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What is "better" sound to you?


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Why is the sound of one device better than the other? Is it because it has more detail? Less distortion? Better frequency balance? Something else? That is a much tougher question to answer than it would seem to be on the surface.

 

In one of the threads I have been reading, SAL1950 posted:

Dynamics and low distortion = detail.

God is in the details.
;)

Paul Klipsch had it 90% right by 1946

 

That resonated with a lot of people.

 

Personally, I don't like the sound of Klipschorn speakers, and have not since around 1977 when I first heard them. (Okay, they did and still do sound great in movie theaters...) But the point is, to me, whatever KlipschHorns do to the sound - for me, it does not make the sound better. But it is not arguable that for a lot of people, Klipsch horns do produce much better sound.

 

Paul, I have never liked the Klipschorns either. I had a friend whose dad had a pair of the big corner horns (the original K3/5 model), and I thought they sounded dreadful. About the only saving grace that I could attribute to them was that they were incredibly efficient. We did an experiment one time where we connected one of the Klipschorn speakers to the headphone jack of a typical 6-transistor radio of the early 1960's. The SPL ran us out of the room! The speakers sounded tinny with little bass (due to the radio, I hasten to add, not the speakers!), but that <100 mW was really loud (the speakers were advertised as being 50% efficient!). They were also gorgeously finished pieces of furniture and were really impressive looking. They produced prodigious bass for the time (I believe they could produce decent output below 30 Hz), but that bass was also incredibly boomy, and the speakers were very slow and did transients very poorly, and had a very screechy top end from a OEM ElectroVoice compression tweeter driver coupled to an exponential horn. More modern Klipsch speakers like the Heresy, I can't comment on because I've never heard them.

 

I've been behind the screen in lots of movie theaters, on both the east and the west coasts, and I've never seen a pair of Klipsch speakers - maybe that was a mid-west phenomenon, after all, wasn't Klipsch's works in Arkansas or some such place?

 

Anyway, when I was a teen living in Virginia, just south of D.C., they were tearing down a local movie theatre. While they were stripping out the place, I went to see if I could score some of the discarded sound equipment. I missed out on the amplifiers and the phonograph system (and I believe they had a tape deck as well in the projection booth - which I also missed out on), but I did manage to score a pair of Altec Lansing A7 "Voice of the Theater" speaker systems. They were going to throw them out. A friend and his pickup truck helped me to get them home where they literally filled my bedroom! Anyway, they too were very efficient and I could get them to play very loud with just two 18 Watt Knight-Kit mono amplifiers. I later found out that most theaters, in those days, filled up an entire theater auditorium with 25 Watts per speaker system, and wide-screen theaters generally had three speakers behind the screen. My Altec A7s, while they sounded much better than the Klipschorns of my buddy's dad, still sounded pretty bad even by the standards of the day (at the time, I think that AR3ax's were considered state-of-the-art). With 15" woofers, the A7's still struggled to get below 50 Hz, and that aluminum multi-cellular treble horn that the A7s used from about 500 Hz-up, rang like the bells of Saint Mary's! So, in those days, theater sound was nothing to write home about. But as "quirky" as the A7's were, they were still better than the Knight 12" KN-812 "full-range" speakers with "whizzer cones" in home-made bass reflex enclosures that I replaced with them!

 

On the east coast, older movie theaters had mostly Western Electric or RCA theater speaker systems, and newer theaters had Altec Lansing systems. On the West Coast most theaters had Altec Lansing systems, or so it seems.

George

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So, there are two of us in this world! Sweet!

 

Great story about those Altecs too. I had an opportunity to grab a double pair of those, but I was still living at home with my parents and had no place to store them. Dad would not even consent to let me store them in the barn. I think they made him a little nervous... :)

 

-Paul

 

Been there, done that! There were actually FIVE speaker systems behind the screen in this theater. The left and right side were doubled-up as a pair of A7s, and then there was a single much bigger speaker box in the center. I saw no name, but it looked similar to a pre-war RCA system. and was probably the theater's original speaker before they installed the wide-screen in the 1950's. I only took two of the A7s for the same reason that you didn't grab any - lack of room. We lived in a Cape Cod style house with a steep roof. This allowed for two good-sized rooms upstairs (even though above about chest -high, the roof caused the walls to slope inward) and had dormers for windows and a big dormer "bump-out" in the back to allow for an upstairs bathroom. I was an only child and I had one of the two upstairs rooms all to myself. The other one was used solely for my mom to hang her wash on rainy days and in the winter. Soon after I got the Altecs, my parents bought a clothes dryer, and the other room suddenly became open, My dad suggested that I move my stereo system, TV, and easy chair out of my bedroom and into the other upstairs room. Now, we're talking. Now I had my own "apartment" and I only had to come downstairs for meals! I was able to play with placement of the A7s in that second room, and eventually found an arrangement that sounded the best, but I have to tell you, I would have traded those behemoth A7s for a pair of AR3ax's in a heartbeat! The A7 aluminum multi-cellular horn crossed over to the woofer at around 400 Hz (this was normal for this kind of system) and had a huge, broad peak centered at around 700 Hz and a narrower, but just as high of a peak at around 14 KHz. This gave these speakers a nasty (to my ears, anyway) honky quality and a high frequency sizzle that made strings sound screechy and cymbals, "splashy." However, I couldn't complain about their high-frequency coverage, though. That Altec treble horn driver was good all the way out to 19 Khz!

 

 

I remember the Western Electric sound systems, and I may be mixing those us with Klipsch. Did they have the big old honking horns too?

 

-Paul

 

Yes, they did. To my knowledge, all cinema speakers from Vitaphone days all the way up to the introduction of THX, used horn speakers (I don't know what modern theaters use). And no matter who made them, they seemed to follow a formula not unlike the original Klipschorns. The bass units were generally 15" or 18" woofers housed in folded-horn enclosures (which they used to call "acoustical labyrinths") and the mid-range and highs were usually long, wide-mouth horns driven by compression drivers. These horns were usually of a multi-cellular design (for wide dispersion) but not always. Some had three separate exponential "High Frequency" horns, each with it's own driver, arrayed in a fan-like configuration to get the auditorium coverage required.

 

Before WWII, the woofers in these huge speaker systems did not employ permanent magnets, but rather used electromagnets for the field magnets. This meant that they had to have dedicated DC power supplies (to avoid hum). WWII advanced the science of magnet making and the Alnico V (for the alloy of Aluminum, Nickel, and Cobalt used) magnet was perfected, After the war, electromagnetic speakers went the way of the Dodo.

George

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Yea verily, I hear thee!

 

I came *this* close to picking up a set of AR3a's from E-Bay the other day. Only thing that stopped me was paying $600 + shipping for a set of speakers that sold for $250/each new, and were in unknown condition. I remember seeing the price tags and grimacing at my local stereo store. (grin)

 

You have really got to be careful buying used AR3s. Almost always you will find that the drivers have deteriorated to the point of being useless by this time. The original AR3 dome tweeter had a phenolic diaphragm, and those should be OK (if they haven't been cooked by being overdriven), but as I recall, the AR3ax had a "soft dome" tweeter made of silk and latex rubber. These will be perished, The woofers had pulp paper cones and most have dried out and are brittle. These speakers can be restored to like new, but it's neither a DIY project nor cheap to have done. So, Paul you dodged the bullet when you decided not to buy a pair of AR3axs on E-Bay. Not only would you have paid more than they were new plus shipping (talk about expensive!), but you would have likely had to have both of them restored. After all would have been said and done, it wouldn't surprise me to find that you would have paid more than $1000 for those two speakers, and perhaps much more!

 

I have definitely been bit by the "heritage" "vintage" "old stuff sounds good" bug. It is part of what is making me reexamine what I think "good sound" really is. It really is both an easy and a fiendishly difficult question to answer, isn't it?

 

I know what you mean. Lately, I've been lusting after an old Empire 398, 498, or 598 turntable, or perhaps one of those tank-like Denon direct-drive turntables from the 1970's - you know, the one with the circular bezel and built-in LED display showing the 'tables speed? I'm resisting.....

 

On a related note, one of the Stereophile columnists is into vintage equipment. Lately he has restored both a Garrard 401 and a Thorens TD124 rim-drive turntable as well as several vintage speakers, and I found those articles fascinating!

George

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