Like anything remarkable, the path followed is rarely without obstacle.In the case of sound reproduction, there exists many alternate paths, each containing their own obstacles. The KLIPSCHORNS offer a live, dynamic, emotional, full force, and to my ears natural sound reproduction. As well as being a musician, I am a machinist/toolmaker with an apreciation of science. The emotional involvement the KLIPSCHORNS deliver, with proper, room, tubes, and recording source,MUSIC, etc.is tops! Additionally the science behind the perfomance is pure genius. Horn loaded compression drivers are roughly the inverse of the design for our own hearing. The quality of construction is superior in every way. No partical board for these bad boys. How about some birch plywood. The bass horn if unfolded would aproach ten feet long! the K-HORN is an American Classic. A HOT ROD.

I heard these big babies decades ago with a tube amp. They did then want I have never heard any system do since. They hummed with the music being played! The light bulb burst in my head - suddenly I got it, they were not supposed to be a part of a great sounding system - they were supposed to be making music. By vibranting with the strings being played, the huge Klipsch horn cabinets became musical instruments themselves!

While they are not for everybody, (after all who does have a music room set aside for a grand piano or a drum set?)they are a musical instrument can blow away many expensive stereo sound systems with their obvious realism.

No large house whould be without a music room. No music room should be without Klipschorns in the corner. Those who can play an instrument will also have a room within which to play; those who can not, will always have true music at the flick of some switches.

Effortless dynamics. The speakers never sound strained. Although they are large, the form-factor (corner loading) allows them to stay completely out of the way.

The strict placement requirements can be a problem.

Klipschorns are probably the BEST speakers ever manufactured. While I am sure that there are milllions of people who would violently disagree, I am sure that they do not own a pair of Klipshorns themselves. I worked at a high-end shop during college. We were a very high end shop in a small town and it was unusual to get more than 4-5 customers a day. Consequently I had lots of time to critically listen to speakers. Over the 4-year period I had Duntech, B&W, Thiel, Paradigm, ADS, Mirage, Klipsh and several others at my disposal for about 3 hours a day of concentrated listening. When my friends stopped by with the latest Sheffield Labs or Telarc CD, we would take it around the room and try it on the 801's, or the Sovereign's or whatever ... but when somebody brought something to LISTEN to .. somethig we actually LIKED, I mean, you can bet it ended up on the K-horns. And not for sheer volume, either ... we had to keep it down so we could hear a customer enter. The K-horns sound much more articulate at low volumes than the others.

When I finally got through school and got a real job, you can probably guess what speaker I bought. Although I had my choice of anything in the $2-20,000 range (okay, maybe I could only go up to $5k or so), I chose the ones that sounded the best, day in and day out. I'm still satisfied with the K-horns. I am an amateur musician and sometime concert goer, and these speakers simply sound more like real music.

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Please read review summary.

I can understand why some people really like this speaker. It has excellent dynamics and can play very loud with low-power amplication. Rock and certain types of Jazz can come alive through them. But I don't like the coloration they lend to classical music. Few instruments sound natural through them. And while the bass goes deep, it doesn't have the resolution found in many other speakers.
I consider this to be a niche speaker, designed for certain tastes.

My choice of speaker was the Klipsch La Scala for three main reasons. First, it´s unbelievable lifely and vivid sounding - specially with 300B and similar single ended triodes. Second, it has always been my dream since youth.
Third, it has some advance in comparison with the Klipschorn regarding the point that a La Scala offers free positioning in your listening room.

Here´s some additional advice for using the La Scala from my personal view.

If you live in a country where the Klipsch is really expensive, compare the costs with the alternative possibility of ordering from an US dealer including shipping costs.
(I have safed DM 3500.- by overseas ordering)

If you drive your La Scala with low output amps, give a chance to very thin solid core speakercable (0.5 mm) with randomised flow of the plus and minus wires (way better in my current system), but not more than 2 metres run. Silver sounds better than copper, but it must be pure!
This is an advice from Allen Wright´s >The cable cookbook<.

Also change all internal wiring (it´s actually stranded) and go for solid core (0.5 mm) when driving less power. When driving higher power up to 100 watts, try (only one) wire plus and one minus, stripped out of an Audioquest Type 4, which is also solid core. Don´t forget the crossover wiring in any case.

Your Klipsch LaScala has a passive crossover, which enables the possibility of biwirng or biamping! Nowhere I had found some discription about this feature!. May be, Klipsch don´t point it out to keep enough distance to the Klipschorn. Biwiring sounds much opener and more relaxed in my system.

To enable biwiring, you must only cut off the wiring which links from the input plus and minus (very right when looking to the back of the speaker) to the very left two terminals of the crossover. Than go with a second pair of speaker cable straight in this new inputs on the very left. Note correct settings of plus and minus. Now, you have one input for the base, and the other one combines mid and high range ways. Enjoy the music...

It would be nice to have the statements from some more La Scala owners right here.
Thank you very much for your interest and sorry for my relatively poor english.

metalic harshness, size. It's uncanny need for a very good amplifier. Last but not least, Others that don't know music, never appreciate it...

If anyone is going to tell you anything about the Horn, don't believe him or her, just go listen to a pair and see if it is your sound. If it is not, go buy a pair of Rf 3's and be happy. When you grow up, go listen again to the Horns. If the same thing happens, stay with your Rf 3's and be happy, because a High end enthusiast you will be not!

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Klipsch Rf3, Klipsch 4.1 pro-media, KLF 30, KP-682 2x18" Bass Reflex Subwoofer,KP-302 15" Two-way Bass Reflex Speaker System,KI-172,RP 3,

NONE

Hi my name is Captain Lionheart and I am a young and inspiring audiophille as you all were at one time in your lives. Please visit my website, learn more about the Klipschorn, and see the computer generated oil painting I did at:

http://hawkenslair.tripod.com/klipschorn.htm

Please support Hawken's Lair as one of the coolest websites about home audio on the internet! Please bookmark it and come back often. Thanks!!!!!

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Klipsch RF-3

For the money, these sound awful. Sold 'em off to get decent speakers. How did Klipsch get such high marks? They are very over-rated. Not very musical, but rather just blast the sound at you. Forget Klipsch and keep looking, you can do much better in this price range.

From Sterophile - 11/1992
"Dynamic dilution: Realism in reproduced dynamics goes even further than this. Comparisons with live sound repeatedly show that the recorded or even just the amplified form suffers a significant loss of dynamic quality when it comes to reproducing music's inner dynamics. While an engineer might instinctively accept the notion that an audio transmission system has a finite dynamic window and that audible limitations may well be audible when waveform peaks reach the limits of that window, the idea that sounds nicely placed in the middle of the working range could still suffer in terms of dynamics is quite alien to him.

It's unfortunate that the subjective effect of all kinds of audio component errors is often a dilution of dynamic expression. More often than not, this weakness goes hand in hand with a loss in rhythm. Psycho-acous-tic-ally speaking, it may not be entirely valid to attempt to separate the two. Intuitively, one might expect that a perceptible softening of a system's dynamic quality would blur the timing cues due to its effect on the coherence and unity of the fast edges of transients and dynamic contrasts. Such an impression leads logically to a weakening in the presentation of rhythmic aspects in music. Weaken those, and the sense of drive and forward pace is also diluted.

It's ironic that you can have an extended bandwidth, or high sound levels, or great stereo imaging, or very low coloration, or powerful, low-distortion bass, or several worthy combinations of these, yet rarely can you obtain these with a coherent, focused combination of natural dynamics, pace, and rhythm. In high-end audio, we are often too busy examining the texture of the bark to see what kind of forest we are walking in.

It is undeniable that dynamics and rhythm strongly affect the emotional response to the whole musical entity. They represent the structure of the musical house, to which we can add such details as windows and decoration. However, exceptionally clear glass in a window frame is of no use if there is no structure to support it.

Whether played loudly or softly, music reproduced with good dynamic and rhythmic content competes with external factors for a listener's attention. Unfortunately, the high-end goals of purity and tonal balance often result in blandness of expression, with rather subdued dynamic contrasts. (Footnote 2) In addition, the rhythmic delivery can be perceptibly leaden, to the point where the sound is more like superior acoustic wallpaper than a committed attempt to reconstruct a live musical event.

In a contradiction of received wisdom, it turns out that some of the classic horn loudspeakers show much greater musical integrity, judged in terms of natural pace and dynamics, than do the majority of low-sensitivity, low-coloration systems now produced. Come back, Klipsch and Voigt, all is forgiven! Those designers' belief in outright sensitivity, and the qualities of linearity and uncompressed dynamics which this single factor confers, are still not properly valued by the high-end industry. "

Effecient, Will play extreemly loud

Directional, No depth or transparency, covers up detail

I owned K-HORNS back in the mid 70's when I worked for HiFi Hutch. We sold Tons of them & I bought a pair for 50% retail as I got them sales accomodation. After becoming more experienced in the art of listening, I Realized that I was missing a lot of the information present in the music, such as depth. As an experiment I Took a pair of Infinity Monitor's Home & Compared them to the big K-Horns. I Heard things that the K-Horns completely covered up. After that I was never happy with them & sold them for what I had paid. I ended up with Magneplaners Which I Used for a number of years, & recently bought a pair of Paradigm reference Studio 100v2's. The K-Horn was a good speaker in it's day, but is sorely lacking in true HIFI sound. I won't criticize the people that like them, but if they consider them to be hifi we'll have to change the definition of the word.

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Magneplaner MG3.5, Paradigm Reference Studio100v2