Klipsh KG4

[laatsch55]

Hmmmm.....

 

[pennysdad]

Power Tools porn.... Ya gotta luv it!

 

[premiumplus]

Great job, getting that black paint off. I can't figure out why people cover great looking wood with paint. But I digress...
I had a pair of KG-4s for a few years and never really bonded with them. The best they ever sounded was out on my deck, in the open air. I had 'em out there last summer for a couple of parties and WOW. Given room to breathe those things took off. Mine were stock with the exception of better capacitors in the crossovers. I think it's the horns that got me. You either love 'em or hate 'em, like someone said earlier. For me, they were too "In your face" when I had them in my listening areas. Outside was a different story. The horns seem to open up and were not at all beamy. Really sounded nice. I always did enjoy the bottom end on the KG-4s. Nice and tight like a great ass should be.
Those are gonna look really nice when you get a coat of sealer on them. Congrats!

 

[pennysdad]

Yep, I agree. having horns so close to u can be a bit in ya face...
but ya know, u can fool round with placement etc etc... they don't have to point right at u. plus u can fool around with some cardboard and redirect the horns so there's some reflection off the walls to help widen the spread or soundstage.
I've tried lots of fooling around with reflecting horns, and sometimes it works and sometimes it don't. hell, i've even stuffed socks down there to cut the barking.... but then, u usually have to add some tweets then to make up for some of the high highs...
wot ur speaker does is only relevant to ur sitting position. forget about all the specs when it comes to coverage and frequency responses when ur off axis, coz in a nutshell, none of that matters when ur just sitting there right in the middle of it all lapping it up, coz at a certain point in the volume, it just comes together.

 

[premiumplus]

Agreed, and I think it all comes down to how the speakers react with the room they're in. The room really becomes an extension of the speaker.

 

[pennysdad]

Agreed, and I think it all comes down to how the speakers react with the room they're in. The room really becomes an extension of the speaker.

... yes, that goes without saying. no amount of room treatment, without totally killing the room will separate the two.
the only way to hear the true speaker is in the middle of a field....
sometimes, when horns are bit overpowering, it helps to try and tilt the whole thing back and try and focus them just a little above ur head. that works great, until you stand up, then u end up thinking, .... damn that doesn't sound too bad either, and u end up dropping 'em back down again. sometimes u just can't win.
but that's half the fun of it.... LoL

 

[Master Tasuke]

at my local privately owned pet shop (one of the very last in the area) the owner (i presume) has a nice little solid Hi-Fi rig
perched atop a wall of reptile aquariums set into a wooden casework. it is an ADCOM power amp, with a KENWOOD receiver
running into it (for TUNER functions, i presume) driving a pair of KLIPSCH that look very much like the subject matter of this thread,
but are more tall/narrow than these. i assume, from their looks, -wasn't able to pull the grilles- that they are probably CHORUSes.

then again, it seems KLIPSCH had a very specific styling that at least several models in their line shared generally in the mad/late 1980's.

one thing for sure; if that rig ever actually gets used, that pet shop probably get's it's shit totally rocked...

 

[laatsch55]

... yes, that goes without saying. no amount of room treatment, without totally killing the room will separate the two.
the only way to hear the true speaker is in the middle of a field....
sometimes, when horns are bit overpowering, it helps to try and tilt the whole thing back and try and focus them just a little above ur head. that works great, until you stand up, then u end up thinking, .... damn that doesn't sound too bad either, and u end up dropping 'em back down again. sometimes u just can't win.
but that's half the fun of it.... LoL

I don't find myself wantin to move my K's much....what makes or breaks a horn loaded system is the mid-horns.. and in that regard , for the levels I prefer thre is no choice but to spend a lot of money on mid drivers and wood horns. A bad one will drove you from the room, a really good one will keep you glued to your seat....it's that simple...

 

[pennysdad]

I don't find myself wantin to move my K's much....what makes or breaks a horn loaded system is the mid-horns.. and in that regard , for the levels I prefer thre is no choice but to spend a lot of money on mid drivers and wood horns. A bad one will drove you from the room, a really good one will keep you glued to your seat....it's that simple...

it doesn't apply with K's simply because they're so well balanced and impose their own sound on u.
with smaller units, they are so much more influenced by their surrounding, and then things start get thrown out of whack.
a good trick with smaller boxes is to separate the horn from the box, and then start playing with physical time alignment simply by placement of the horn relevant to the vertical plane of the front baffle. Sometimes it fixes things, and doesn't cost anything to try.

I got wood, metal, plastic, fibreglass etc horns, and even though i can match 'em to boxes, and pink noise 'em, no one can say that each system, although identically tuned, all sound the same. it's how they react with the room, that makes the difference.

.... and sometimes when people say that the horns are too overpowering, it can mean that the rest of the system isn't up to them. the beauty of bi-amping resolves that.

 

[laatsch55]

True , BUT the quality of the driver and construction of the horn itself can still be responsble for making a mad dash for the door.....but when it's right....it is SOOOOOOOOO good.

BD, with Tim's Soniphase he built the mid and tweet stack identical to the K's mid and tweet stack. The bass bins are front firing folded horns. We've left the tops unattached and move those in/out and tolt up/down and mess with the angle of the faces quite a bit and the sound can be manipulated a bunch. And like ya say, one day it sounds good and other days it don't. We used the same crossover as the K's and that wasn't exactly what it needed either. The Soni's have an 8 ohm EVX-155, the K's a 4 ohm Crites 1526S.. After talking with Joe because the EVX didn't sound right to our ears it was determined that the inductor for the 8 ohm EV's had to be doubled from the 4 ohm Crites. The new inductors have been shippe and shoulkd get em in a week or so...

 

[pennysdad]

True , BUT the quality of the driver and construction of the horn itself can still be responsble for making a mad dash for the door.....but when it's right....it is SOOOOOOOOO good.

BD, with Tim's Soniphase he built the mid and tweet stack identical to the K's mid and tweet stack. The bass bins are front firing folded horns. We've left the tops unattached and move those in/out and tolt up/down and mess with the angle of the faces quite a bit and the sound can be manipulated a bunch. And like ya say, one day it sounds good and other days it don't. We used the same crossover as the K's and that wasn't exactly what it needed either. The Soni's have an 8 ohm EVX-155, the K's a 4 ohm Crites 1526S.. After talking with Joe because the EVX didn't sound right to our ears it was determined that the inductor for the 8 ohm EV's had to be doubled from the 4 ohm Crites. The new inductors have been shippe and shoulkd get em in a week or so...

Well that's obviously going to make a difference. keep me tuned in for further developments.
Sometimes when i can't hear wot i want, i just stick on a pair of headphones for a while and re-boot my hearing, then start again. works for me! LoL....

... and as far as quality of drivers and horns is concerned, i never deal with rubbish so i don't know about the 'other' brands. JBL, born and bred. .... but now getting used to NEXO Line Arrays... heh heh heh....

 

[laatsch55]

Well it wasn't obvious to me that you needed a different inductor for an 8 ohm woof compared to a 4 ohm woof. That's how little i know about speaks and crosses.

Went to another concert at Red Rocks, the had the Nexo horn array up as the first ones. The bass bins were not as good as Shpongle , and not near enough of them. I gotta say those Nexo's are amazing...

 

[pennysdad]

Well it wasn't obvious to me that you needed a different inductor for an 8 ohm woof compared to a 4 ohm woof. That's how little i know about speaks and crosses.

Went to another concert at Red Rocks, the had the Nexo horn array up as the first ones. The bass bins were not as good as Shpongle , and not near enough of them. I gotta say those Nexo's are amazing...

i've ripped a couple of 'em apart, and i'm thinking of putting together mini ones for home from some scraps i got lying about.
need a couple of poles to hold 'em up, and get the curved loading that they need to work, coz i just can't see myself flying 'em from my ceiling somehow. i figure i can shrink it down to about 2 metres high.

 

[laatsch55]

So ...what are they actually made of??

 

[premiumplus]

I don't find myself wantin to move my K's much....what makes or breaks a horn loaded system is the mid-horns.. and in that regard , for the levels I prefer thre is no choice but to spend a lot of money on mid drivers and wood horns. A bad one will drove you from the room, a really good one will keep you glued to your seat....it's that simple...

That is a great point, I guess I've never heard (in a home system) a really, really good horn system. I did hear a pair of K's in a high end store about 15 years ago, with Levinson mono block amps. I forget what the source was, but I recall being unimpressed. Especially for $35K mono block amps, wired to 220 volt mains. I remember thinking that they had really blown it when they set the system up, because the K's were NOT in a corner. The mids were crashing through and everything was unbalanced. The bass sucked.
The only other K's I've heard was at a party 35 years ago, and I can't remember what the system consisted of, but I remember that I was very, very impressed with it. Those were in the corners, by the way.
I guess I prefer standard (non-horn) drivers because they're more forgiving. I think my DQ-10 system sounds ideal, because when the music is IN-YOUR-FACE that's what they deliver. Grab your seat, in your face. But they image so well, and there isn't any beaming of any frequencies. They are balanced IN MY ROOM. In your room, they might suck.
The KG-4 speakers I had absolutely rocked out in open air. They had room to breathe, and they sounded very, very good. I remember thinking how I wish I could have gotten them to sound that good inside. Now I've got that kind of performance in spades with the DQ-10 speakers augmented with two Dahlquist low frequency modules, driven by 2KW of WOPL glory. Took a while, but my listening room finally gave in and it sounds just the way I want it to now. And that's what this wonderful hobby is all about, right?

 

[pennysdad]

So ...what are they actually made of??

plastic, with a pair of 8" speakers firing forward (and one firing backwards to cancel out rear radiation and so feedback on stage when the front pa sound couples with the onstage monitor sounds), with a small horn between the two forward firing ones.
nothing special.
it's wot they gain by being a line (array) that makes 'em couple and so increasing the spl.

just found out they're actually made of birch! could've sworn they were plastic....

 

[laatsch55]

That is a great point, I guess I've never heard (in a home system) a really, really good horn system. I did hear a pair of K's in a high end store about 15 years ago, with Levinson mono block amps. I forget what the source was, but I recall being unimpressed. Especially for $35K mono block amps, wired to 220 volt mains. I remember thinking that they had really blown it when they set the system up, because the K's were NOT in a corner. The mids were crashing through and everything was unbalanced. The bass sucked.
The only other K's I've heard was at a party 35 years ago, and I can't remember what the system consisted of, but I remember that I was very, very impressed with it. Those were in the corners, by the way.
I guess I prefer standard (non-horn) drivers because they're more forgiving. I think my DQ-10 system sounds ideal, because when the music is IN-YOUR-FACE that's what they deliver. Grab your seat, in your face. But they image so well, and there isn't any beaming of any frequencies. They are balanced IN MY ROOM. In your room, they might suck.
The KG-4 speakers I had absolutely rocked out in open air. They had room to breathe, and they sounded very, very good. I remember thinking how I wish I could have gotten them to sound that good inside. Now I've got that kind of performance in spades with the DQ-10 speakers augmented with two Dahlquist low frequency modules, driven by 2KW of WOPL glory. Took a while, but my listening room finally gave in and it sounds just the way I want it to now. And that's what this wonderful hobby is all about, right?

If you're ever in Wyoming stop by, I'll make you forget all about the DQ's....

 

[laatsch55]

plastic, with a pair of 8" speakers firing forward (and one firing backwards to cancel out rear radiation and so feedback on stage when the front pa sound couples with the onstage monitor sounds), with a small horn between the two forward firing ones.
nothing special.
it's wot they gain by being a line (array) that makes 'em couple and so increasing the spl.

What do they run for horns?

 

[pennysdad]

What do they run for horns?

it's just a proprietary small neodymium driver on a very small horn that's x-ed at around 1.3khz i think.

one box on it's own is crap.
15 boxes in an array is just mind boggling.
... but they need heaps of power.

 

[laatsch55]

Hookay..