In my previous post on this thread I called my Bill Fitzmaurice designed bass horns 25Hz 1/8 wave corner horns. They are instead 25Hz 1/4 wave horns. Just a brain fart I suppose. I wish we could edit posts on this forum.
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I have owned the Klipsch rf7 3s while its not the best/most high end horn speakers, they are still modern and come from a renowned horn speaker specialist company I would have to say that for music they are some of the worst sounding speakers I have EVER heard in my life. extremely fatiguing and bright + high noise. HARSH is the best word to describe them. what's sad is that I've read they are some of the most balanced speakers Klipsch has. Which should mean that they play all music well but thats simply not the case. living up to klipsch reputation they are better with alternative/rock and quite terrible with many genres honestly, listening to music in my car, heck even with cheap headphones is much more enjoyable I have tried many things to make them more acceptable sounding including using a high end dac costing many times more than the speakers. I even used speaker cables costing more than the speakers themselves. The upgraded cables helped improve the sound quite a bit. I even tired using a power conditioner (synergistic uef 12se with upgraded Galileo sx power cord- to lower noise floor and help clean things up. There is nothing that will make these sound good. I am using different speakers in the same room with significantly better results. I am now using the klipsch for home theater which them seem perfect for. They are good speakers overall, but just not for music It's safe to say that after this experience i literally hate horn speakers and I'm permanently dissuaded from ever looking at any pair regardless of price |
My tech geek also forwarned me to avoid Klipsche horns. He also gave me 2 thumbs down on a horn system. So thats thats. Stickin with my WBer things. I have zero complaints about my WBers. Every speaker/design has +'s and then the =-'s. My WBers have no _'s, unless you want to make 20hz-40hz a requirement and 12khz+++ a requisite. Then thats 2 strikes. I hear them as Grand Slamers. 1st pitch. |
I had been happy with Lansche 4.1 since 2006 . Recently, I got Altec A7. It is surprisingly good. You can get a glimpse of the sound of its horn through linked Youtube videos. https://youtu.be/4L42N2Qdhqs https://youtu.be/uE1eFKG6RCU https://youtu.be/OmITNM6a9Q8 https://youtu.be/TAWqNpfjaG0 Thomas |
My apologies this post is way to long but you asked. This question fits me to a tee. Assumptions I've held for over forty years have been upended, stomped on and proven wrong. I was a died in the wool sealed 3 way speaker guy using only a soft dome tweeter. ADS L1290II. using a DSP to Bi_Amp them I was pushing over thee hundred watts of class AB power per side. Then on my second system I Bi-Amped using two Dynaco ST-70s powering Dahlquist DQ12 speakers. They were open and spacious with a very good presentation. I preferred the spaciousness provided by moving the midrange out of the box. The ADS had a much better frequency response but they didn't sound realistic compared to the Dahlquist. My listening area currently is huge and a very unique space. Basically the room is an open L shape with a staircase bisecting the bottom of the L and the listening area provides minimal parallel walls. From the corner to the half wall for the staircase is about 18ft and my sitting location is approximately 10ft from the front wall but the long part of the L is almost thirty feet. I purchased a SET amp and it sat in the box unopened for over a year. Because of the Dahlquist I was planning on building some open baffles for it but wasn't sure If they could fill the space with only two watts. I went and listened to the MOABS and while they sounded great they were just to big. What I realized was that while corner horns are big they don't really intrude into the living space. I found a used pair of Speaker Lab SK corner horns planning on using them as bass boxes for my open baffle speakers until I hooked them up. Holy crap. I had finally after forty years moved from midf-i to HI-FI. The sound first reminded me of the movie theaters of my youth. It was huge, detailed and deep. The most amazing part is that they sounded great anywhere in the space. I added a 12 inch sealed subwoofer for no other reason in that I had one and now the bass goes really deep. With 2 watts I can pressurize the whole space and it's so clean and clear that I don't realize how loud it's playing until I pause it and then come back to it I've listened to some pretty good stereos and nothing has impacted me the way these corner horns have in this space. The limiting factor now is my source, cables and crossovers. It just doesn't compare to the sound of a $15,000 turntable with thousands of dollars of cables but saying that it is totally satisfying. I have less invested in my current system than some of you have in a single power cord. There is no reason that it should sound this good... but it does. I would recommend horns now something a year ago I would never consider. Live and learn. Don't even ask me about power cables. |
I do find it amusing that people buy a cheap loudspeaker with a horn tweeter and then pronounce that they hate horns forever. Since they didn't even have a horn speaker in the 1st place just a horn driver and an extremely small sample rate to pronounce all horns bad. So to horn or not to horn sure horn but go fully horn-loaded or your not hearing what such systems are capable of. And not to horn if you just to buy some cheap speaker with a semi-horn tweeter. |