advertisement


Wow, damning Klipsch review!

wow&flutter

wow&flutter

pfm Member
I guess this could be covered in DIY, Audio and Youtube topics but it is a video so chose the latter. I caught a previous video from him on a small ATC loudspeaker which although finding compromises was in general complementary about the speaker.
This review however not so much!


 
Whenever someone starts chucking measurements at me I always think that they haven't measured enough. They are obviously relevant just not the whole picture.

They have been used for donkey's years so you'd think that the perfect speaker would have been made long ago.

He practically talks himself out of a sale of one of his kits because it must be more economical to get shut of these and spend the $700 on a better made pair in the first place. Even after everything that he does the twitter will still sound shrill.
 
The overall response looks OK to be, the >10 KHz lift is unimportant.
The bass is step depends on measurement method a lot.
 
It always amuses me when people who don’t understand Klipsch speakers review Klipsch speakers! I didn’t spend much time with the first review as to be honest I’ve no interest in the non-Paul Klipsch stuff, it’s just a totally different company, but I watched the Heresy review. For a start I didn’t realise they’d added a port to the MkIV! No idea what PWK would think about that. I owned some odd mid-point between MkIs and MkII and enjoyed them a lot.

My guess is the reviewer used some totally inappropriate modern tight dry solid state muscle amp ‘because measurements’, which is exactly not the way to drive these speakers. They are an ancient design and expect a nice clean little valve amp with some output impedance which has the effect of making them sound far bigger and weightier plus bringing the quality such sensitive horn drivers require not to sound harsh. They don’t need high power, a even 2 Watt Decware Zen works fine. I also notice he played no acoustic music at all. PWK was a classical listener and to my ears Klipsch speakers get something ‘right’ about piano so, so many conventional speakers get wrong. I grew up in a house with a grand piano in it so I have an instinctive and embedded understanding of how the things sound and these little high efficiency speakers just get the note shape right in a way so many bigger and fancier speakers fail.

Regardless I was astonished to see that they measured within 3db for much of the frequency range! I bet my pair didn’t, but I’m of the mindset that a speaker is good or bad long before it produces a straight line on a graph. People focus on frequency response purely because it is so easy to measure, so easy to look clever doing so. Time domain, phase and dynamic ability is way way harder to assess and I’m pretty sure far more important to whether I personally like a speaker.

FWIW I’m not defending Klipsch here, I’d almost certainly hate the first pair in the thread due to the spacing of the drivers which the guy had focused on. The only time I like multi-driver speakers is three-ways where the mid carries all the important stuff. From a Klipsch perspective that’s KHorns and La Scalas which run a very wide mid horn (400Hz - 6kHz crossover). The Heresy gets away with it as the mid and tweeter are close to one another, though all Klipsch speakers have issues in the time domain as the generators are so far apart front to back in the cabinet.

To sum up I would agree classic Klipsch are flawed, but they do give a taste of the super high-end at a bargain price. If you can't afford Avant Garde, Cessaro, JBL Everests etc but want to see what proper front-loaded high-efficiency horns are about (I count back-loaded horns such as GRFs, Lowthers etc as something very different) then Klipsch are a way in and they do give you a lot of it. I really enjoyed owning La Scalas, I found them phenomenal in some regards, awful in others, and a great learning curve.
 
Tony L said:
It always amuses me when people who don’t understand Klipsch speakers review Klipsch speakers!
Click to expand...

The problem is I think the reduction of sound reproduction to some sort of binary state of either being accurate or inaccurate, typically backed by whatever is the current state of the art measurement technique. The idea that it's a case of give and take, that correcting one problem will invariably lead to a compromise elsewhere is lost on such people, and so they miss what is special about a given design, which might major on, say, phase coherence over frequency response, and as you mention, take into account the limitations of the auxiliary equipment.

To be fair, I probably had such a simplistic approach when I was younger, but have hopefully grown out of it.
 
Tony L said:
To sum up I would agree classic Klipsch are flawed, but they do give a taste of the super high-end at a bargain price. If you can't afford Avant Garde, Cessaro, JBL Everests etc but want to see what proper front-loaded high-efficiency horns are about (I count back-loaded horns such as GRFs, Lowthers etc as something very different) then Klipsch are a way in and they do give you a lot of it. I really enjoyed owning La Scalas, I found them phenomenal in some regards, awful in others, and a great learning curve.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you got rid of the LaScalas, did you replace them with something else?
 
John said:
Sounds like you got rid of the LaScalas, did you replace them with something else?
Click to expand...

Yes, from one size extreme to the other - I now have Spendor S3/5Rs on the TV, Matt J here has the La Scalas (pics on the Systems 2020 thread).

The La Scala thing for me was really only ever an experiment. They are very rare in the UK, in fact crazy so, so the only way I had of hearing them was to buy when a pair appeared. I’d always loved the mid-century modern aesthetic and needed to see if I liked them. I really liked aspects of them, though ultimately I preferred my Tannoys, so when Matt expressed an interest I decided to sell as really I’d done the journey I needed to do and it freed up a lot of space in the room. I also far prefer to sell something like this when I have a customer as they are such an outlier they’d likely prove a tough sell if I was trying to move house or whatever later. The little Spendors do the TV speaker role superbly so I don’t actually miss the La Scalas (they were clearly wasted in this context). I got back what I paid so a very interesting few years playing around!
 
Yank said:
Click to expand...
An informative watch. You certainly can't accuse the reviewer of skimping on the measurements and he did make a point of supplementing them sufficiently with his own subjective impressions.

His observation about the perceived soundstage varying with frequency dispersion is very interesting, I'd never directly associated the two as being interdependent but it does make sense to a degree.

I do however still question the increasing importance that's being placed on the Toole mandate of matching on- and off-axis frequency responses for solitary one-seat listeners. My current speakers measure and sound poorly in the MF/HF crossover area when listened to above vertical axis, but as they do not exhibit these response aberrations at the on-vertical axis height I normally listen to them at, I don't see it as that important an issue. Maybe my opinion would be different if I had a reflective goldfish bowl for a listening room where reflected sound was a more dominant component?
 
I have seen this video and a few that they make. I totally understand that measurement is important in designing speakers and a mostly flat response is desirable, but soo many seem to just go on measurements and data. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important but how important depends on how much you are willing to spend to modify already pricey kit! My speakers measured perfectly but are used in an undamped minimalist box playing vinyl and low but rate mp3s!
Every speaker ever made is a compromise. You can’t design a speaker for every amplifier or room especially if we listened on tall stools a meter away in the vertical axis lol
 
If you love the sound of them then fine but I wonder why you would buy a speaker if it was so bad in the first place and then have it modified so much and at such a huge cost! Maybe the above were bought on reputation and the owner had hoped for something sounding more classic, who knows.
For me it was the “send the speakers back with some decent drivers then I’ll fix the crossover” comment that was most surprising.
I guess the bulk of equipment is built to a price point especially if the manufacturer has a range of gear to sell and compromises have to be made.
 
A higher fidelity speaker will reproduce the signal/recording more accurately and in order to determine if the reproduction is accurate one has to measure as many parameters of performance as possible.

The trick is to learn how to interpret measurements and to correlate them with listening experience and personal preference.
And for some people, to accept that the equipment they like may measure poorly in spite of sounding good (to them).
 
To be fair the speaker is like what 1700 quid a pair? For a floor stander in audiophile world its not exactly expensive. They look chintzy to be frank.
 
True but it is a £1700 speaker that appears according to the reviewer to be constructed of very inexpensive parts and many of those parts having been poorly integrated!

I have no Idea how much a speaker should cost in terms of components and labour to realise a £1700 retail price and give the manufacturer, maybe a distributor and retailer a margin.
Maybe the construction materials used reflect that!
Surely a company the size of Klipsch should have the economies of scale to be producing something like the quality of its big competitors, who lets face it can produce some lovely speakers for substantially less.
 
Remember that’s a very large American speaker and a UK price! It would cost a substantial amount just to ship it. It is definitely a budget party speaker, kind of Cerwin Vega market to my mind. The Klipsch Heritage range, of which the Heresy is a part, isn’t this at all (they are about £3.5k in the UK).
 
tuga said:
A higher fidelity speaker will reproduce the signal/recording more accurately and in order to determine if the reproduction is accurate one has to measure as many parameters of performance as possible.

The trick is to learn how to interpret measurements and to correlate them with listening experience and personal preference.
And for some people, to accept that the equipment they like may measure poorly in spite of sounding good (to them).
Click to expand...

To me measurements are completely unimportant, I wouldn't even seek them out before buying.

I listen to stuff, if I like it then I like it, if not then there's always something else to try. I'm not interested in the slightest how bad my speakers measure, it certainly wouldn't be any part of my decision process.

I think the Klipsch in the first review are just their lifestyle/budget line anyway, I certainly wouldn't associate them with proper Klipsch speakers.
 
matt j said:
To me measurements are completely unimportant, I wouldn't even seek them out before buying.

I listen to stuff, if I like it then I like it, if not then there's always something else to try. I'm not interested in the slightest how bad my speakers measure, it certainly wouldn't be any part of my decision process.

I think the Klipsch in the first review are just their lifestyle/budget line anyway, I certainly wouldn't associate them with proper Klipsch speakers.
Click to expand...
That is your loss. Measurements help to shortlist what is worth listening, to sort the wheat from the chaff.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top