The best speaker you ever heard?

KLIPSCHORNS--Read on..I'll tell you why. Before I ended up with a pair, I been nosing around high end audio stores and listening to some high end setups. I have heard GRAND UTOPIAS, AVANTGARDE DUOS AND TRIOS, WILSON GRAND SLAM and DYNA AUDIO--can't remember the model but their about 7ft. tall. The salesman usually tells me what the speaker is all about and more importantly the price. None of these speakers impress me. I don't know, maybe because of the listening room--or just the overall setup. One weekend I got invited to a get together in a friend's house. In the basement they had a pair of 1985 KLIPSCHORN on the corners-- 20 FT. apart being driven by a 300B SET amp. The chair I sat on was about 8 ft from the front wall. For the first time the hair all over my body stood up. I could not believe what I was hearing. The depth and width of the Soundstage, the three dimensional very life like midrange and the immediacy. That's when I found out that these speakers where first made in the late 40's to present with very little changes. Now why would a company make the same speakers for over 50 years if it's not THE BEST SPEAKERS in the planet.

Yo, Justubes,
I owned K-horns for 20+ years. I absolutley loved everthing about them...BUT, the 4,000 Hz - 8,000 Hz peak drove me crazy. On almost all of my classical recordings, they made the violins sound like wire, and twangy wire at that. Higher-pitched brass instruments would drive you from the room with a whanging headache. Their bass was the deepest, most natural I have EVER heard, and their legendary sensitivity made them driveable to full volume on less than a watt. Hell, I could have driven them to 100db with a battery-powered wristwatch! I kept them for 20 years for their virtues, hoping to be able to eliminate the one damnable flaw by experimenting with different electronics, etc. But no luck. I finally sold them, for TWICE what I paid for them, and the buyer was ecstatic (still is) to get 'em so cheap! Now, THAT's value!!
I never had a room that was large enough to space them 20 feet apart, though. The most I could do was around 15-16. I DID hear K-horns, with a derived center channel (the "Heresy," I believe), in an enormous room...it had to be over 40' wide. If you sat at least 30-40 feet away from them, the peak was ameliorated and they sounded fine. The guy (lives in Hong Kong) used vintage McIntosh tubes...25 watts per side. I suspect you are right, that SET's in a large, LARGE room might do the trick. You'd only need 1/2 to 1 watt to fill the LA coliseum! Even though I had no luck with 'em, it's fun to read about someone else who responded so positively to these "old" classics.
Happy listening!
Gerald Clifton

GkCC

I'm very sorry that your experience with these amazing speakers is not as superb as mine. I made sure that the rest of my gear matches the fabulous horns of the Khorns. I never had any of your bad experience. As a matter of fact mine was all sonic nirvana. Why did it take you 20 years before you realizing is not for you??? It seems odd that all those years you have not sold it to somebody. It is very easy to unload--people are lining up for the mighty KLIPSCHORNS.

Justubes,
As I said, I finally sold them for about twice what I paid for them...and you are right, there were plenty of buyers who responded to my ad. I kept them for so long, because I thought there would SOMEHOW be a way to make them work. I moved around quite a bit, but I really think I just needed a permanent house with a HUGE listening room. Some rooms sounded better than others, of course, and I was always reluctant to let them go because of their tremendous, accurate bass and their near-perfect dispersion pattern: they filled any room wall-to-wall, and it's tough to give all that up. But I finally gave up when I had to move cross-country, and realized that I had to have something that reproduced the "silky" characteristic of massed violins in a symphony orchestra (my favorite type of music). Some smaller B&W's actually sounded better, overall, than the Khorns in my smaller apartments, because they captured the upper-mids to highs more smoothly, even though they couldn't approach the Khorn bass quality. Cheers and happy listening.
Gerald

Totem Hawks...in the presence of music being played...they haunt you and demand you listen as much and as long as you can!!! Truly soul stirring, more than I can say about my Watt/Puppy 6's, 801N's, Dunlavy V's, ML Prodigy's or Magnapan 3.6's! The Winds and the Forest are equally special in unique ways. Magic be made here..dare ye try them?