About That Klipsch K-77 You Have

There are times when I get people who want to buy just a set of SMAHL lenses from me, which of course I am delighted to do. However for the sake of avoiding bad choices on the buyers part I am learning to ask questions about intended use. Perhaps the most common one is what driver do you intend to use.

I think some make assumptions about their K-77’s without ever having taken them apart. They just assume I guess that everything fits everything because it will save them money by reusing that old dog barker K-77 magnet and diaphragm assemble.

Now I think it is time to explain something here before I go any further. Why would you want to reuse any part of these old Klipsch tweeters is beyond me. Whether it is the Ti diaphragm bandage on the 2.5cm lens like those on a Forte or Chorus or Cornwall 2 and on, or thinking that you can reuse the old magnet assemblies, even if you could which you can’t though, why? Why take inferior parts of old designs long since passed by with current state of the art designs which sound much better, and cripple new parts with bad pieces.

In the case of the Ti diaphragms you still have that old horn and magnet and phase plug. All you have done is refresh the OEM diaphragm with one that will sound shrill and tinny and are not cheap. It might sound better then the old one did but replacing worthless with bad is not an option I would choose. I had one set of those Ti diaphragms and that mess was part of what led me to designing the MAHL’s to begin with. I thought they were awful and listed them on EBay right away.

In any case though I digress and back to the dog barker. It is time to talk about that money saving idea of reusing the K-77 parts. Here is the clamp plate in position with the face that the drivers mount onto. This clamp plate has three hole patterns for commonly available current drivers.

Here is the base of the magnet assembly and the diaphragm is in behind the bug screen. Lots of these old K-77 drivers go bad because they are 5 watt drivers and subject to power problems far more readily then the DE-120 drivers which are 20 watts. Notice the raised boss on the bottom which will only fit

This old diecast zinc horn lens with it’s design which was not changed or updated in any significant way for over 40 years. I have a couple of the old late 60’s chrome plated EV-35’s in my cabinet with the same exact horn as the K-77’s used all the way through the early 2000’s. Time and technology passed these poor things by and Klipsch could have cared less because of tradition. Customers have been buying these for a long time so why change was the corporate philosophy I guess.

There is no way to make this stuff work with SMAHL’s. I do not intend to ever make an adapter to allow for doing so either because this bad sound set of parts was what led me to looking elsewhere to begin with.

Another thing that comes up once in a while is substitute drivers for the DE-120. The number of drivers that will actually fit the restricted spot the K-77 went into are very few. I was asked this week again about using DE-10 drivers on the SMAHL. Yes while there is a hole set there for those bolt patterns the DE-10 is much to large in diameter to ever fit your old La Scala or Heresy or K-Horn on Klipsch OEM cabinets.

I am amazed at the durability of the older Klipsch plywood Heritage speakers and with the replacement of crossover caps that need changing and ditching those crummy old tweeters those Klipsch speakers can readily be made much better sounding and will last you a lifetime.

Crites CT120 Dropin Replacement Update

I now have an update to these and some pictures to help explain. These will require some work on the buyers or installers part. The flange fits perfectly but the cutout will need to be enlarged to allow the body to drop in.

So you will need to cut out each side.

The customer who was my test case for fit up obviously did not have optimal tools on hand for doing this and was eager to get them in and hear them. I imagine we all can relate to that and it worked out fine and the ragged edges were hidden.

Here is the inside view of these in place.

Now here is what he had to say initially about the install.

“They sound good, I just installed 1200.00 of upgraded networks from Dean and didn’t have them that long before I installed your lens. I’m coming from Tekton Double Impacts and I know there a lot of haters out there, but they are really good sounding speakers. These are obviously horns speakers but I’m digging them and they compare to the DI detail. Keep them the same as the pair you sent me and just let them know that they require a bit of massaging with an oscillating tool. Guys that are brave enough to start changing out tweeter lens should be able to do that little bit of trimming!”

Shortly after he sends this.

“Another thing, even if they didn’t improve the sound and I definitely think they do, they look bad ass. Nice work!”

New Addition to the SMAHL Family, Crites CT120 Drop In Replacement

I have been asked a few times to make a replacement lens for the Crites CT120 setup. Things move slowly here at times but the last person asking really really REALLY wanted a set so off I go. Of course things are in the way of orderly progress and I had a bunch of wood lenses I was cutting and did not want to stop until I was done.

I cut the wood lenses dry and it makes a mess so before I can cut all aluminum anything that requires coolant I have to clean the mess out. So I finish cleaning and answer another “have you started” email again to say “no, not quite yet”.

Then the screw compressor goes out and until that is fixed nothing is cut, except my wallet of course.Yesterday saw the compressor fixed and the resumption of goodies production.

This is meant to be a direct drop in replacement for the CT120 set from Crites used in the CS Style B speaker. Now if you already have the CT120 you can reuse the driver on my lens. They have a Crites label on the driver but it is the same DE-120 I use with a label added. Anyway I don’t know if I will stock these or if they are going to be special order but in any case the CAD and CAM files are done and proofed and these are available. Contact me if interested through this blog.

Complete New Two Way Speaker Build

I have been working on a project to build a complete speaker for some time now and I have a final version. This is crude looking because it was my test mule to iron out all the bugs. Made with screws and no glue to be able to change the cabinet if needed by simply taking it apart.

The journey to making a complete speaker began with a desire to have another product to sell that could fit into both the Pro and homeowner markets. I picked basic cabinet dimensions and then with the capable help of Claude J who did the analyzing of the box and made an excellent woofer recommendation I was off to the races.

Of course modeling gives you a good indication of what you need with various drivers and defined goals but there comes a time when you must build and then dial it in. It is an eye opener to see the difference the port slot size makes in sound quality and what an additional couple of inches in ht can make. Then there is tinkering with eliminating resonance and standing waves through cabinet shape and acoustic foam.

I like two way systems a lot and to have a good one you need a good top horn. Taking the same basic cavity of the SMAHL and LMAHL tweeter bodies which are proven and known good I scaled it up to a horn made of stacked Baltic Birch. A mouth opening of 14″ x 7″ and 6.75″ deep from from face to driver proved to be the one and thankfully I needed only three attempts to get to a really fine sounding horn. I have had a few 1.4″ drivers I tried but the one that really excelled was the Faital HF146R-8. This produced a tremendously realistic high end with a crossover point at 900hz working quite well.

As an aside here the horn will be available before Christmas as a free standing horn on a sheet metal bracket that will fit helicoiled holes in the top of the bass bin in my speaker. They can also be used as freestanding units with any other bass bin or speaker you might have. It will also allow for rotation left and right and with horns, really with any speaker, positioning and aiming is key to finding your best result sweet spot. Believe me, being able to independently direct your HF sound brings a lot of improvement to the table.

14″ x 7″ stacked and glued and machined Baltic Birch horn.

Diagonal view of whole speaker.

Yes it is rough looking but is a complete finished product for sound and proves the concept admirably. One of the real bears to solve was the passive crossover. I wanted people to be able to plug and play. The basic second order Linkwitz Riley crossover has a couple of tweaks to it to dial it in better. No I wont tell you what. I started with an adjustable L-Pad which turned out to be a nightmare. They would drift and these speakers are sensitive enough that this made an audible difference and they were not consistent. I went through a bunch of these before I gave up and went with a fixed resistor setup. The Faital is 109db and the woofers are 99db so the mismatch has to be tamed. This too was done and let me tell you there were smiles all around as my visitors and I heard the final version for the first time.

That big ol black box behind the new unnamed as of yet two way is part of a set of Klipsch KPT 942/4 Cinema speakers with a set of 1st gen K-402 horns on top. One of the things I do is fix up old sets of Klipsch Pro gear. Great speakers with lots of headroom and surprising great fidelity these were made for 400 seat theaters. Being the crass mercenary that I am I will mention these are for sale.

Front view of two way in front of my Super MWM’s.

A project I did for myself is the rather large brown wood things with a K-402 horn on top behind the two way. It will be the topic of a future post and it was built to give me an all horn speaker capable of getting all the low notes of Toccata in D Minor.

In any case the next day after the final combination was arrived at I decided to try the pro side of my two way. You see I wanted a speaker that could be used for pro use or right at home with audiophiles. So we rolled them to the big shop door and pointed them out. I use Crown xli 800 amps which provide 200 watts per channel. With each woofer in parallel being able to handle 400 watts plus the 150 watt horn driver I figured we would just crank it up all the way and see. From around 130 feet away they pegged the db meter at 85-86 db with the Allman Brothers live at the Fillmore and it was like you were there. Acoustic instruments like Cellos, which have become one of my favorite genres, have amazing depth and accuracy and I spend hours every week just listening. Pipe organs and Japanese fireworks can rock your world here and percussion is tight. I have become a big fan of 12 inch woofers now as I think they bring more definition and speed to sound then the bigger 15″ + ones do.

Cabinet construction will be of Baltic Birch and none of that odious crumbly prone to damage MDF crap in this shop. The finished version will be raw Baltic Birch with sanded finished surfaces. Crossovers mounted internally and the HF horn will be mounted in the aforementioned bracket.

Anyway that is it for now and some technical measurements will be forthcoming sometime soon along with pictures of the final finished and for sale speaker. Now it is my intent to offer this in the raw Baltic Birch which finishes up fine in my book with stain or Watco Oil or wipe on Polyurethane. Plus you ding it it is easy to fix and the birch is water proof so your friends sweaty drink wont ruin your veneer or dissolve your MDF. Believe me I have seen a ton of Klipsch (and others) MDF speakers with all kinds of problems and did not want to make something like that. And the best bonus is in this day and time of wildly expensive corporate offerings these will be quite reasonable for the superior listening experience they will provide.

If you are ever in Middle Tennessee get in touch with me through this site in advance and stop in. I always enjoy audio visitors.

Archived SMAHL and LMAHL V2 Klipsch Forum Thread

Recently the overlords of the official Klipsch sponsored forum have gone a bit wonky on what they allow. Apparently the idea that things like my tweeters are called upgrades really irritates some Klipsch people and so they have been deleting some tweeter threads and comments along with other threads on different topics that also irritate them. I have no idea what prompted all this but find it somewhat ironic.

Roy Delgado is the chief engineer for Klipsch and he does admirable work. I have nothing but high regard for his technical abilities but his involvement in the forum has not been so productive. Very sensitive to the idea that thirty year old drivers and horns have been improved upon and are far better then those old dog barker tweeters Klipsch used for way to long. He talks about preserving the PWK legacy and vision and sound but has done things like convince PWK to start using Tractrix horns so he himself is guilty of changing PWK’s “vision” for some decades now. The computer generated models he gets for insanely complex crossovers are nothing at all like legacy PWK Klipsch but they just happen to work much better. I understand Roy is loyal to the vision of PWK but somehow he can change things around and it is approved whereas others do the same thing and it is not.

Klipsch and Roy themselves have admitted the old tech drivers were no good when they came out with the new ones for the revamped Cornwall 4 and the Heresy 4 and the new Forte. New drivers, new lenses in places, cabinet modifications and new crossovers. The end result is very good and they are light years ahead of the old style. My jaw dropped the first time I heard the CW4 and Heresy 4 and even though I make aftermarket tweeters I would sure not put them in these. Incredibly improved and also NOT PWK designed so whose vision is it now anyway? I say it is Roy’s vision and all that PWK legacy honoring stuff is just words.

What makes this kind of sad though is the demand that only pure unmodified Klipsch speakers are truly Klipsch speakers. Only JEM capacitors will give you that genuine “Klipsch” sound, whatever that is. Funny thing is that those of us who treasure our modified Klipsch speakers still consider them Klipsch speakers. But just what is a pure true blue Klipsch speaker sound anyway when Klipsch is busy changing the recipe that makes that sound? I figure the good bones a Klipsch speaker comes with allows for aftermarket tinkering, and a La Scala or Chorus for instance can go another 30 years or more and sound much better doing so with minor tinkering. Tinkering with Klipsch speakers goes back for decades on the Klipsch forums but there are now new rules to go by.

I had a thread about the new LMAHL V2 and SMAHL V2 started by another forum member that discussed the new V2 style and went into it in great length. I referred people to it on occasion when they wanted to see curves or why they were better. I figured Claude who was a forum member who graciously tested my ideas for me and other forum members who described what these new tweeters did for their speakers in their own words stated what they were and did better then me. Plus these were honest comments from others and not from the guy tooting his own horn just because he makes them. I am egocentric enough however to tell you patient readers I make the best aftermarket drop in tweeters for Vintage Klipsch speakers but let unsolicited buyer testimonies on EBay and the Klipsch forums do my horn tooting.

Much to my chagrin this thread was deleted. I found out when I referred someone to that thread and they could not find it. Well in looking neither could I because that now offensive “upgrade” thread had been deleted. So I did a search and found a link to the old post that while it did not work did give me a time frame and topic name to enter into the “Wayback Machine” site where I find the complete thread archived in all it’s glory.

DaveA’s Fabulous New Improved Super Tweeters 2.0 – Technical/Modifications – The Klipsch Audio Community

If you do not know about the WaybackMachine it is a wonderful research tool you should know about. It saved the tweeter thread in a way Klipsch can’t delete and I have found old Pro Klipsch gear brochures from the 90’s there also that Klipsch had thrown away a long time ago with a past forum “upgrade” that trashed a lot of legacy data.

So, you have MAHL V2 questions there are once again answers.

WHY WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY?

About three years ago before all this Chinese Flu stuff my wife and I used to eat out once a week. It was a diminishing experience and we found ourselves unhappy with the food quality decline. Really the whole experience was declining and since we often went as a group with others the pressure was not subtle at times to vacate those seats so they could be turned again. It was a social event with treasured friends turned into a seat rental program and it was time for us to go ready or not.

Add surly servers who expected tips no matter how crappy the service nor how unkempt looking they were and restaurants that would stick the tip on automatically since we were a group. Having worked for decades in the restaurant industry and helping to remodel dozens of restaurants I was very familiar with the use of disinfectants to mask bad things. A smell I was finding more and more and the facade can’t hide the smell so I knew what was there behind the scenes.

Around this time I noticed the idea of audiophile quality sound systems and home theaters was catching on. A trend that forced lock downs or business bans in many areas only accelerated. Used Klipsch speakers which used to be so plentiful were hard to find and going up in price all the time. Now when I say audiophile I do not mean some one who thinks they have to spend a ton of money to do this but rather someone who likes to hear good music or sound tracks played well. They are enamored of the idea they can hear great things IN THEIR OWN HOUSE.

See this is the key to the renaissance of the lost idea of inviting your friends over for a good time. Food you like prepared the way you want. Stay as late as you like and spare beds for those who like to indulge in what ever and should not be driving. Quite frankly when I pop the prime Rib Eye roast in the oven now I get to enjoy something I can’t buy in restaurants any more. Eat what you want when you want and the snack bar is open with no evil eyes directed at you for lingering.

Oh and you can watch movies plural, not singular, and have audio playback to suit your room full of people, or indeed just yourself, and not have that odious DBX theater standard hack the quality of your sound to fit their concept of how things should be. And have you seen the price of huge flat screens lately? A thousand dollars buys huge and hi res and perfect for home theater. Wont take to many $5 dollar beers or $$$ stupid expensive mixed drinks to pay for either. Or $4.50 a gallon gas. See here is something to think about. Many people can pay for an excellent system in less than two years by just taking the money they spent on public venues and having a better time at home.

Oh, and you will like the people around you which is certainly not a given in any public venue. No Karen’s invited and no screaming kids unless they are yours.

I spend some time talking about groups of people but there is something else I do with my setup. I happen to really like acoustic music and good blues. I want to hear all the details of the Cello musician as he fingers the strings and the nuances of the bow on them to great horn blat and blues like you were there in person. I want everything to be like that as much as possible no matter what the genre. I normally spend a couple of hours a day listening and I find it very rewarding. Of course finding good files to play can be a problem but when you find them you have them forever.

I also like pipe organs and to hear them like I wanted too, I built a single fold large horn with a 108″ deep throat that has no problem going down to 27hz with great crisp well defined authority.

Super MWM’s in the shop.

Painting the last bit for size reference.

That is a Klipsch K-402 horn with their 1132 driver on top. System is bi amped with Crown XLI800 amps and the DSP is a Xilica 3060. Sound personalized to suit me with prodigious clean bass. Jet flyovers and Japanese Fireworks are real life including a physical impact by the thump just like you were there. I have a steady trickle of Klipsch heads that visit me to hear these.

Great quality sound has been a quest of mine for seven years now. Of course I have dived far deeper into this than most ever will but there is one thing common here to me and to each and every one of you readers. It is the desire to be entertained in a fashion I CHOOSE with electronics I choose and people I choose or no one but me as the case often is. It is something you can only do in an environment you control and for most of us that is our house. Or shop as you can see in my case. Roll your gear out on your deck if you wish in good weather.

Music is good for the soul too. I noticed that when I was finding Klipsch Chorus speakers to fix up and sell the largest identifiable group of buyers was surprising. I sold more to ill widower men and I figure it was because it helped to transport them away from their situation. Of course you do not need to be in that shape to benefit from good music. It is for everyone who is willing to sit and listen.

At the push of a button you can be transported to audio bliss or Star Wars blowing stuff up right in your house. With your friends and good food and no curfew or time limits.

WOOD LMAHL’S

Not everything I come up with gets shown to people nor do I even make some of everything that has been designed. That is part of the discovery process and there are times when inspiration gets ahead of common sense and you guys never get to see the wasted hours spent fiddling around with ideas. Well I guess it is not really wasted but surely is not productive either.

  In any case I have had Klipsch heads after me for some time to do various things like for instance a wood horn for La Scalas and KHorns. Another one is a wood LMAHL or Large MAHL. I have held off on this because that .2″ flange that gets recessed into the motorboard (or baffle as they are known in many places. Motorboard to me because that is how they were named on the Klipsch forum by many.) cutout is plenty for the plastic and aluminum flanges. For wood however my fear was the ability of wood to split out at the corners where the bevel head screws went for mounting. I could have just had drilled holes and a flat bottomed screw but I did not like how that looked when modeled. As in one of those things no one see’s but me.

  Now how you get somewhere may vary from person to person and for me sometimes odd things lead to inspiration. I have had a couple of people that wanted MAHLS with no engraving on them so I removed it and they looked pretty good and now wood MAHLS are only cut this way. So I think, what if I remove the screw holes and the engraving how would that look and what would I do for mounting?

   For better or worse I did come up with something. My concern here is you can tell people not to tighten something down or they can split or ruin it.  What constitutes snug enough is a wildly variable amount depending on the person. Thinking of the few stripped screw holes I have had to deal with over the years of restoring Klipsch speakers and people with screw guns.

 I think I came up with a way of doing it that is not fool proof but as good as the material used will allow for. First up is a front view.

Second up is an assembly view showing how I propose to clamp the horn to the motorboard.

And the third to show it without the motorboard.

I expect to be offering these soon as yet another variant of the MAHL’s as soon as I get a speaker to try them in. I need to check for clearance with other drivers and horns and to see just how much pressure is needed to tighten these down enough to stop any cabinet rattle but not be so much that the flange is split from the lens body. I am using serrated bottom nuts for these to lock things in place.

One of the final questions I have to answer is will the DE-10 I commonly offer with the LMAHL be to heavy for this mounting method? I might just offer these with DE-120’s as they are much less weight though sadly almost double the price my cost. Looking to get some KPT-301’s soon as test beds so for those of you wanting these your time just might be soon at hand.

MAHL Updates and New Freestanding LMAHL’s

It is my intent to make this blog active again and a regularly posted upon entity. It has been a while but now I have decided that MAHL’s are going to be something I really wish to do as long as health and my mind hold out. At the age of 68 I assume there are a number of years left for me to pursue this endeavor. I was unsure of the reception I would get with these. I really like what I make but the true life test is what do others think of what you have done. Pleased to find out I have found a niche to fill and look forward to doing so for some time.

Well what a half year this has been For those of you who do not have to worry about products or delivery you might not be aware of the total upheaval of the manufacturing process going on right now. Typically I order enough drivers at a time to last a half year of estimated use. This has become a real problem as I don’t have a real defined answer for usage to project to the future. Sales are rising but what would be a real number projection? Heck if I know.

Right now B&C Speakers has a SIX TO SEVEN MONTH LEAD TIME on new orders. If you go to places like Parts Express you see their driver listings populated with lots of out of stock notices. Simple things like 25mm Baltic Birch which I intend to use on a line of two way speakers I am developing are the latest headache as none is to be had. Just a half year ago in Nashville,Tn you could get endless amounts of any thickness but today the thickest available is 18mm. Woofers I intend to use from Eminence I ordered on 6-1-21 and they did not get any in until 9-16-21 and I notice they are out AGAIN.

I am going to try making a box out of 18mm BB but there is no substitute for 25mm BB for great baffles, or motorboards as you will, and gluing two pieces together presents more problems then I want to deal with. Plus I have found that 25mm BB makes a really inert neutral cabinet subject to no offending audible resonances. More on this speaker soon in a future post.

In the mean time with the supply problems I started looking for other things I could do. I like machining wood as it is certainly easy on cutters and the mill. The far more redeeming side of wood cutting however is the sheer beauty of what you can find to cut. I live next to a large Amish presence here in southern Middle Tennessee and many are involved in sawmill work. I have found a few that cut and kiln dry large slabs up to two inches thick and here is what I am doing with some of this wood.

Front View Ambrosia Curly Maple Freestanding LMAHL

Side View Freestanding

Back View

This is the finest piece of wood it has been my privilege to cut on and I have been saving it for some time until inspiration struck.

I have had customers for my SMAHL’s who put them on stands and then rest them on top of their speakers. Primarily Klipsch La Scala, KHorn and Belle owners. Sound takes time to travel through the air and some have hearing acute enough to detect the muddiness that occurs when sound emitted from the drivers have different setbacks from the front of the speaker. So aligning the tweeter driver with the mid range driver provides more coherence to your sound and what you then hear.

This new tweeter type is limited to wood that I can make book end pairs from. Some will have very distinct patterns and others will merely have continuation of wood grain. All will be unique and one of a kind sets. I might be close at times to duplicating appearance in different sets of these but it would be an illusion since there is no substitute for sequential cutting. The difference might be minor but it would be there.

I have made these with a support block and 3/4″ stainless steel rod connecting the tweeter and adjustable support blocks and there is a set screw on the bottom not pictured to keep it all together. The intent here is to keep the assembly from tilting forward or backwards. The main block size is 1.75″ thick, 8.875″ tall and 7″ wide. The height is enough to allow sound to pass freely above cabinets with a roughly 14″ setback from the front which is typically where my customers have placed these using their home made stands. I have taken the liberty of using their experience to incorporate into these tweeters.

Looking for ideas for some sort of cushion on the bottom of the blocks to keep from marring cabinet tops and prevent vibration. I have thought about felt and just have not decided if it would be resistant enough to being pulled off by kids or cats. You might laugh but they are two of the major perils to happy healthy speakers. Any suggestions on a good non marring/ marking and thin cushion will be appreciated.

Working on a set of Cherry ones right now too. I was unaware of how light fresh Cherry is and will wait until they get more of that reddish Cherry color back before posting them. The slab I cut them from was much darker and apparently ageing darkens Cherry.

I was surprised at how many little cracks and splits there can be in solid appearing wood and I will end up throwing away more than I wish in pursuit of bookend slabs. It certainly adds to the time to cut and machine but in the end the amazing esthetics of the audio art produced are certainly worthwhile in my eyes and I hope they are to my readers also.

Until next time.

The Beauty of Wood

    One of the things that I find fascinating with machining is the idea of cutting anything within reason. One day I got to thinking about wood horn lenses and what they would look like.

    I have 56 acres of mostly woods and used wood to heat shop. In the process of cutting for the heater I have seen many interesting pieces of wood over the years. I saved some with no idea as to what I would do but they were to pretty to throw out. In the mean time I had begun cutting the SMAHL and LMAHL tweeters in aluminum and when people on the Klipsch forum saw these they started asking about wood.

    Cutting wood is a different animal than metal and there was a learning curve. The V1 type lenses were cut in Walnut and Red Oak. This choice of wood was based on the veneer types Klipsch used on the vintage speakers I like so well so I used the same for my tweeters.

     Walnut cuts like a dream and is smooth enough to not need further work unless you require a perfectly smooth surface. I have coated them with Satin Spar Polyurethane with very good results as is when finished with just a little hand buffing with a scotchbrite pad. Red Oak however is a different story and with it’s much coarser wood grain and pore size was a nightmare to get even close to good. No matter what there were always some pick outs with this. Liked the wood grain pattern appearance it had though.

    One thing leads to another and there have now been perhaps six or seven variations on these lenses to arrive at the current one which I do not expect to change in the future.

    There is a huge variation in wood and I find a lot of it quite appealing. Here for instance is a set of Walnut Crotch SMAHL V2’s cut recently which turned out well.

 

Black Walnut Crotch Wood SMAHL V2

      In case you are wondering wood does not change the sonic characteristics of these tweeters and these are cut with the exact same geometry as the aluminum ones and indeed the same cut paths with the feeds and speeds modified only.

     One of the other ideas I am kicking around is building complete speakers and cutting mid range horns into the motorboard. It will be a while before I get these done though as first is building and testing and figuring the best way to cut to allow for minimal to little hand prep of surfaces.

   

  Sorry about the glare on the LMAHL V2 but I did not have time to redo the picture. In any case the main item of interest is the mid range horn  cut into stacked and glued 25mm Baltic Birch which I am a huge fan of. Folks if you are going to ever make a speaker and want it to be durable and sound right and be good looking you cant beat Baltic Birch. This would get an Atlas Pd-5vh driver and have an aluminum mounting plate to the horn. Now I may or may not build this as it was a test run but I think it is part of cutting in wood and a work on progress. I will have more on this mid horn topic soon in a separate post.

 

  In any case just letting you peek behind the curtain at some things I will have finished and up for sale soon and planting seeds for the future. I might start offering exotic wood cut to order for the SMAHL’s in addition to the Walnut soon to be out there.

  Sadly at this time I do not thing the LMAHL’s will be offered in wood as the .20″ thick flange is too thin to be durable as a drop in replacement for Klipsch in existing motorboard cutouts.

  Until next time and some other variations of the tweeters lenses for specific Klipsch situations.

Introducing Machined Audio Horn Lens

This will be a brief introductory post today which will herald the launch of a blog/website relative to what occupies my life now.

For some time I have had a love affair with Klipsch speakers and when I used to travel around the country welding stainless steel tables together for the Chuy’s Tex Mex chain I had a chance to buy and fix many sets of speakers.

This became a passion of mine and more than wanting to just get them home and fire up something I had not heard before I want to know what could be done with them. It is a learning process and I ran across the official Klipsch forum The Klipsch Audio Community and there discovered a whole new world of technical ability and tweaks and how to’s relevant to my favorite speaker brand.

It can be a path with no end and at first I started with recapping crossovers since that seemed simple enough. With proof in hand some simple things like recapping made a real difference in what I heard I started looking more and more into restoring, tweaking and rebuilding.

A couple of years ago the trips slowed down and Klipsch started getting more expensive fast and much harder to find. It was evident that without paying trips where I could as a bonus buy used Klipsch at the other end I would not be able to buy fix and sell and show something for my time.

Now when you are a CAD and CAM guy you mind can quite easily wander over to if you can’t find something to fix what can you find to make?

The end result was a tweeter replacement for the K-77 in a set of one piece fiberglass coated La Scala Industrials I had at the time. I used an Eminence APT50 driver on my machined aluminum horn and man what a difference it made. It ate up all the shrill I objected to without me really realizing it was the K-77 tweeter doing it until I replaced a set.

This was the first version and I bought the APT50 because it was cheap and did not know better. Even so it still was a real improvement.

I can come up with ideas and designs and machine things but I am not a software using speaker and driver testing wiz (yet) with audio so while I was coming up with improvements I had no way to know precisely what was the level of improvement.

About this time a gentleman by the name of Claude Jodoin became interested in what I was doing and he did have the technical ability to analyze what I was doing and he has been a significant help since. Tip of the hat to you Claude.

Over the course of the next year and a half or so there have been perhaps ten iterations of various shapes until the latest versions which are the LMAHL V2 and SMAHL V2 tweeters.

While designing these it was my goal to offer something never done before. What I came up with was a system that would allow more than one type of driver to be mounted on the horn lens. Today I have the only modular clamp system that will allow three different mounting bolt patterns on the SMAHL V2 and four different mounting bolt patterns on the LMAHL V2. Plus the machined aluminum looks darned cool.

I have also started cutting some out of wood, primarily Black Walnut right now and these are limited to the SMAHL V2 size.

I have other ideas in various stages of design or completion and if you tag along over the next few months I will be talking about them all. I believe my tweeter retrofits are the very best out there for Klipsch speakers and they are the ONLY ones that sound this good and have superior versatility engineered right in.

I do have these for sale right now on EBay and if you go there and type in “LMAHL V2” or “SMAHL V2” you will find them. You can also buy direct from me at this time by posting a comment and I can reply to your email that way. This will save you a bit of $$$.

Bear with me I am having problems with comments showing up publicaly and I can’t figure out why. I do see all comments though and can reply. I approve them and now they don’t show up. Seems like nothing just works right the first time anymore.