "flat & dull" to him. That's why i said start with the simple and easily reversible stuff for now and see how you like the initial results.

As to the ALK crossovers, i've never used them but i have seen them. They make use of Solen cap's, which are not bad so long as you keep the leads as short as possible and damp them where they enter the body of the cap. Something along the lines of "blu-tak" or "fun-tak" can work wonders here. If you don't do this, the caps will ring and sound bright. The cap bodies themselves are so lightweight that the solid core metal leads become microphonic, causing the cap body to resonate. By damping the leads where they enter the body of the cap, you damp & decouple any ringing that the lead picks up before it can excite the body of the cap. If you doubt this, hold a Solen ( or other similar cap ) at he far end of one lead with your fingertips and "flick" the other lead with your finger. You won't believe how much and how long the cap vibrates once you "flick" the leg. Nor will you believe how loud the leg rings. In this respect, the original Klipsch's used paper in oil caps, which are somewhat self-damping to begin with. In this respect, the stock caps aren't bad in the older models and may sound more natural than newer caps that are poorly implimented.

The ALK's also make use of Solen Litz wound coils which are of a stranded design. Personally, i think that stranded wire is typically a step backwards in performance from a well chosen solid wire or a foil conductor. This is strictly a matter of personal preference though and some would debate the viability and cost effectiveness of other approaches.

As a side note, Audio Xpress had a recent article about the ElectroVoice T35 tweeters as used in the vintage Klipsch models. In this article, they show graphs and response curves of this tweeter, demonstrating how limited in bandwidth it really was and that it had a noticeable peak at appr 11 - 12 KHz falling off rapidly above that.

The author of the article ended up replacing his T35's as found in his K-Horns with some JBL's and the differences were like night and day according to what was published. I would not doubt that Marco's Fane swap provided much the same type of results. Personally, I'm using some $6 tweeters that are easily superior to the EV's in every way, shape and form. Only problem is, these $6 tweeters are now discontinued :( Sean
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PS... You guys aren't helping me any. I'm trying to stay off of the forums and get some other things done!!!