Event Electronics | Reference Studio Monitoring. Opal owner. I set them up in the afternoon and continued to sit in amazement until late night, early morning. I put on every record from every genre in my collection, racking my brains thinking of long forgotten tracks that were sonically superior, be they old or new. Every single track just had this amazing 'living' sound, with an 'unheard before' quality to it. I could finally hear my music. I kid you not; there were moments of sheer musical bliss, complete with goose- bumps and maybe even a tear in eye! The first thing that struck me is what a lot of the press has also mentioned, and that's the absolute lack of mid- range distortion, at any reasonable level (and when I say reasonable, I mean I haven't even got close to making them sweat). This comes in part from the zero time delay difference between the two cones in each box. On good quality source material, the clarity of the mid frequencies is nothing short of amazing. For example, if there are several sounds or instruments in the mid range at once, like a sharp transient- ey guitar, and a smooth piano chord and say, a harmonica, they simply remain completely separate. My mind struggles to believe what I'm hearing. One is layered over the other, yet they never seem to touch. The sound stage is that incredible. I must admit I had a few reservations before hearing them. For one, when it comes to tweeters I've always been a 'soft- dome' guy. I never liked the Mackie style forward and uber- dry mixes. Every bit of music I made on Mackie's I wanted to drown in reverb, if only to make my ears relax. Although the Opals are reasonably bright and tough in the top end, compared to say an Adam ribbon tweeter, they are so clean and crisp that all doubts just melt away when you hear a string section surge forward in the mix. Speaker Driver Response Impedance Frequency Graph In ExcelFc: fc is the resonant frequency of the driver in a sealed enclosure. The fc is higher than the fs with a given driver. The image below shows the impedance curve with. Poly cone 8" driver with unique paper whizzer cone. The frequency range that this driver covers is extremely wide, making it useful as a ceiling speaker, background. IMF Electronics and later TDL & Fried Transmission Lines loudspeakers website. You're looking at a stock Klipsch Chorus, which is a direct descendant of the famed Klipsch Cornwall. In spite of the frighteningly bad impulse response, the speaker. I sit around and wait for that string section in every track! Another reservation I had was purely an aesthetic one, in that I thought the Opals were dead- set hideously ugly. All that 'Complex Radii'.. Couldn't they have made the outside square while the inside curved? But you know what? You really do get used to 'em. Even love them. Especially the very imposing horn plates, which scream 'listen to me!'The beam of the Tweeters is massively wide. How can they do this? I move my head from side to side, stand up and sit right down. Hell, I even get up and walk around and the image from the tweets is utterly stable. My entire control room is now the sweet spot. ![]() This was never the case previously. Yes, the bass changes near the walls, but I swear the tweets have motion sensing cameras and just follow me around the room.. I've heard that with some other comparable monitor brands you have to use the software to point the beams at you, and when they lock in, they lock in. This seems the antithesis to the radiating light that is the Opal tweeters. High sounds remain full and rich, even at relative volumes. There's a ride cymbal hit in a track by 'Lior', panned three- quarters to the right, and I believe it scared the crap out of me with its realism. But more on the mid range, which is I think the defining characteristic of these two way speakers. The Crossover point seems non- existant. Truly a three way sound in a two- way box. A warmly recorded vocal (again, Lior) will sit smack bang in the centre of the stage, and pronounce a thick and rich mid range that has changed the way I'll be recording vocals. I will not be eq'ing anymore vocals 'upwards' to get them to poke out from the sludge. I won't needlessly be pushing 'air' into a sound, thereby degradating it, to feel like I'm breathing life into a dull track. The Opals have lighted the path, and shone a critical eye over my mixing. The technology behind the low drivers is also worth a read.. For me, this aspect of the speaker has taken the longest to adjust to. But after many hours over the last two weeks of just shuffling through music, I am coming to terms with the low end. Although my musical taste is wide, and I produce many varied forms of music for myself and other people, my primary bread and butter is progressive trance, with lashings of techno. I've been doing this successfully for over ten years now. It's essential that I have deep (very deep) bass response, and a quick bass response, too. The most important freq range of my music is from 4. Hz up to say 3. 00. Hz. I've been getting it wrong for a while now, I see this now. Even worse, I've been releasing music that didn't match up. My old boxes hid freqs and boosted others that made me mix in error. Sure, I learned to deal with them and compensate, and I've done some really nice mixes, but nothing really beats having the honesty right there in front of you. I've already noticed it takes less than half the time and far less headaches to do anything. I just zone in on a frequency, and correct it. No more guessing. As you can tell, I'm a very happy customer.. There really is something about these speakers. Believe the hype. Read Andrew's whole Opal review on the soundonsound. Klipsch Chorus. A MLSSA Gallery. Klipsch Chorus. You're looking at a stock Klipsch Chorus, which is a direct descendant of the famed Klipsch Cornwall. In spite of the frighteningly bad impulse response, the speaker actually sounds quite good, with a fresh, lively, very dynamic sound - this is almost certainly due to the low IM distortion that Klipsch speakers are known for. In terms of impulse response, I should add the Cornwall, and its successor, the Chorus, are actually some of the best- measuring Klipsch's - the La Scala and Klipschorn have much more time dispersion, thanks to the very different path- lengths between the bass, mid, and treble horns. With this speaker, the double- peaks are due to the different path lengths between the HF and MF horns, which not surprisingly, are about a third of a millisecond apart (five inches). The fairly resonant decay signatures are typical of PA- style horns, and are caused by standing- waves reflecting from the sharp edge of the horn- mouth reflecting back into the horn and hitting the phase plug. The standing- waves are also responsible for the characteristic triple- peak seen in the impedance curves of most horns - which makes passive crossover design considerably more challenging for horns, thanks to the impedance variations. The Group Delay plot makes the crossover frequencies pretty obvious, with the mid/high crossover (and driver offsets) creating a 6 millisecond deviation at 6. Hz. The woofer crossover is also easily seen with a 2 millisecond deviation at 7. Hz. The odd- looking null is due to the drivers being several wavelengths apart at the 6. Hz crossover frequency, which makes the vertical polar pattern very sharp- edged. Moving the microphone a half- inch would move the null around in frequency, but no combination of microphone placement, or driver phasing, would get rid of it (I tried). The tipped- up response is true also; the Chorus has a forward balance, and needs to put fairly close to the rear wall to sound its best. It shares that attribute with the Cornwall, which as its name implies, is designed to be put in a corner or against a wall (PWK's sense of humor in naming his products). It needs to be repeated this speaker sounds a lot better than it looks; although it's certainly not a low- coloration speaker, the dynamic presentation, especially with live recordings of bluegrass and rock music, is impressive. Classic music - well, not so much. My friend Gary Dahl plays the tympany in a local symphony, and is a choir director as well. He wondered if an external tweeter would sound better, along with minor changes to the crossover. The new tweeter ended up on top of the cabinet, at the very rear, mounted on a small wooden stand. The crossover was modified for flatter response, but retaining the Klipsch autoformers, which play a big role in the characteristic Klipsch sound. You can see where time- adjusting the speaker without MLS would be almost impossible; this is why I harangue manufacturers and audio- friends to stop using outdated frequency- only setups, and get a MLS system instead. Now the Chorus is almost perfectly time- aligned - better than the Ariel, or most other audiophile speakers. It looked a little odd with the tweeter sitting on top, and placed so far back, but that's what the doctor said needed to be done. The time performance is so much better it's hard to believe it's the same speaker. The modified Klpsch is very close to linear- phase; all of the artifacts seen in the previous plot are gone, and the crossover frequencies are not visible on the graph. Total deviation over most of the spectrum is less than 6. The frequency response is also startlingly better as well. Even though the crossover is pretty close to stock, retaining the same topology (which is pretty good), now it can finally work correctly, with the drivers in close time- alignment. In practice time alignment isn't as hard as it sounds; simply lining up the voice coils will get you 9. After a month of twiddlng around, how did it sound? Well - not as good as it looked. The balance wasn't right; it was too bass- heavy. In terms of coloration and image quality, the speaker was much better, and the "PA sound" coloration was gone. The balance problem could be partly alleviated by putting the speakers farther into the room, audiophile- style, but the Chorus, like the Cornwall, is a physically imposing speaker, and looks odd sitting in the middle of the room. This experience shows that it's easy to get led down the garden path - the measurements above are some of the best I've seen, but trust me, the modified Chorus was a long way from being one of the best. I undid all the mods and returned them to stock condition, and the bright, fresh Klipsch sound was back. I could have really gotten into the project and kept going; this would have been at least a commitment of six months or more. If I was working on a new crossover for the La Scala or Klipschorn, that would be one thing - but well, shucks, Al Klappenberger over at ALK has already gotten there, and owns that niche already - and as you can see from his website, he's a sharp cookie that knows filter theory inside and out. Rapid settling times to zero are usually considered a desirable design goal. However - this kind of impulse response is a moot point when the arrival times from each driver are several wavelengths apart. Given that reality with Klipsch, Al Klappenberger makes a strong case for ultra- steep crossovers with this 4. MB PDF. You could almost say a Klipsch is the inverse of Quad ELS design philosophy; instead of optimizing for minimum energy storage with low mass drivers and no cabinet signature, the Klipsch is optimized for very low IM distortion and extremely wide dynamics. What's really interesting is that both sound open and fast - but technically, they do so for completely different reasons. This is why most audiophiles don't know what they're talking about when they discuss "good transient response". Without measuring, you have no way of knowing if it's low IM distortion, lack of voice- coil heating, more headroom before overload, absence of cabinet resonance, or fast settling time. All of these subjectively sound like "good transient response". Measurements that show the impulse response of complete horn systems are fairly rare - but Tom Danley has comprehensive measurements of his Synergy horn on Page Five of this PDF. As you can see, the impulse response is completely different from the stock Klipsch, and looks a lot more like the time- aligned version - but with the very important difference of a coaxial dispersion pattern that comes from a time- synchronized array of drivers inside the horn. Even if you have a slow connection, Tom's PDF is worth downloading and reading. Text and Pictures © Lynn Olson 2.
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