The La Scala's I already had do not have the upper grill cover while the pair I just got had them from the factory. I'm thinking about putting a full grille cover on the first pair. I saw a pair of walnut La Scala's about a year ago that had them and they sure were nice looking although I'm not sure whether that was an option available from Klipsch.

My nicer system is currently in the basement awaiting me to hook it up again. It is all Technics from their Professional Series circa 1978-79. The La Scala's in the bedroom are powered by a Technics SA-TX1000 THX (5.1) 125 WPC receiver and has a matching RS-DC10 DCC Cassette Deck. It is a digital cassette deck that also plays analog tapes. Technics takes care of the CD duties.

The main system in the family room doesn't have anything extroadinary. It is run by an Onkyo TX-SR804 THX (7.1) 105 WPC receiver. CD's are taken care of by Technics while the DVD is an up-converting Panasonic. I'm about to switch back to a Technics high end deck that, even though it is seven years older, has a better picture than the newer $130 player. The subwoofer (Technics SST-35HZ Super Bass Exciter - insert noises made by Tim Allen) is powered by a Marantz SM-80 Amp pushing 520 watts into the fish killing subwoofer. Up front are the newest pair of Klipsch La Scala's with center channel duties being handled by a "Rohrbaugh CC1." Nothing spectacular here but Brian Rohrbaugh is an old friend that built this to run with my K-Horns or La Scala's. He built this for $400 - friend price, a non-friend price would be around $650-800 or maybe $300. The surround channels are taken care of by Paradigm Titans. Protection for the system is handled by a Monster Power AVS2000SS and a HTPS5100. Cables are handled by Monster Cable although I've come to the conclusion they are grossly over rated and this could be handled much cheaper. Consider using lamp cord before investing in expensive speaker cable. Believe me, the stores that carry this stuff don't want you to know that but tests show it to be true.

The best part of my system - all the speakers up front! By now, you already know I'm a big Klipsch fan but the center channel is killer and the subwoofer, well, it not only makes a great conversation piece because of it very odd design, it also kills fish and is believed to be the only one ever imported into the US.

quote:

Originally posted by towerguy:
The La Scala's I already had do not have the upper grill cover while the pair I just got had them from the factory. I'm thinking about putting a full grille cover on the first pair. I saw a pair of walnut La Scala's about a year ago that had them and they sure were nice looking although I'm not sure whether that was an option available from Klipsch.{/quote]

I remember people putting grille cloth on the mids and tweeters of the La Scalas soon after the Belles came out. Wife Acceptance Factor, perhaps. Aside from corner conflicts, the naked horns of the Klipsch, and the diffraction grille of the Hartsfields spiked the corner cannon for sure here.

Cables are handled by Monster Cable although I've come to the conclusion they are grossly over rated and this could be handled much cheaper. Consider using lamp cord before investing in expensive speaker cable. Believe me, the stores that carry this stuff don't want you to know that but tests show it to be true.

Yeah, I never found any of Monster's products to live up to the hype. But, different systems respond differently to different cables, so you just gotta try them. I have never found a zip cord construction to suit me, though. Even on cheap systems, I separate the conductors and twist them, which always yields an improvement.

quote:

the center channel is killer and the subwoofer, well, it not only makes a great conversation piece because of it very odd design, it also kills fish and is believed to be the only one ever imported into the US.

OK, I'll bite.............what subwoofer is the fish killer? I have had my subs scare dogs, but not kill fish.

I have mixed feelings on subwoofers. It is tough to get one that matches up to electrostatics, and the damping factor of the amplifier becomes a serious factor. And location drives me crazy. Those who say subs are non-directional haven't heard what I hear. I built severql sub designs featured in Speaker Builder magazine. I found placement to be the main issue. It seemed that the only location I could abide was a stereo pair right beside each speaker or a center channel, centrally located and distanced. I even had Quads and Dahlquists sitting up on their own transmission line subs at one time. I ended up with a pair of Hsu tubes on each side, which caused wife issues.

A single VMPS in the fireplace worked really well, and caused no wife issues. In fact, due to the concrete base that supported the whole brick fireplace and chimney, it was the best possible location for not shaking the hardwood floor and upsetting the Linn, and was perfectly centered and phased. But, alas, winter comes early here, and the fireplace was needed for its intended purpose. So, now, we are surviving sans subwoofer.

I was in Japan in the 1960s. Came home with all the stereo equipment I could afford to buy. Sansui amps, Dual and Teac reel to reel tape machines, Dual and JVC turntables. Pioneer and Sansui speakers and headphones. Lost it all in a fire at my son's home.

Nick

Uh oh, now the flashbacks have started…!
I used to have a set of home made K-horns back in the late 70’s. Anybody remember “speakerlab”? They sold stuff in kit form and also K-horn plans, there is a hell of a lot of plywood in a K-horn!
Try to imagine the damage you can do with a set of K-hours in a 10 x 12 cylinder block dorm room being driven by a Phase Linear 400.
Yes, I made some Karlson enclosures….and lots of exotic stuff including a horn loaded transmission line. If you really want a good match to the Dipoles a transmission line based sub works well…the only problem is that you have to make your ownvto get them just right! Bill - which subs did you have?
I blame my parents for this obsession – my father is a nuclear physicist (ex Cornell prof turned into Los Alamos research director – high energy particle physics, mostly neutrinos) and my mother was a music teacher / pianist.
Interesting Barth / Audiophile correlation here on the forum….

So Bill,you have an enclosure design for a breakaway for some 604e's and location for the Ampzilla?

quote:

Originally posted by chrisW:
Uh oh, now the flashbacks have started…!
I used to have a set of home made K-horns back in the late 70’s. Anybody remember “speakerlab”?

If you're talking about the place in Burbank, I used to go there a lot.

quote:

Try to imagine the damage you can do with a set of K-hours in a 10 x 12 cylinder block dorm room being driven by a Phase Linear 400.

It's a wonder you have any hearing left. A normal wooden dwelling would have disassembled itself. I remember that the PL 400 was pretty harsh on horn midranges and tweeters. Particularly with something like the Verdi Requiem.

quote:

Yes, I made some Karlson enclosures

Somehow I suspected someone else here did. Believe it or not, the one I built was very small, and I drove it with a pocket transistor radio. It was just a curiosity project, and it was stunning. The slot front-loaded the cone over a fairly wide range, so the bass output was surprising for its size, and was quite absent the boominess of other small boxes. The speaker never got to show its full potential, as the pocket radios of the late fifties and early sixties were AM only.….

quote:

If you really want a good match to the Dipoles a transmission line based sub works well…the only problem is that you have to make your own to get them just right!

Yeah, I did a several, some using the KEF B139. It seemed to work out the best. My first one was a coffin-sized thing that served as a coffee table, lived behind the couch, and a bunch of other places. I slowly came to realize that I had to have either stereo bass or center channel placement. Placement issues as well as wife issues were the cause of its departure. I next went to a pair of subs that acted as a base to raise my Quads, and later Dahquists, up to where they needed to be, anyway. Each sub ended up using the KEF B139 with treated lambswool. I did play a little with a couple of 10 inchers, but the KEFs were it. When I abandoned the Dahlquists to go back to ESLs, the subs worked as bases for my Sound Lab A4Xs, but really weren't fast enough to completely satisfy, although some of that was surely due to the fact that the A4X used a crossover between the woofer/mid and tweeter panels. So, I heard the crossover-induced discontinuity from two suspects, as well as the speed disparity between a dynamic driver and an almost weightless dipole membrane. This led to the purchase of a pair of Sound Lab A3s, which had only one panel, hence no crossover. With their large diaphragm area, I needed a sub only for a few of my Bach or Buxtehude organ records. That need was never fully satisfied, as I mentioned the Hsu and VMPS efforts. I built a couple of tube crossovers and tried a lot of amps, finally settling on an Ampzilla IIb (with Siemans power transistors) with a Dahlquist LP 1 electronic crossover. I have a Previn Shostakovich symphony that has a kick drum that I use for sub evaluation. It really shows up any deficiencies. Not only in terms of volume or impact, but in the tendency of the drum to muddy the orchestra. I have to say that nothing measures up to what my Stax electrostatic ear boxes do in that regard.

quote:

I blame my parents for this obsession – my father is a nuclear physicist (ex Cornell prof turned into Los Alamos research director – high energy particle physics, mostly neutrinos) and my mother was a music teacher / pianist.

I can blame my family, too. My mother was an almost concert-quality pianist, and we had a small Knabe grand in the house, which all of us played. Unfortunately, the sound of a piano is the hardest sound to reproduce accurately, if waveform displays on a scope are any indication. So, if one has the sound of a live piano in his or her brain, a lot of systems don't measure up. We also attend a lot of live concerts, all acoustic. I usually use a piano recording or massed voices to judge systems and tweaks.

quote:

Interesting Barth / Audiophile correlation here on the forum….

Well, you know, an appreciation of classic quality paints with a pretty wide brush.

But, I thought I was stretching things pretty far out into obscuranta when I mentioned the Karlson, but, as with many things Barth, you just never know..

Anyone remember the early Sixties Honda motorcycle ad campaign, "You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda"? One could make the case that you meet the most interesting people in a Barth.

I made quite a few Transmission lines with the KEF driver, then I became a Dynaudio junkie.
I still have some dynaudio drivers installed in my car..
The largest transmission line sub I made was 48" x 32" x 24" - camoflaged it as a coffee table but it had the unintended side effect of clearing hte table off when some good low end showed up!
I even considerd using the classic (I don't think its been made in years) 30" Hartly woofer...

BTW - current (no pun intended) electronics - Belle Research stuff. Had it for over a decade now.

quote:

Originally posted by Eric D.:
So Bill,you have an enclosure design for a breakaway for some 604e's and location for the Ampzilla?

Hah! I think I still have one of those somewhere. I haven't seen it since I moved in 1969. I played with it a little, thinking if I really got something going, I would look for a mate. As with so many projects, other projects intervened.

I never drove it with an Ampzilla, but perhaps the Altec's inherent smoothness would take out some of the Ampzilla's inherant roughness. The earlier iterations were particularly rough. And, they are power hogs. Mine will dim the lights now and then. I can just see you knocking out all the electricity for an RV park with Saint Sean's third symnphony. Or Also Sprach's opening pedal tones. Heck, even Larry Hooper might do it.

But, as far as Barths go, we are practically Luddites. Not even a television or an antenna for the radio. We do have a pair of Polk RT25s that we really love. They require space behind them, but the mount allows for that, and they can hang on one screw and are easily removed to take outside to hang from the awning. Details on request. We hang them on each front corner near the ceiling, and get pretty good bass coupling. I am not normally a big Polk fan, but these things got stunning reviews and I really like the pair one of my sons bought. I have been the whole route with small speakers and car speakers, (Visoniks, ADS, LS3/5, etc) and these seem to be a nice compromise. One reviewer, whom I respect, declared them the best speakers for under a grand a pair. That might be stretching things, but they are a super duper value on the used market right now.

quote:

Originally posted by chrisW:
I made quite a few Transmission lines with the KEF driver, then I became a Dynaudio junkie.
I still have some dynaudio drivers installed in my car..

I built my Lady Love a set of mini monitors using their drivers. They are pretty good. I put most of the effort into the enclosures. I used 3/4 chipboard, and used a tension strut to pull the two large sides in a little. Than the inside was coated with roof tar, and pea gravel was poured in and shaken aroung. After the excess was poured out, 3M 77 was sprayed over the gravel. When a semi-sticky layer was built up, silica sand was poured in, shaken, poured out, and the remainder was coated again. The cabinets were then rounded, removing all sharp edges and corners, and a particular, non-mineral anti-skid material was stuck on the outside. My reasoning ws that the material provided some dampening and a lot of little edges, which would disperse the acoustical energy all over the place at teeny-weenie amplitudes instead of a sound wave travelling all the way to an edge or a corner, gaining strength and interacting with resonances along the way. The result was stunning. I could hear the improvement the second I turned the set on. I didn't even need to turn around from setting the preamp to hear the difference.

The woofer was hard coupled to the front baffle with structural adhesive and the tweeter was floated on silicone rubber. The crossover was external on an umbilical to remove it from the effects of vibration, proximity to magnets and chokes, etc. That also allowed me to play with tweeter cables and capacitors a little. The woofers seemed to be less sensitive to changes in either.

I did one version of the baffle front with the voice coils in the same vertical plane, a la Dahlquist, but there seemed to be little improvement. Switching the phase of one of the drivers also was of no benefit.

All of this was done in stages, one by one, on only one speaker. The other was of conventional construction, so I could compare and evaluate each change. The truth is, just rapping each box with my knuckles told the tale for most of the changes. The difference could even be noticed over a telephone. A friend was always coming over to kibitz, and he went one step farther and made hollow boxes out of poured concrete, using the same drivers and crossovers, with very good results. He then went the Galo route, and made sort of egg-shaped concrete enclosures for the same components and crossover. He was single, so his outside coating was 3M spray undercoating. Incredibly ugly and dust-catching, but the stick-on anti skid was not a choice, in view of the compound curves. They sounded better than mine.

quote:

The largest transmission line sub I made was 48" x 32" x 24" - camoflaged it as a coffee table but it had the unintended side effect of clearing hte table off when some good low end showed up!

That sounds like the coffin I built. I think the plans came either from KEF, Speaker Builder magazine, or Wireless World (from Blighty).

quote:

I even considerd using the classic (I don't think its been made in years) 30" Hartly woofer...

I had a friend who did that. Used a large walk-in closet as an infinite baffle enclosure, with a door like a bank vault, but oak. Of course, he never got to optimize the placement, but had to move the speakers to get things better. He also had fun with what hung in the closet, as it all affected the damping. I think he was silly.

quote:

BTW - current (no pun intended) electronics - Belle Research stuff. Had it for over a decade now.

Oh, another Class A guy. Neat! Belles is good stuff. One of my work mates used a Belles power amp with a tube preamp. Great tweak-free combination. He was a tube guy, but big tube amps can be a pain to keep at the top of their game. And decent tubes are harder and harder to find. Not to mention Chinese and Korean counterfeits.

The only solid-state I can really love are Class A. Before I went back to tubes, the only SS amps I owned were Class A. Can't remember what, though. I am often pleasantly surprised at how good solid-state has become.

I guess I would have to blame my older brother for my love of audio gear. He didn't have anything special, a Girard TT, BIC speakers and who knows what the receiver was. I went to Germany after I joined the Air Force and it grew from there.

My mom was a rancher's daughter, you know, one of those that actually rode her horse to school and, at times, walked up hill both ways in six feet of snow with barrel slats strapped to her feet.

My dad, he was a Buick dealer/salesman so it certainly didn't come from him. He is responsible for the Barth I'm sitting in at the moment. He didn't steer me towards Barth, he just got me hooked on RV's with quality in mind and Barth did the rest.

The subwoofer I mentioned is a Technics SST-35HZ Super Bass Exciter. I know, the name cheapens the product but at $2500 each, it wasn't cheap. No, I did not pay that, I paid $149 for it on ebay. The seller did not know what it was and thought it was missing the crossover and amp. Being a passive sub, the amp was supplied by the user, and the crossover was inside. The sub was brand new so I'd have to say it was one of the better deals I've found there.

I found out the hard way that a sub-woofer should never be placed in close proximity to a fish tank. We watched "Jurrassic Park" and I think the T-Rex portions of the movie did the fish in. We moved the fish tank to the den and the fish (new) have been fine since. The Klipschorns normally would not need a sub but, since they were not in a corner, bass was suffering a tad. I'd love to have a pair of these but I seriously doubt I'll ever come across another one. I might be able to find one in Japan but I'd have to search on a daily basis and that isn't going to happen.

I do remember the Honda motorcycle commercial and I have to agree. I have had two bikes, both were Honda Goldwings and the people that owned them were very much like Barth owners - very friendly and over the top helpful. When I first put my K-horns up for sale, I was in hopes I'd find a Goldwing owner wanting to trade. The best deal ended up being for the pair of La Scala's.

quote:

Originally posted by towerguy:
I do remember the Honda motorcycle commercial and I have to agree. I have had two bikes, both were Honda Goldwings and the people that owned them were very much like Barth owners - very friendly and over the top helpful.

My road bikes are a BMW and a Ducati, but if Susan ever wants to join me for more than a short ride, we will definitely have a Gold Wing. They seemed to be designed for two people and lots of miles, and years of refinement have just made them better and better.