Klipsch forte II what league are they in?

I just picked up a pair of these to use with some SET amps I'm building.

I used to HATE Klipsch speakers, but thought I'd give them a try anyway.

They are kind of temperamental and must be matched with the right amp & cables. Tubes are best.

They didn't sound that great with my Berning 270 on low feedback, but on High/Normal feedback they sounded great! They also sounded really, really good with the 2 wpc output from my Bottlehead SEX amp. (building the 8 wpc Paramounts).

Adding Cardas SE 11 cables (made especially for high sensitivity speakers) improved the sound even further.

Over at the Klipsch forums I was directed to a guy named Bob Crites who sells replacement titanium tweeter diaphragms (only $50 pr).

Huge improvement in the tonal balance and smoothness of the speaker and only took 15-20 min to install the diaphragms.

On Bob's advice I also replaced the caps in the crossover with Sonicaps and had another nice improvement in soundstage width, depth, and definition.

I'd say they are up there with the some of the better speakers. I like them and the wife likes them too which is rare that she said anything at all about them.

She usually ignores my stereo adventures but gave an unsolicited thumbs up to these speakers.
TR

I have a pair of Fortes I bought when I was in the army in teh 80s. I love those speakers. Can't bear to sell 'em. I've had a number of pairs of speakers since then but the Fortes are not bad. Mid-fi is about right. I think you have to like the horn sound. But I use them in my second system now and everyone says Klipsch sound good with tubes so I'm thinking about buying tube amp for them. Still for what good ones go for on ebay 500~700 dollars you can't really go wrong.

Ok, took my whole system to a guys house who was selling a pair of forte 1's. Relative to harbeth super 5's, hplp3's, nautilus 805's, merlins and de capo i's, regrettably i was disapointed. Their strong point was pace and timing but their timbre seemed off to me and they also seemed to be "noisy", probably due to the unbraced cabinets and materials. Other things too but i wont mention them. Based on my listening experience i would say they at best are midfi. Not for the serious audiophile. Having said all that they did have some decent qualities to them.

You haven't heard how good Klipsch speakers can sound until you've heard them with upgrade xovers. It's not even close! I liked my stock Klipsch speakers and lived with them that way for 6 years. I then upgraded the xover networks with better parts, a simple and straight forward upgrade that takes me an evening or two, and these speakers now are in a completely different league. I would never own Klipsch speakers without the xovers upgraded with better parts.

Everybody sell your merlins,harbeths and b&w's and get the klipsch's with the modded crossovers!